If your reaction to the phrase is even slightly frequent then I might want to address people in a more neutral way. Is "you guys" better or am I being sexist now? Is just "people" better? Suggestions? Maybe I should go all medical and drop pronouns altogether just to be sure :)
Since I'm not a native speaker my connotation-o-meter isn't always amazingly tuned. The issue is amplified when I think and type quickly. Since you're a native speaker I suppose your experience is more typical than mine, so I'll avoid "you peopleing" in the future unless I want to be extra cheeky.
You might want to better take into account the amount of non-native speakers here next time you're instinctively reading between the lines. Anyways I'm glad I learned something new about connotations again.
"You guys" has absolutely none of the hostile/contemptuous feeling that "you people" has (at least for me). It's distinctly informal and (as you surmise) some people may interpret it as sexist.
I think I'd generally just say "you" and, if necessary, make it explicit what particular group I had in mind.
It hadn't occurred to me that you might not be a native English speaker; sorry about that. I guess it's one of the perils of speaking the language very well :-).
Conventional wisdom, and many studies, hold that 40 hours of work per week are the optimum before exhaustion starts dragging your productivity down too much to be worth it. I read elsewhere that the optimum is even lower for creative work, namely 35 hours per week, though the sources I found don't all seem to agree.
In contrast, many tech companies in silicon valley demand (or 'encourage', which is the same thing in practice) much higher work times. 70 or 80 hours per week are sometimes treated as normal.
How can this be?
Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources? Or does the 40-hour week have exceptions?
How high is the variance in how much time people can work? If only outliers are hired by such companies, that would explain the discrepancy. Another possibility is that this 40 hour limit simply does not apply if you are really into your work and 'in the flow'. However, as far as I understand it, the problem is a question of concentration, not motivation, so that doesn't make sense.
There are many articles on the internet arguing for both sides, but I find it hard to find ones that actually address these questions instead of just parroting the same generalized responses every time: Proponents of the 40 hour week cite studies that do not consider special cases, only averages (at least as far as I could find). Proponents of the 80 hour week claim that low work weeks are only for wage slaves without motivation, which reeks of bias and completely ignores that one's own subjective estimate of one's performance is not necessarily representative of one's actual performance.
Do you know of any studies that address these issues?