Yup, context matters. However, you should consider the possibility that an appreciable fraction of your audience will fail to read your mind, and will (consciously or not) take your "you people" as indicating hostility, which you probably don't want.
(Though ... it sounds as if you're talking about a use of the phrase with a rather different structure from the one we're discussing here: using it vocatively at the start of the sentence. "Hey, you people, listen up! Blah blah blah." or something like that. I don't think I've ever heard that done; it would strike me as rather odd, but not as hostile and dismissive in the same way as the sort of usage I thought we were discussing.)
No, I use it in the, ahem, traditional structure along the lines of "Now what you people fail to understand is that...".
I understand that some people might read it as hostility. That's fine. I usually scatter enough hints in the text for the clueful people to figure out I'm not actually foaming at the mouth, plus I prefer to have a bit of ambiguity mixed in -- it adds flavour :-)
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?