Why don’t we quit earlier? It’s not just social conditioning— there are a lot of cognitive biases at play here. We irrationally take into account the effort we’ve already expended in the past when making projections about the future (sunk cost fallacy). We don’t take into account opportunity costs. We place undue importance on things that we’ve built (the Ikea effect)— one of the reasons why developers shouldn’t be the only ones testing their code. We work so long that we experience an enmeshment of our jobs with our identities: what we do becomes who we are… and how can we quit who we are? And finally, we quit less frequently and more belatedly when we’re being observed. (View Highlight)