I am not sure that the question is whether a 60 hour workweek is fine. There's a huge difference, like it or not, between on one hand answering tech support calls for 60 hours in a week, or coding 60 hours in a week, or the like, and working as a self-employed individual for 60 hours every week.

I probably work 60 to 80 hours a week, most weeks. During slow times I work less. It includes everything from software development to discussing tech support issues with customers, to doing my own billing, to accounting, to any number of other tasks. If I worked less than 60 hours a week I wouldn't have time for real work most weeks.

But a few points:

1. I don't have a commute. When I used to work at Microsoft I would work 40 hours a week, spend at least ten hours a week stuck in traffic, and have at least 5 hours a week in unpaid break time. That adds up to 55 hours by itself. Had I lived a little further away, those could have added up to over 60 hours committed to work for 40 hours of pay. I also find being stuck in traffic significantly more stressful and draining than working.

2. I don't spend more than 40 hours a week doing any specific kind of work. Most weeks, I do less than 20 hours of work software development, and I know that if I am doing particularly heavy software development work, that going above 20 hours a week is courting burnout (I would rather put in 20 hours of really good effort than have to throttle effort in order to stay sane). For lighter work? Sure I could go up to 40.

3. The 60 to 80 hours includes a lot of time that would otherwise be hobby or personal project time, but which I can count because I am self-employed ;-). For example, I spent 20 hours worth of work this week on a strategic project that has no immediate impact regarding revenue, etc, but is fun and I think will make the rest of my work a lot more fun (when I have examples of how I will certainly submit them here on HN). That counts.

4. I work from home so all kinds of break time are usually family time unless I am on HN ;-).

So my point is that there are so many factors that go into this. I think the author is talking about working 60 hours for a business, particularly where you don't work from home, doing just one job. That's fine for short bursts but I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle. On the other hand there are certainly contexts where over 60 hours a week for the long run makes sense once you escape the idea that "it's a job."