Corporate lawyers, investment bankers, computer programmers, and many other types of workers routinely work seventy-or eighty-hour weeks, putting in extra effort during particularly hectic times (Kidder, 1981; Schor, 1991). These men and women, married and single, are stressed, exhausted, and even dying as a result of frantic schedules (Harris, 1987). They have insufficient time to meet all of the demands on them from work and their lives outside of work. The purpose of this paper is to explore what I refer to as their time famine -their feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it -and to question whether this famine must exist. I chose to study a group of software engineers in a high-tech corporation. Over the past three decades, a number of studies have described the nature of engineers' work (e.g., Perrucci and Gerstl, 1969; Ritti, 1971; Brooks, 1982; Zussman, 1985; Whalley, 1986); however, I chose this group not because of the type of work they do but, rather, because of the immense pressure they are under to get their product to market and the time famine they experience as a result. Several recent books have described with awe the fast-paced, high-pressure, crisis-filled environment in which software engineers work (Kidder, 1981; Moody, 1990; Zachary, 1994). These authors portray the engineers as heroes for their willingness to work extremely long hours and celebrate the engineers' intensity and total devotion to work. I, in contrast, explore the engineers' actual use of time at work and the impact their use of time has on other individuals and the groups to which the individuals belong, which reveals the problematic nature of the current way of using time. Ultimately, I therefore challenge the assumption that the current way of using time, which is so destructive to individuals' lives outside of work, is in the corporation's best interest (Perlow, 1995, 1997).