[coldbrewed]

I was working on a high pressure/tight timeline pressure with the CTO and a handful of engineers. The CTO was working a minimum of 16 hour days because he absolutely loved to code and was having the time of his life cranking out enormous volumes of (untested) code.

The rest of us were dragged along with the expectations the CTO had set with his working hours, and I was gunning for a staff level position and thought that we'd only be working these hard hours for a few weeks (which dragged into months). I genuinely trusted the people involved and my mistake was made clear when the only person on my team that wasn't cut was the only other person that regularly worked as many hours as the CTO.

In an environment like this it's very difficult to say "Nope, I'm doing my eight and then I'm clocking out." When you have the CTO and a chunk of the most senior engineers working non-stop trying to enforce reasonable working hours carries a healthy chunk of risk.

Ultimately I got cut because I'm on US/Pacific and most people were in Europe/Central. Was it foolish to work those hours? Sure was. Is there a strong unspoken expectation within startup culture that sometimes you'll be working long, painful hours in the pursuit of a promotion? Talk to anyone that has worked for Stripe and you'll find plenty of other people that have either landed a promotion or got equally burned out.

This kind of thing is also why I'm interested in leaving tech - actual overtime pay, and having the possibility of union representation.