It is extremely predatory. Perhaps if you're a company founder you can try to glamourise this level of personal sacrifice, but for standard employees it's clearly an unhealthy level of work, and would have been seen so by most normal people 10/15 years ago too. Also, nobody is going to do their best work when they're having to work so many hours, it's highly likely you're not getting a lot of good work done if you push yourself that hard.
Imo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on. The issue is trying to apply that logic to normal employees. The calculation of time v payoff is worlds different
> Imo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on.
While you're right that it's easier to try to justify this level of work for founders, the reality is that this level of work is not sustainable by anybody, and founders would risk damaging their physical and mental health and reducing the quality of their work the longer this went on just as much as anyone else.
I'd also argue that it's largely unnecessary. There may be some periods of time when there are too many competing demands on your time and you just have to accept extended working hours to get through a week or two or even a month, but more often than not this situation comes about due to poor planning and/or poor working processes. Effective delegation and automation can greatly reduce the likelihood of having to work 65+ hour weeks, even for founders.
"Willingly" is basically just peer/manager pressure. "Everyone else is doing it, why aren't you?" "Do you want to be the reason we fail to meet our deadline?" My experience in tech outside of video games is that although there's an offer letter with terms and a bunch of stuff like signing invention agreements and non-compete clauses, it's also pretty much always "at-will" on both sides without any sort of contract. The actual job is basically just "do what we ask", with the conditions that each side is wiling to ask for or tolerate being a game of chicken (that tends to favor the employer, since most employees can't survive without a paycheck/health insurance, but an individual employee is likely expendable for the company as a whole).
I got nothing out of working like that 10/15 years ago but my employers certainly did.
I may have thought it was cool and in line with my passion and desire to learn and ship cool things, but I was plainly taken advantage of. I’m willing to admit I was naive.
Glorifying this type of abuse needs to be called out.
Every human gets only ~16 waking hours a day to live their lives, it is absolutely immoral to sign a contract to pay somebody for literally half of this time, and then pressuring them into giving up even more of their life on top of that. Especially when using threats of revoking the original contract if they don’t comply, and/or not offering any additional compensation.