All this hustle porn is meaningless. Why are you doing it? Everyone is doing it to escape the system. Anyone that says different is lying to us or to themselves. You can't escape the system if it kills you first.
Pace is what is relevant here. You can probably get more done faster by putting in more hours. However for the vast majority of companies shipping something sooner rather than later really will not intact the company bottom line.
Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
Working longer hours, like hiring more engineers to a team, has diminishing returns. You can maybe sprint for a few months (I’ve certainly done it) but it takes years to see a startup through.
I think some people are also very ego-driven. For example, very young Steve Jobs said that he wants to be a very important person one day. That's not about getting FU money, that's about fueling an ego.
You’re right but he’s also a super outlier. I think people working on hard problems (like the Deepmind founders) also don’t fall into this category but they’re so few and far between that they’re a footnote.
