4. You own shares in an exciting young company. You own your overtime, not the other way around.
Let's be very generous, you own 2% of the company, so you are entitled to 2% of the company's profits. Let's be generous and assume you contribute 20% of the company's productivity. Your influence on your 2% is equity is 20% x 2% = 0.4%. For this extra 0.4% compensation, you work 50% more hours.
50% divided by 0.4% is about 125x. So you are on the losing end of this deal by a ratio of 125 to 1. Your "screwed factor" is 125.
Tweak the variables to find out your screwed factor.
If your pay is just a percentage of a company's profits, the amount of equity you hold has no impact on this number. If you working 50% more hours generates 10% more profits (or whatever) for the company, you get 10% more pay for 50% more work, so the screwed factor is 5.
Again, this is assuming that the screwed factor is meaningful in the context of a startup, and it isn't. First of all, the different possible outcomes for an early employee of a small startup can mostly be boiled down to two, maybe three: the startup IPOs and you get rich, it gets sold and you get well-compensated, it fails and you get nothing. Treating your income as a very smooth function of the hours you work is misguided in this kind of scenario.
Second, contributing to a culture of working really hard on the startup (by working overtime) might be more important than the work you actually do in your overtime. Startup employees don't work in a vacuum.
You are wrong for two reasons: 1. If you want more than 2%, than you need to start the company yourself. The only way anyone can over come your screwed factor is if they are a founder.
2. 2% of a successful company should make you relatively wealthy, thus negating your screwed factor.
I found that it just wasn't worth it. I wasted more energy on micro-optimizing my time than I saved, and ended up being less successful. Plus it always just made me feel depressed, enervated, and vaguely guilty.
I'm working for The Man now, a large tech corporation. My stock options are a miniscule fraction of the company's capitalization. My salary is decent, but probably less than I could earn elsewhere. I've already made the company more money than I'm likely to earn in my lifetime, and will likely see at most a few thousand of that in bonuses. I harbor no illusions about advancement or striking it rich through climbing the corporate ladder.
And y'know what? I don't care. I'm happy now. I'm doing stuff that I'd want to be doing even if I were financially independent. Maybe that makes me screwed, but it seems to be working out fairly well for me so far.
I find that it's worth figuring out the big things, and then not sweating the small stuff. If you have a great marketable technologically-feasible idea, go found a startup and do that. If you don't, join a company where you can feel good about however many hours you spend there. Don't sacrifice things you really care about for work, but don't keep score either.
Anyway, I think it's a matter of different strokes for different folks. When I started working post college, I worked a lot of hours, because everything I did was hard. Now I've learned that a "work-life" balance keeps me the happiest. I'm a much better engineer, so I'm more efficient in these 40 hours than I used to be in 60-80 hours. The key has been--when at work, always be productive. When at home, do not think about work.
It helps that I now work at a mid-size company that encourages exactly this. :-)
Now different strokes for different folks--a very ambitious person should probably work more than 40 hours.