Secondly, thanks for replying. You totally injected yourself into what you call the 'Jaytar' wars. My post was not meant to be considered 'Jason hate mail'. I was simply saying why I fundamentally disagree with Jason's core work ethic principles.
We fully agree on letting the free market decide. Time will tell on that one.
What's very interesting about your blogpost, is that all those activities you list (afternoons off to go to the beach and play SC2, etc.) run contrary to Jason's public statements.
When he says, he expects you to be a 'Samurai' and work '80 hour weeks constantly'...that doesn't indicate afternoons off...so my entire post was based on what he says. If he does something different, then that might be totally reasonable. But given that I don't work there and don't know anyone that does (personally) I can only go on what he says.
So given that you are now shedding another light on it, that's good because it shows us what REALLY goes on. Not what Jason SAYS goes on.
Also, I am shocked, to say the least, that you actually have a life outside of work. Because according to Jason, anyone that does so is 'weak and normal'. He is 'strong and abnormal'. So that, again, contradicts with what he is saying.
I am happy for you, that you can have it and I think you should. In fact, I don't mind doing your bidding and publicly berating Jason for taking things too far, so he can ease up on you guys :) - because I don't believe when he takes away those things, that your performance goes up. Morale as well as performance must go down as it is unsustainable in the long run.
Also, just another quick note...I reject the notion that in order to produce anything 'great' you have to be prepared to work more than anyone else. If we look at this statement in it's extremes, that would mean that people in countries with dictators would produce much better/more innovative stuff than the Valley. Because they can literally lock people up in prisons and force them to do X work (i.e. programming, or anything they want) for more hours in a day, for a much longer period than a western government would allow. That has not worked, to date, because excellence cannot be brute forced. It can only be achieved through continual refinement.
Also, if 'great products' can only be achieved by working more than anyone else, then by that definition we would never have Rails or any other wonderful open source project/technology that came out of the spare hours of the creator. DHH famously says that he only worked on Basecamp for about 10 hours per week, and Rails was even less than that because it was done after he had worked on everything else. There are countless other OSS examples.
That's just my $0.02.