"The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
"Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it."
Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give.
I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.