As harsh as this may sound, working at a startup is often chaotic, if you can't deal with high pressure, it is probably best if you go back to being a cog at a BigCo.
It is now 6:45 pm and there are only 12 people in our office. We have 65 people that work here in Seattle. This is totally unacceptable.
This company has far too much very important work to do to have virtually empty offices at 6:45 pm. If anyone thinks that everything we need to do as a company can be accomplished within an 8 hour day, then I think they fail to understand the scope and complexity of our venture. Anyone harboring such illusions should seriously consider a career change. I am sure that I could point to tasks for every single person in this company that would merit working past 7 pm every single night.
...
This is not a bank; this is not Boeing. This is a start-up and we are all expecting to be rewarded for taking the risk of a start-up. But, there will be no rewards without exceptional effort.
Given the severity of the situation, I am putting strict office hours into effect immediately. Until further notice, all employees are required to be at their desk from 8am until 7pm, with 30 minutes for lunch. There are no exceptions.
-- excerpted from email from MyLackey (http://web.archive.org/web/20070318005206/http://www.fuckedc...)
Sadly, I fear that situations like this are not an exceptional case in startup-land.
However, sometimes critical situations arise whereby you may need to work a few more hours or on a saturday. If you flat out refuse to do this, then it would come across that you don't care about the startup's success.
These critical situations are rare and often members of a startup will be more than happy to pitch in to solve something quickly when it goes wrong.
When you have a consumer facing product used by hundreds of thousands of people, you can't really wait till Monday when things break on a Friday night. Every hour counts.
My friends at investment banks often work 18 hour days and have a terrible lifestyle/hate their job compared to people I know working at startups.
I'm sure there are great BigCos and startups to work for, like everything in life, there is a good and a bad side.