Open source really has shown how you do not need so much cruft/guilt-tripping to build on top of good models.
How sad is it to over work folks & be proud of it, sure if Cognition equity is going to the trash just as Windsurf's lol, the irony of all this grind.
Is the logic that working with AI will need grind, waiting for the burnout blogs to show up here in some time.
If you really want to develop on the cutting edge, you need a lot more than smarts. You have to have that dog in you. That fire in your belly that makes you obsessed, consumed with your work and solving the problems you set out to solve. If you don't... you're gonna lose out to someone who does. Go sling Java for a bank or insurance company, then, if you want to punch out at 5.
Scott Wu has that dog in him. It's reasonable for him to expect the same of his employees.
Passion is a different thing and I agree you need passion you be the best. While there is clearly a correlation between people with passion and people willing to work more, it don't see why someone can't be passionate and also have other interests or responsibilities outside of work.
We know that the design of software is fundamentally a different sort of task than loading pig iron. It requires management of complex amounts of state in working memory, which must be acquired before work begins, and much of which is lost after work ends (or is interrupted), requiring reacquisition when work is restarted. I believe that because of this, Carmack's observation is that more contiguous time spent on the task yields superlinear gains in output, because you're just spending that much more time with the system state in your head. And if you're a really smart guy working on cutting-edge stuff you want to take advantage of those superlinear gains because you are messing with much more deep and complex state, in terms of your own cognition, that would take more time to reacquire when lost.
Get real.
If there's an emergency, sure, work 12 hour days until it's fixed. Maybe if you're really in the zone, go ahead and keep working for 12 hours once in a while.
But, being behind schedule is not an emergency. And if the emergency continues for more than a couple days, it's a situation, not an emergency. 12 hours of focused work is hard to do. And if it's not focused, might as well punch out at 5, live your life outside of work, get some rest, maybe let problems marinate, and come back tomorrow.
As a founder, I think there’s a similar incentive to work all day every day, not just because of the potential payoff, but also because you love it and it is your life. It is unrealistic to expect the same intrinsic passion from employee #30, much less employee #300. They don’t have the ownership, both financially and spiritually. It’s not their baby.
Grinding and hustling _without_ participating proportionally in the upside is naivete at best and foolishness at worst.
This kind of thinking is a disease and a race to the bottom. I don't think we should stop people from doing it, but we certainly shouldn't reward them, in the market or otherwise.
If it was up to the owners then we would not have labour laws, weekends or decent work hours either. Owners should feel free to work to death alone & with money you can't take with you, just don't expect to get friends/employees to join in this.
Strive to have a balanced life and be extremely careful not to get burned out. Maintaining that joy for building things requires balance and perspective instead of slaving away your life.