I spent two years in banking - normally we had 18+ hour workdays... definitely gave me stamina later on.
Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year.
You pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work.
I've worked in a few startups, as well as had my own where I was working 6-7 days a week 15+hours on most week days, and it didn't result in a big pay day. I've had lots of stock in bankrupt companies and experience to show for it.
However, I will say that it is possible you'll gain lots of experience, and I wouldn't give up my long hours in my youth for anything else. It was great experience and I loved being in the thick of it.
As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate more of a balance.
He was at a bank, not at a startup. Since you are not familiar with bonus structures at banks, what he's talking about could roughly double a salary in a _cash_ bonus.
People in banking/finance have a very skewed sense of reality when it comes to work and fair compensation. You generally have to take their anecdotal advice with a grain of salt if that's all they've ever done.
No line of work can consistently deliver the kinds of returns that finance can. Hence its very easy to justify the longer hours in that industry since they turn into very real dollars. For the rest of us, putting a dollar value on our output is much harder to quantify.
Personally I can absolutely see "working" long hours -- but then that'd probably be something like 6 hours effective programming/planning/implementing and 6-8 hours of studying.
Either that or doing some form of manual labour with which I'm familiar/skilled enough that slips in concentration wouldn't be damning. But even for those kinds of jobs, having three (or four) shifts to 24 hours would probably be much more effective (again, if possible).
Could be an IPO, restructuring etc
That means lots of modeling and dicking around with slide decks
RE lunch: I took fewer than ten lunches away from my desk over those two years.
Generally dinner at the desk via Seamless