> All the startup employees I've talked to work 80 hours a week.

Worked at many startups. Currently run a startup. No one has worked 80h weeks at any of them, except myself in the first year of creating my own startup.

If you really have friends working at startups for < 10% equity and doing 80 hour weeks, something is wrong.

I work at a startup. Neither myself nor anyone on my team works 80 hours a week. I’ve been in tech in the Silicon Valley for two decades at a half dozen startups or more and have only ever put in a few 80 hour weeks.

Doing that consistently is unhealthy and sort of antithetical to building a thriving business.

Anecdotally, I worked as a software engineer at a very small (10-15 person) startup that just got acquired by FANG, and I, as well as almost everyone else there, generally worked 40 hour weeks. My relationships were fine, I went to the gym most days, and I worked on a masters in AI on the side, and I also learned a lot more than I would have at large companies since I got to own way more complex and interesting projects than I would have if I had just taken a job at FANG.

I feel like a lot of it comes down to how strong your management team and market position are. Our CEO had a pretty crazy track record, and drove the company into a really interesting, strong position, and then wanted himself to have a good, sustainable family life, and would constantly reiterate that he wanted everyone else to do the same.

I have other friends who have had roughly the same experiences, again, anecdotally.

That's really cool. Any tips on identifying startups with this work-life balance?

I can't really say for sure, but some things that stood out:

People skewed older than I expected for a startup. Most people were in their 30s, and the C suite people were mostly in their 40s. No one other than me was below late 20s, and everyone seemed laid back but competent.

I probed at it during the interview and was told that everyone leaves between 5-6, and that the CEO wanted to go home to his family and didn't expect anyone to do differently. When I asked engineers things about how days and weeks went there they were very direct about how people didn't stay late and didn't dance around the subject.

The CEO had already sold multiple startups while raising his family, so I assumed that he would be able to make the company successful without setting a precedent of burning yourself out and without us being under constant threat of death.

Also yeah, I didn't make nearly what I make now that I'm at FANG. But I ended up in a higher role and with more leverage than would normally be possible at my age and experience level in the new company, and got some cash from the deal, so it's been pretty great. But yeah, if I was just trying to maximize short term dollars earned it wouldn't have made sense to work there, since I couldn't have realistically known that this was the outcome.

Look for places with diverse workforces. My experience is that managers who expect long hours also expect everyone to be 100% aligned with the company vision, and people with different backgrounds tend not to last.

Consider the compensation package a company offers. Companies that want young go-getters are more likely to offer high cash and equity; great benefits packages are better for drawing in risk-averse family types.

Also don't be afraid to ask straight-up what the working hours are like during an interview, ideally from the lowest-ranked person they'll let you talk to.

Disclaimer: I don't have strong data supporting any of this, just my personal experience and intuition from working in the bay area.

You can ask, but the ones that are terrible will tell you point blank that they care about work life balance and then simply fail to follow through.

My advice to folks is that if you don’t have a very significant chunk of the company, ie >1% then the payoff can never be good enough to compromise work/life balance.

If you’re a founder or very early and have 5% or some such the. That’s between you and your family.

Probably still ain’t gonna pay off.

Ask during interviews?

Most people aren't going to lie to your face that a normal week is 40h if they expect 80.

there are 2 kinds of engineers,

one kind sent rockets and recollected them, made robots run and jump. The other kind, shrank blog posts to 140 characters, or added a timeout to short messages, removed the thumb down button, and called them a new feature.

Today, we still remember the names of da Vinci, Tesla, Turing, not because they had a successful family ...

I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid.

>Today, we still remember the names of

So you're living based on how you will be remembered by strangers? That sounds incredibly unfulfilling and doesn't sound like a good way to live. In a few hundred more years almost no one will remember the names of those people either.

>da Vinci, Tesla, Turing

It's incredibly safe to say that you are not going to be as successful as these people. Almost no one achieves this much success in the sciences. At most you will probably advance your field by a few useful steps and then be personally forgotten about except in research paper footnotes.

>not because they had a successful family

You know who cares about you and remembers you more significantly than as a research footnote? Your family.

>I just want to keep the dream I had as a kid

Man, don't we all.

In a few hundred years nobody will remember you either: x220 the family man, who lived a complete life and raised wonderful children who went on to live very comfortable lives and have children of their own.

"I" am the best witness to my existence. Not the person giving my eulogy. Who are you to tell someone how to define what "fulfilling" means to them?

Why are you trying to tell this guy what he should value? He wants to do work that interests and excites him, and he's making the tradeoffs that balance his personal set of values - with, incidentally, far more information than you have about what those values and specific tradeoffs are.

Pursue your own balance of values with passion, and allow others to be meaningfully different from you. Their desires don't diminish yours.

I think that was in response to the false dichotomy the guy created, and the implied judgments about skill for those who didn't value what he did.

Are you reading what you're typing to this person? You're like the evil dad in the family telling their kids they will amount to nothing.

It's not for everyone, but it sounds like you know what you want, and you are in the position to do it. Go for it!

I'm with you, man. I'd rather spend my life pursuing big dreams and try to do something meaningful, and leave a legacy - even if I fail and die broke, penniless and alone - then spend my life engaging in boring, pedestrian "normalcy".

I can live with failing. I can't live with not trying.

Just please make sure to take breaks and recharge or you will burnout. Burnout is about imbalance, remember that this life is a marathon not a sprint.

They're not working 80 hours a week. They're just saying they are, because that's fashionable. Or rather it used to be fashionable. It isn't anymore, so I'm surprised you're still hearing this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17003457

Pet peeve: they are not working 80 hours a week. Simple number crunching. That would be working 8am-10pm every single Mon-Fri, then five solid hours on Saturday, and another five hours on Sunday. Every week. No, that's not happening.