I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends.

My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead.

To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.

I’ve worked in that environment as well. One of the problems is it’s a rollercoaster. You crash as soon as the emergency is over and you get nothing done until the next emergency. You just mentally shutdown. So now the quality of work when there is an emergency is shit because you’re rushing and the quality of work when there isn’t an emergency is shit because you’re recharging for the next emergency. Average output goes down even though peak output has gone up but the boss loves to see people putting in the long hours on his way out the door for a round of golf.

If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again.

Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.

I was paid pretty well, but the period of burnout that followed cut my effective hourly rate in half.

The problem wasn't the long hours - it was that places that push long hours tend to get other, even more important things wrong as well, like product-market fit.

Thats only 750K$ - roughly have the price of a house in the Bay Area before taxes (maybe just enough for the down payment).

Certainly, but let's not forget that there exist other places to live :)

... and also consider that taxes (self-employment tax etc.) and expenses (health insurance) are higher when you're a contractor. You'll be lucky to see half that figure hit your bank account.

I'll give you that health insurance is more expensive as a contractor (though not enough to significantly cut into $750k), but if your taxes are also higher then you really need to talk to a good CPA. If you are doing it right, paying less in taxes is one of the BENEFITS of being self-employed.

> we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.

You could do taht with 2 instances and dropwizard (https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.9/docs/)

Or you could do it with a single $5 virtual machine without any of the Amazon "you're an idiot for using the cloud because you don't need it" tax.

don't need more than a single instance, or 1-2 lambdas

Can’t agree more with your sentiment. It’s hard to get people to see that though. I spent so much time trying to help employees prioritize their work, the response was always everything is important. Some people almost thrive on everything being a crisis, because others reward that behavior. People can go take their “rockstars”, I’ll take the people who can function in a team and not spent time trying to suck everyone into their shit vortex.