So I guess this is what I'll be told the next time I ask a prospective company about WLB.
Personally, I probably would have read that manager the riot act for even considering it appropriate to do.
So if they give you that speech, you can turn around and demand proper skin in the game plus a huge amount of freedom and autonomy. Fair is fair. No company will affect my work life balance unless they've made it worth my while.
At least with a founder they capture more of the economic output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for most founders.
Well, who do you think PG's audience is?
A 45-yo welder? A school teacher who loves their job? Or even someone happy at their FAANG job?
This advice isn't meant for them. Like most PG essays, it's obviously meant for people who want to be founders (or already are).
You might think it's dumb. But given he's seen people go out and do this, what, 5,000 times now? (Not sure what the total YC company count is) with some median level of success? He's got something valuable to add.
Perhaps you'd like 10x more qualifiers, 10x more nuance, 10x more comprehensive treatment of ALL potential types of people in his essays.
But he'd be far less effective at reaching his real audience - founders and potential founders.
I also think it can be bad advice for founders too.
I tend to agree it's a part of a character which also can be developed.
(Naturally, this was not a publicly-held company, nor was it financially beholden to any venture capitalists. One rarely finds much equity in extractive economies, regardless of whether the thing being extracted is mineral resources or intellectual resources.)
There were a few peculiar social phenomena that might have been attributable to this setup. One was the natural culture of collaboration and relative lack of office politics.
A more interesting one, though, was that people rarely worked any overtime at all. My guess as to why is that more traditional pay structures encourage more ambitious people to overwork, because it sets up a situation where employees feel a lot of pressure to compete with each other for raises. (And it demotivates other people, because they understand that any level of productivity in between the minimum, and whatever it takes to get ahead in the rat race, is wasted effort.) If the rising tide really does, obviously, visibly lift all boats, though, then there's no particular need to treat your entire career like a Black Friday doorbuster.
I enter into employment with an employer, and the terms are laid out in a contract, possibly based on an agreement the company and a union.
My employer gets to call the shots during the working hours, as specified by the contract. For anything outside of that, they have no say in what I do, and the less they know about it, the better. Work is something I have to be compensated for, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.
I bring very little of my private life into work, just what seems reasonable for general interactions with my colleagues and talk about random subjects over lunch. I'll talk about a recent concert I went to or a nice restaurant, and that's it. We can have a beer at the Friday bar and some small talk, but colleagues != friends. We have a professional and cordial relation, not a friendship.
Conversely, I also don't take my work home with me. My phone and laptop get shut off completely at the end of the work day, and they do not get switched on before I am at the office again (or around 8 when WFH).
My time is mine, and that is non-negotiable.
A job should absolutely be able to be just a job you perform to generate income if you can do the job, regardless of passion for it. The bar is high enough already for employees trying to climb the employment/career rock face without retired “thought leaders” adding additional constraints.
I think it's a marketing pipeline for founders. Maybe very early stage employees.
After reading many pg essays, I have this feeling that he's protective of founders. Not just YC founders, or other founders. But possible founders, too. Really the "spirit" of "founder" as it appears to him. (Use "idea" instead of "spirit" if it sounds too woo for you.)
He sometimes sees this spirit as under attack. Some other writer will dogmatically insist on work/life balance. It's probably targeted at the majority of working people who are selling their labor for the wages they need to get by. Personally, I think it's a good message. But there's no specific carve out in the article for founders, so maybe one person out there is a little less foundery than they would be otherwise. This worries pg.
So he writes some sentence like the one that kicked off this comment chain. It's really just "leave founders alone!". The intended effect is that those other writers insist a little less dogmatically, and that people feel enabled to dive into their own projects a bit more.
What the top comment is responding to is the perversion that so often happens. The line gets taken not just as gospel for the founder to live, but to preach. "We're looking for people who believe in work dash life, not work slash life." they say to the software engineer they're expecting to pop tickets off of JIRA for 40% below market wages and options on 0.01% of the company.