I wonder if working nights and weekends was a bonus? What's wrong with being competent and putting out a reasonable amount of work and not being overworked and under pressure?
Success often means racing to get to market with significant lead over your competitors who are also working on solving the same problems you are and are most likely not sticking to the 9-5, mo-fr schedule either. Which is why probably not many market successes came out of Europe where everyone works 40h tops, unless it's their own company/passion project.
I was blown away by how many people in the original iPhone team claimed lost their marriages due to spending so much time grinding to iron out all the last minute issues and get the phone out the door on time. Jensen Huang said in the beginning their team was iterating to ship a new GPU design every 6 months with a tiny team. I bet everything I own they were not doing only 40h weeks back then.
I'm not endorsing this practice, which is why I don't work in start-ups, but succes in this racket for early stage start-ups was often correlated with burning the midnight oil and it seems like a lot of people were willing to make the sacrifice for enough equity in their mission to "change the world" and "make it".
1. Over engineering too early. 2. Making bad decisions because everyone is exhausted and pissed off. 3. Everyone racing to "seize power" rather then focussing on the product or actual customer wins. IE, a bunch of antisocial engineers end up in people leader roles because they are good engineers rather then tech. Leadership.
Number 2 is a serious problem. The things I've had bosses pulling 80 hour weeks say to me and others has been astounding. Like if you wrote them down and showed them to a fifth grader they'd think you were insane.
This is what was missing when Apple and Amazon started and for the last decade this dirty VC business has stifled innovation and made people look only for an exit. That is why the biggest companies in the VC era has been companies like Uber and AirBnb instead of Apple and Amazon.
OTOH if you put in the same amount of effort as most other people, you'll get the same results as most other people. That was not enough for highly ambitious people like Bezos, so he sought to build a team of other highly ambitious people to take a big bet with.
Quite a few who answered ads just like it worked years below market rate only to see their theoretical equity dissolve, though.
If you can't tell whether the company you work for is going somewhere or just using you for cheap labor then that says as much about you as it does about the company. Employment is a two way street.
If you don't want risk, then don't choose risk. But there is nothing inherently wrong with risk.
A 3x SWE can't produce 3x if they are in 6hrs of meetings a day. Likewise a 1x SWE can't produce 10x even working 12hour days.