"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend."

Especially when said "doing" is done by other people (engineers, testers,SREs etc) , not the manager.

Easy enough to hold such beliefs when the cost is paid by others.

A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what powers your mojo.

No kidding. If you're on team "Do whatever it takes to win" then you better at the very least applaud when people do whatever it takes.

You can't tell your team "Do whatever it takes to win", and then when they work their asses off for you turn around and say "Well long hours aren't a badge of honor"

This is an asshole who wants people to work themselves to death and doesn't want to give any sort of reward or recognition for it.

No he’s right. This is vital for a growing company who is vacuuming up market share. It’s not necessary for big corps who just throw more people at a product or use their economies of scale to stay ahead.

The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that was never you, then you either joined a company late or weren’t one of the key people.

I worked for 2 hours this past weekend because doing so would save about a weeks worth of work due to various reasons.

I will also leave work early to pick up a few things on my daughter's birthday later this month.

I think this is reasonable. I don't know if it's the sort of thing the author is talking about, but I think my work/life balance is fine.

Especially when, IME, people are either outright abusers (and blatantly leech until discovered and fired) or people tend to fall into a distribution whose mean centers around a WLB that's slightly tilted in favor of work. Employees in the US are already so guilt-tripped and gaslit and scared of unemployment that you end up doing things for work you feel are unfair even if they don't ask it of you.

And that's easy to say for someone who has a large equity stake in the company, who is directly rewarded for working very hard like that. Ridiculous for them to impose it on others though who are salaried employees and aren't rewarded for all this extra work.

If you want me to work as hard as you are, pay me. Take my total annual compensation, divide it by 2087, and give me 2X that amount as overtime to work nights and weekends in excess of 40 hours/week. I'd do it. If he's actually willing to put his money where his mouth is I bet he'd get plenty of takers to work that hard. But I bet he isn't; he just wants to get lots of extra work out of his employees for free.

Yep, I was just about to quote this exact sentence here, but I see you already did. Absolutely agreed, what an awful manager.

I don't think it's a "young people" stereotype. I'm an oldster and I wouldn't want to work for someone like that who is trying to squeeze every last drop out of his "resources."

Last time I somehow ended in a company with culture/managers similar to the one above I quit after only a month and a half. And I don't exactly fit into "young people don't want to work" stereotype. You'll only get this kind of expectations in extremely toxic places.

Agree. My first question would be to ask 'win' what? The reality is, very few are working on things that are so critical if a feature is pushed off a few days because of a weekend, nothing will change.

Working on the weekend is a management failure.