Sorry, but I don't see how this is relevant to what the other person said. Important or not, if you're too tired for sex then wtf are you going to do with an infant?
To add, often it’s these parents (potential grandparents to be) who pressure their children to have children to continue the line. It goes beyond what people are used to in the US, ie “when are you guys gonna have kids?” No, it’s more, “hey, hurry up, you owe me grandkids now, that’s why I helped you with mortgage, now get to work and deliver!”
One Chinese I talked to said there are two reasons that can play into this pressure. First reason is that the grandparents probably had the same situation themselves, they were raised by their grandparents, so now they have a urge to take the parent role themselves since they never were that close when their own children grew up. Second is the age aspect, they want to do this before they get to old and tired.
In India, a husband and wife both earning tech salary will get a full time maid for a while who may cost Rs15000 of a Rs60000 combined income, rent another 15000. Woman will spend maternity leave at her parents home, 4 paid, 2 unpaid. Either set of parents will take long vacations, even from India to US, to raise infant or toddler grandchildren, especially if they are retired.
There are cultures which shudder at couples who have to take care of an infant alone or elderly parents who live without their chidlren.
In China, you're mom or mother-in-law will help you raise the kid. That's also why the retirement age in China is 60 for men and 50 for women (55 for women civil servants).
Human society has been great at and thrived on exploiting people for a very long time now. We'd probably have to go all the way back to hunter and gatherer tribes before we find a point in time where that wasn't a normal fact of life. Capitalism is just the most efficient form of exploitation that we've found. It's not really controversial though.
It's unfortunate that we can't come to a world agreement to work 32 hours a week or something reasonable like that. There can still be a healthy competition without all of us working ourselves to death.
Easy to say when you're salaried. Not so easy when you work for hourly wages. It's not as though pay would suddenly increase by ~20%. Also, 40 hours / week is already a decrease from what it was ~100 years ago.
> I feel like today 40 is more the exception than the rule.
Is it though? Most people aren't you and I. Most are working hourly jobs and their employers are not paying out overtime.
My only meaningful point is that a shorter work week would likely only benefit those among us who are already better off (in terms of compensation.) I don't see how it helps my friend working at the Chrysler plant.
I honestly wonder whether anyone else has had my philosophical crisis this past few years. I started to think all of my attempts to be part of an elite group that's "changing the world" through technology are actually fucking it up more.
Whether this is fueled by burnout or a feeling of uneasiness with world events I can't be sure. I'm getting scared though because if I don't get my motivation back in a few years being broke is going to suck.
Yeah, I think anybody with some kind of moral compass in tech has that thought at the back of their mind. When I was 18, the thought of working somewhere like Google was the dream, but now I'm not so sure.
Google itself changed a lot. 13 years ago it was amazing to work there. In 2008 there was a feeling of slowing down luxury expenses, but the real change was when Larry came instead of Eric Schmidt as a CEO: he's boring (and Sundar is just his puppet) and forces boredom on the employees.
Eric Schmidt had a great way of saying no to employees while still making them excited about the possibilities ahead of Google.
I do have ask about this desire to "change the world", as I constantly question my own motivations. We all generally think of it in a positive manner, but have most SV companies actually done that objectively? I'm not so sure. I think when we say "change the world", most of the time we really mean, get rich doing something impactful (negative or positive). If we all really wanted to change the world we would go work for non-profits cleaning water for African children or something. By this I mean, there are things that are currently objectively changing the world in a positive way and can certainly benefit from people who have analytical and software skills, but they don't tend to pay very well.
The company I work for doesn't even have an ad platform, and its business model isn't designed around addicting people to anything. I don't go home with the thought in the back of my head that I'm just making a drug that much more attractive. We actually help people. I've heard customers talk about how we saved them from some big disaster before.
Companies that are designed to be exploitative and addictive are the minority, really. They just got really large because of how successful that business model can be and loom large in our minds. There are plenty of places to work based on creating win-win scenarios with customers. You may take a pay cut from Google. Then again, you may not even take that much. Can't hurt to look around.
I can't lay claim to "changing the world", but I do feel like my job is making it better. I'm a Chesterton's Fence kinda guy anyhow. It doesn't surprise me all that much that a lot of companies out to "change the world" do so only to discover that their change wasn't an improvement after all. Improving the world at all is a tall order; to do so in a revolutionary fashion, nearly impossible. (On the flip side, a lot of that "change the world" stuff is just rhetoric anyhow. "We're going to change the world by making it slightly easier to call taxis on your phone!" may be a great pep-talk, but it's kinda... silly.)
I've had similar thoughts. The problem to me is that a huge portion of the people who say they want to "change the world" really mean they want to get rich quick with loose morals or they want to change the world in mostly trivial ways for young urban professionals. On the flip side, there are plenty of people and companies who legitimately are trying to change the world for the better for large segments of the population, but they're not paying FAANG salaries with cushy offices and benefits.
It comes down to your own priorities - if you want to actually help make the world a better place, you're probably going to have to suck it up and take a salary and career trajectory hit to work at a non-profit or a help-oriented company with low comp structure not based in a sexy city. If you're unwilling to give up some lifestyle points for that, you'll always be faced with companies that are really only paying lip service to positive change while actually being driven by profits.
I think this issue can still be solved by technology. Keep working on technology that allow me to be self sufficient for my basic needs. I have that, I don't need to work for anyone anymore to survive.
Many of these 'change the world' efforts by non-profits do not scale if there is not a profit motive associated with them. The profit motive would naturally keep these programs running and people happy to make a good living while actually helping others when going to work. Instead what you have is non-profits totally relying on the government and rich people feeling pitty to keep their doors open. Generating a profit can eliminate that and can actually empower these companies to help in the ways they want to without middle men.
> Tech firms in China typically expect their employees to work long hours to prove their dedication.
> By the end of 2018, many tech companies were announcing plans to cut benefits, bonuses and jobs as they hunkered down amid the country’s worst economic slowdown in nearly three decades.
> Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour.
There's a lesson here. Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.
I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to assume that the word "dedicated" automatically means exploitation and extrapolate that across the spectrum of organizations that are out there. That's quite a reach.
Dedication almost always translates to "doing stuff you're not getting paid to do". How exploitative this is depends on context. If you're volunteering at the local community theatre, it's not really exploitative. You're there for your own reasons, probably doing something you like. However, if you're asked to be dedicated at your job in a multimillion dollar corporation what's probably happening is they're trying to save on labor costs. And they're doing it by keeping headcount lower than it otherwise needs to be to get the job done.
This becomes really apparent when you consider contractors. Nobody ever screens contractors for "dedication". They find one whose rate and qualifications are acceptable and pay them for their time. Likewise with other professions like lawyers.
It's weird how this has become normalized for many rank-and-file tech employees though.
No, it doesn't. The word dedicated just means that you're engaged with the problems that the business is trying to solve.
You are always doing things for your own personal reasons. Whether volunteering or not.
It's also true (besides the point about dedication), that certain jobs and certain missions DO require extraordinary hours.
NASA required long hours for their Apollo engineers. It's unlikely they would have achieved what they did if they had engineers that worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and multiple breaks throughout the day. Was this exploitation? No. Folks knew going in what they were trying to achieve had never been done before.
People do screen contractors for dedication. For whatever job you're hiring for, you want someone dedicated to solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and executing effectively.
> He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour.
The only solution I can think of (if you want to keep on programming and not make a career change), is to acquire skills in such a way that you cannot be easily replaced by younger cheaper labour.
Easier said than done, but one way to do this IMO is to not go after the fads, but instead to pick less sexy but still useful and important technologies and to become an expert in those.
Also, what's been a useful heuristic for me, is what Nassim Taleb calls the "Lindy" effect. The longer something has been in use, the longer you can expect it to be used. This applies especially to technology.
I've been at plenty of places that keep 'baggage' employees around because "They paid their dues", or "They were with us during the tough times", or "they've done a lot ffor this company"
Usually the smaller the company, the more attachment there is to those employees. No matter how useless they are at the current time
My guideline has been to love people, not institutions. Not through any fault of the institutions, but rather through physical reality, they can only be as dedicated to their members as a person can be to individual cells in their body.
> Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.
If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected.
> Easier said than done when you're only other option is toiling in a field.
Yes. There is times that developer do not have a real option to say no. But, it is good for junior developers to understand what they are agreeing to and what are the consequences.
In the end businesses are going to ask for so much as legally is possible. If 15 hours/day where legalized, it is what people would get.
> If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected.
This happens in charity-sector voluntary organisations too.
Having worked extensively for free (both in open source and community charity work), I found it becomes extremely draining when you really get to appreciate how people take your free time for granted, get angry if you don't give more and more to fulfil their unrealistic expectations, you can't find a way off the treadmill that doesn't get you into difficulties somehow, and there's not much support or meaningful help if you're having a rough time of it.
It's one of those things that sounds theoretically obvious from a distance, but actually being in the thick of it is such a different and unexpected experience.
It does lead to burnout as well as lasting trauma.
Also, to what I call "weaponisation" of language making it harder to talk about such things. For example, "you seem like you're heading for burnout", from people saying it for office politics reasons (self promotion) rather than empathy, and who are often the chief causes of said burnout and trauma.
I have seen people work 70 hour weeks in that situation for free, in addition to their day job they have to do to be paid, feeling more obligated to do the free work than the paid work when they clash, because of the pressures of expectations, and a bit of a "100 bosses 5 workers" problem in co-operative type social organisations.
Maybe this is an excessively callous view, but isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed? Is the expectation for the reader to pity their condition?
There is no totalitarian government that's relocating these people to a gulag and forcing them into 996 labor work for their motherland. These are people who are trying to break into upper middle class or beyond by pursuing high risk high reward economic opportunities and sacrificing much in exchange. When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
I think it's less about fairness and more about the harsh facts of reality. In a perfect world, the workers would be able to come to fair agreements with employers and get exploited less.
Ironically, there is, in fact a totalitarian government, and it appears to view its citizens as extensions of the state [1]. While the state isn't trying to force anyone into 996 software jobs to my knowledge, when all the companies expect 996, what other options do you have? Especially after you worked all your life to get into a good college and studied to get a good job, which your parents are depending on you getting for their retirement. You just graduated with a software degree, what are your other options? You could always do construction work or factory work like all the other migrants who couldn't get into a good university (or into any university at all), or whose parents couldn't afford university. Just imagine how your parents would flip out at that, not to mention your own personal pride. Plus you'd have to live like a migrant, which in a city like Beijing is probably crammed in a room with 4 - 8 other people.
> When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
So the carrot, or the stick? I suppose the carrot is the better alternative, but it's reasonable to be mad at a system that holds you hostage like that.
> Maybe this is an excessively callous view, but isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed? Is the expectation for the reader to pity their condition?
I guess that you are down voted because you are supporting a fallacy. Your comment supports the idea that you cannot change the system, and that the system is never at fault but individual people is.
If this people wants to improve their situation there is no individual action that they can take that will make a big impact. Only if they unionize, or make changes in government they can achieve improvements in their lives.
> When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
Yes. This is exactly what I mean. But, the rest of your comment seems to contradict this fact.
It's weird that that's a thing, considering how there are SO many startups both in Silicon Valley and Shenzen. You would think these companies would poach talent by providing perks like "4 day work week" or "unlimited vacation". The author of the article might have a point. Silicon Valley is starting to figure this out to some extent but China isn't yet
Still I would think that since there's so many companies that these jobs would be extremely cushy. I guess the actual problem is that the label market is so much more saturated than the number of startups that they don't even have to poach talent at all
Same thing in the real Silicon Valley. Wasn't there adoring stories about "dedicated" people sleeping under their desks or in parking lot vans. Doubt everyone is banging out kids to move into their $3600/month studio apartments.
> “One thing Chinese founders or unicorns haven’t figured out is how to become a sustainable business. If you continue those [long hours] for 10 years, people will have no personal life any more, they will have no kids, they will go crazy,” Wingender said.
I wonder if this is simply symptomatic of a labor market imbalance. China has a lot of people, and proportionally they have a lot of people who can do software. Employers can demand what they want. This model is only sustainable so long as the stream of labor is constant, which I suspect it is.
there are 2 inputs to the classical production function (e.g. the 2 things businesses need to purchase/obtain in order to stay in business) - labor and capital
if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations
if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will
this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west
old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen
there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases
i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health
Isn’t “the labor unionizes” just a special case of “the supply drops” since labor unions enforce their power by controlling the supply of labor? (Eg strikes)
This sounds like my life. I come from poverty and now I make decent money and my company doesn’t request this. I have really been trying to figure out how to turn it off, or at least down. It’s very hard. I get depressed and a bit paranoid if I’m not martyring myself for work.
Pick one day a week, doesn't matter which one, finish early and plan an activity you enjoy.
Hell or high water stick to that activity on that day.
You'll naturally start to look forwards to that day.
Then make it two days and so on.
Don't try to make massive changes, make little ones that become habits.
As someone who went from working 70 hours a week (or more technically in hindsight sitting behind a computer for 70 hours and working for maybe 30 of those productively to working 37 hrs a week with about the same level of productivity) it matters.
Focus on investing your money, building up an asset portfolio (I suggest commodities over stocks/housing in the current market, but that's not the important part here).
Your financial future should depend on your wealth compounding, and not on your number of promotions. And of course for wealth compounding timing is key: the earlier you start the better it will be for you over time.
Doesn't every tech worker face burnout before they reach 30. Especially in silicon valley or the startup scene. Why should it be any different in china.
It's pretty much high risk, high reward. The startup I worked at, we all slept in our offices working 24/7 to reach milestones every few months. The point work hard and get the company sold off within 10 years and retire.
68 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] thread[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057
Well, I'd recommend against having kids until that situation changes somehow.
If you're too tired for sex, what are you going to do with an infant?
There are cultures which shudder at couples who have to take care of an infant alone or elderly parents who live without their chidlren.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...
In fact the hours were starting to change to 40 that year. Funny coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Conve...
Edit: Did some more research and in 1890 we have some truly ridiculous numbers. http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html
But there's a good reason we turned from those.
Is it though? Most people aren't you and I. Most are working hourly jobs and their employers are not paying out overtime.
My only meaningful point is that a shorter work week would likely only benefit those among us who are already better off (in terms of compensation.) I don't see how it helps my friend working at the Chrysler plant.
I believe slavery already won this category
Whether this is fueled by burnout or a feeling of uneasiness with world events I can't be sure. I'm getting scared though because if I don't get my motivation back in a few years being broke is going to suck.
If you know that's what you care about, though, at least that's actionable information for your future.
Eric Schmidt had a great way of saying no to employees while still making them excited about the possibilities ahead of Google.
The company I work for doesn't even have an ad platform, and its business model isn't designed around addicting people to anything. I don't go home with the thought in the back of my head that I'm just making a drug that much more attractive. We actually help people. I've heard customers talk about how we saved them from some big disaster before.
Companies that are designed to be exploitative and addictive are the minority, really. They just got really large because of how successful that business model can be and loom large in our minds. There are plenty of places to work based on creating win-win scenarios with customers. You may take a pay cut from Google. Then again, you may not even take that much. Can't hurt to look around.
I can't lay claim to "changing the world", but I do feel like my job is making it better. I'm a Chesterton's Fence kinda guy anyhow. It doesn't surprise me all that much that a lot of companies out to "change the world" do so only to discover that their change wasn't an improvement after all. Improving the world at all is a tall order; to do so in a revolutionary fashion, nearly impossible. (On the flip side, a lot of that "change the world" stuff is just rhetoric anyhow. "We're going to change the world by making it slightly easier to call taxis on your phone!" may be a great pep-talk, but it's kinda... silly.)
It comes down to your own priorities - if you want to actually help make the world a better place, you're probably going to have to suck it up and take a salary and career trajectory hit to work at a non-profit or a help-oriented company with low comp structure not based in a sexy city. If you're unwilling to give up some lifestyle points for that, you'll always be faced with companies that are really only paying lip service to positive change while actually being driven by profits.
> By the end of 2018, many tech companies were announcing plans to cut benefits, bonuses and jobs as they hunkered down amid the country’s worst economic slowdown in nearly three decades.
> Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour.
There's a lesson here. Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.
This becomes really apparent when you consider contractors. Nobody ever screens contractors for "dedication". They find one whose rate and qualifications are acceptable and pay them for their time. Likewise with other professions like lawyers.
It's weird how this has become normalized for many rank-and-file tech employees though.
You are always doing things for your own personal reasons. Whether volunteering or not.
It's also true (besides the point about dedication), that certain jobs and certain missions DO require extraordinary hours.
NASA required long hours for their Apollo engineers. It's unlikely they would have achieved what they did if they had engineers that worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and multiple breaks throughout the day. Was this exploitation? No. Folks knew going in what they were trying to achieve had never been done before.
People do screen contractors for dedication. For whatever job you're hiring for, you want someone dedicated to solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and executing effectively.
American companies have been playing that game for 40 years now.
The only solution I can think of (if you want to keep on programming and not make a career change), is to acquire skills in such a way that you cannot be easily replaced by younger cheaper labour.
Easier said than done, but one way to do this IMO is to not go after the fads, but instead to pick less sexy but still useful and important technologies and to become an expert in those.
Also, what's been a useful heuristic for me, is what Nassim Taleb calls the "Lindy" effect. The longer something has been in use, the longer you can expect it to be used. This applies especially to technology.
I've been at plenty of places that keep 'baggage' employees around because "They paid their dues", or "They were with us during the tough times", or "they've done a lot ffor this company"
Usually the smaller the company, the more attachment there is to those employees. No matter how useless they are at the current time
If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected.
Yes. There is times that developer do not have a real option to say no. But, it is good for junior developers to understand what they are agreeing to and what are the consequences.
In the end businesses are going to ask for so much as legally is possible. If 15 hours/day where legalized, it is what people would get.
This happens in charity-sector voluntary organisations too.
Having worked extensively for free (both in open source and community charity work), I found it becomes extremely draining when you really get to appreciate how people take your free time for granted, get angry if you don't give more and more to fulfil their unrealistic expectations, you can't find a way off the treadmill that doesn't get you into difficulties somehow, and there's not much support or meaningful help if you're having a rough time of it.
It's one of those things that sounds theoretically obvious from a distance, but actually being in the thick of it is such a different and unexpected experience.
It does lead to burnout as well as lasting trauma.
Also, to what I call "weaponisation" of language making it harder to talk about such things. For example, "you seem like you're heading for burnout", from people saying it for office politics reasons (self promotion) rather than empathy, and who are often the chief causes of said burnout and trauma.
I have seen people work 70 hour weeks in that situation for free, in addition to their day job they have to do to be paid, feeling more obligated to do the free work than the paid work when they clash, because of the pressures of expectations, and a bit of a "100 bosses 5 workers" problem in co-operative type social organisations.
There is no totalitarian government that's relocating these people to a gulag and forcing them into 996 labor work for their motherland. These are people who are trying to break into upper middle class or beyond by pursuing high risk high reward economic opportunities and sacrificing much in exchange. When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
> you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you
If I am a serial killer and I offer my victims a choice between dying by machete and dying by shotgun, does that exonerate the murder?
Most US workers have no vacation...
[1] https://nb.sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
So the carrot, or the stick? I suppose the carrot is the better alternative, but it's reasonable to be mad at a system that holds you hostage like that.
I guess that you are down voted because you are supporting a fallacy. Your comment supports the idea that you cannot change the system, and that the system is never at fault but individual people is.
If this people wants to improve their situation there is no individual action that they can take that will make a big impact. Only if they unionize, or make changes in government they can achieve improvements in their lives.
> When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
Yes. This is exactly what I mean. But, the rest of your comment seems to contradict this fact.
Still I would think that since there's so many companies that these jobs would be extremely cushy. I guess the actual problem is that the label market is so much more saturated than the number of startups that they don't even have to poach talent at all
I wonder if this is simply symptomatic of a labor market imbalance. China has a lot of people, and proportionally they have a lot of people who can do software. Employers can demand what they want. This model is only sustainable so long as the stream of labor is constant, which I suspect it is.
if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations
if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will
this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west
old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen
there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases
i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health
Hell or high water stick to that activity on that day.
You'll naturally start to look forwards to that day.
Then make it two days and so on.
Don't try to make massive changes, make little ones that become habits.
As someone who went from working 70 hours a week (or more technically in hindsight sitting behind a computer for 70 hours and working for maybe 30 of those productively to working 37 hrs a week with about the same level of productivity) it matters.
Your financial future should depend on your wealth compounding, and not on your number of promotions. And of course for wealth compounding timing is key: the earlier you start the better it will be for you over time.
It's pretty much high risk, high reward. The startup I worked at, we all slept in our offices working 24/7 to reach milestones every few months. The point work hard and get the company sold off within 10 years and retire.