Wow, someone who actually wants to succeed with a startup, eh? The startup = sweatshop mentality really needs to end if we're to see a higher success rate amon

Wow, someone who actually wants to succeed with a startup, eh? The startup = sweatshop mentality really needs to end if we're to see a higher success rate among startups. In every case that I've seen people working insanely long hours trying to get some piece of code working, it's turned out to be bad code. Sweatshops provide the illusion of increasing the development pace, but the reality is the opposite. What you're doing in those situations isn't rushing to market, it's repeating the mistakes that lead to the term Microserf. Most projects fail miserably. Microsoft's software succeed in spite of it's quality (that is, the lack thereof), not because of it. Personally, if I were running company, I'd end up firing the people working the insane hours; I wouldn't want to be paying their technical debt down the road. And incidentally, Joel Spolsky has mentioned this as well. People working insane hours do bad work. They rack up technical debt that the company will end up paying, usually indefinitely.