At my first startup the culture was really great (in the beginning, at least) and the product was really cool. I had more fun working in that office than I would if I had been going out every night after work instead, so the 12 hour days didn't seem intrusive.

At my second startup, it was the complete opposite. The culture sucked, and the product sucked. Which is why I put in what you're calling "bank hours" for a year and then left. Lots of the people there worked much, much longer days than I, and it's because they either believed in the product or they had responsibilities outside of work keeping them there (wife, kids, etc).

Just a few anecdotal observations that (so far) held true for all the places I've worked.

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!

What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

The main takeaway was work as hard as you can (i.e. 80 - 100 hour weeks). Even if you're doing the same thing as the competition (assuming they work 40 hours), you'll still accomplish in 4 months what they would in a year. Hard work, tenacity, and a little luck is what separates the smart from the brilliant.

The people I've worked for that were putting in 12 hour days always seemed to be the people that wasted the most time at work.

Human's are biological creatures. Just like when we run, when you go for 30 seconds vs 3 minutes vs 3 hours vs 3 days, the relationship of what happens is not a simple linear one of input. We tire, we lose concentration, we actually get worse if we go all out for long periods than if we act in controlled and conscious burn with good amounts of rest and down time.

As another poster has said, what does happen is that the ones that put in the long hours, in my experience, are often the most incompetent, the magical thinkers, the ones most out of touch with how much they're doing, and the ones putting on the show. Of course, in this world, the ones that put on the show are the one's that often get the most rewards...

Musk is though, spot on with the first two points though. Things other people value. Tenacity.

Hard work, is of course needed, but baring some kind of ridiculous genetics which border on not existing, your productivity drops magnificently once you start going longer hours. That's primarily just for show...

For example, participating in hack-a-thons, commiting to open source, blogging, tweeting, working on personal projects during the weekend, updating your linkedin profile, participating in hacker news, etc...

Moderation is key and life is a trade off. So the extra time spent working is your life slowly being wasted away for some other persons benefit for free.

Additionally, a lot of start ups believe will change the world, they won't. Your tee shirt or food delivery business aren't going to change anything, but for someone reason, they sell to their employees these lines and they believe it.

The pressure to confirm and turn yourself into a model programmer seems more toxic then anything else.

Personally, I am very happy at a Big Co. because my schedule is flexible and not insanely demanding (45hr/wk).

Currently I'm an employee and fairly large share holder in someone else's startup. The wages are not that great, but we are a close team, we all live together, we share cars, we hang out together, we're a "family". As we become more and more successful the perks get better and better. We go from sharing apartments to sharing houses, from sharing a car to sharing more cars. We went from working on top of each other in the apartments to our very large and well decorated offices and the family grows. I get to try different approaches at solutions and have way more control over the outcome than I ever had as an employee at a big well funded corporate job.

We all have our own 'why', but logic might not be it. For me, I really enjoy having a mission and being on that mission with my friends. As it's been said "it's about the journey".

For the last 2 years, it got worse and worse. I quit once my job, got a new one into a bigger company, stayed 3 months, offered the chance to work into a startup(moderate engineering, moderate decisions), and after 7 months, i am struggling again with giving up. What still keeps me in here are my personal projects. I invest some money in few of my projects, because i somehow try to buy my ticket to quit the full time job and go into the entrepreneurship world by myself. Or at least, i want to buy a year of my work life, working for me, as a try-learn-experience.

All successful entrepreneurs teach us not to give up the full time job until we have a plan, savings, and our business already make some money working part time. I hardly follow this advice, but this is the way i'm trying to follow with my projects. Thanks to them, i didn't quit. The last 2 weeks were so unproductive for me at job, my mind is only at my projects, investments, and planning my escape to work for myself. My projects, my business...

So far by now, i can only advice you in what works for me: part time work on your business, consolidate your escape plan. To me, DNhub.com, GetCode.org and easyCustomMaps.com are my source of motivation to continuing what am i doing now..

First, the way you framed the question implies many external motivators for work don't match with the possible rewards, when in fact a lot of people who are sweating hard for someone else's dream are driven by internal motivators. Why not put your all into what your do, regardless of who benefits the most? I guarantee you, you will gain a lot of insight into what your capabilities are when you find out your maximum operating capacity. At the very least, when I see someone that puts enormous effort into something they don't necessarily believe it, it makes me contemplate just how much effort they would put into something they truly do believe in.

Next, to completely demolish my last point, I came to understand that all of these internal and external motivations were very weak when it came to whether or not I'd execute on something. The truth, as I see it, is that motivation is like having a sailboat which rely on strong winds to blow you in one direction or another. When these winds die down in one direction, you start steering your rudder towards another direction that can return you to the same level of progress towards your goal. Instead, the key is having discipline, which is like having an engine that could push out in any direction no matter the state of the wind. These startup environments are one of the ultimate areas to test and strengthen discipline, as you have to push the limits that most people would shrug off as impossible work conditions. Succeeding in that environment is also a means of building your confidence up in order to take on larger tasks, such as starting your own business.

It's also possible that a lot of the people you are seeing working long hours are doing so because they're optimizing for long term gains (such as increased job skills, more company responsibilities, startup contacts) which will increase the likelihood of their startup being successful when they do strike out on their own.

I have coworkers and friends that do exactly what you're describing, and I don't know why they'd tell you they do it, but I have my own theories about why it would be rational to work long hours for no additional pay.

First, why working long hours seems effective:

- Showing up at the office isn't really work. I think Woody Allen once said "80% of success is showing up". When you're present all the time, people tend to think that you're more important, more useful, and more reliable. I work from home often, and I can certainly feel my importance in the company diminishing, even though the quality and speed of my work has never been higher. Humans seem to highly value grunting at other humans face to face. If I wanted to move up in the company, I would absolutely have my face seen as much as possible, and a good way to do that is to be there for long hours. Besides, it's not that hard to be "working long hours" while actually reading the internet for most of the day, which is what a lot of people would be doing at home after work anyway.

- Hours are also an objective measurement, while performance is often very subjective. The biggest complaint that I hear from other employees about other employees is that someone isn't looking busy enough or was barely in the office at all. If someone produces shitty output, it can be rationalized if the person is friendly and appears motivated, because we love people who are trying hard at anything. If someone gets all their work done and leaves early, they don't look like a team player and people get jealous and resentful. I think it's a common human response. For office politics, which often determines salary and promotions, it often makes more sense to be there for long hours than it does to produce amazing output. People love a martyr.

Some reasons you might choose to put in long hours at a startup or small company with poor benefits and salary, instead of a BigCo with higher pay and better benefits:

- You can gain rank very quickly in a startup. As a programmer, the best I can really do as an employee is either become a "lead" or move toward management and try to become a startup CTO. I don't personally find this to have a lot of value, but I do think it's common for people to work in a startup for a year or two, get some fancy title and be able to claim credit for a lot of things, then apply to other companies and try to enter at a higher level. In a growing startup, you don't have that many stakeholders to convince of your value, and if showing up is an influential factor in your promotions, then it could be rational to spend lots of hours at work. I've seen high-hour-low-output programmers transition to higher levels of management, obtained mostly through long hours, which they will probably keep them at the same level in their next job. If you've ever encountered a bullshitter that adds no value but seems to have great credentials, then long hours might have been a factor in how they got there.

- Similarly, other coworkers have transitioned to other teams, instantly giving them years of "experience" on their resumes. Late nights in the office helped show the dedication and build enough trust to make that transition without actually being qualified for the new position.

- I know others that would never get hired at a BigCo, especially as a programmer, but by staying at a startup and looking valuable with long days, they get many more years of experience, more paychecks, a bigger social network, and a pathway into management. For people in this position, long hours are a good way to appear to be contributing without actually having to perform that well.

- It's easy to be misinformed about the value of equity, especially if the founders have done a good job of selling the idea of everyone getting rich if the company succeeds. Thinking of yourself as an owner makes it easier to justify working longer hours.

- If someone has an interest in learning a new skill, working late nights could be looked at as continuing education that also gets you paid. I'd certainly have learned more working for free at a company than I did in years of university, and I put a lot of hours into university work. A company can also be a useful structure to get help and to grow skills, especially if you're under-skilled for your position.

- A lot of people genuinely do want to give their all to something. This makes sense to me too, because some people certainly do find a sort of bliss in life-enveloping levels of work and discipline. I think people tend to view this as an artist thing or an obsessive entrepreneurial thing. If you can find a deep sense of purpose in your daily job that would make you want to work long hours, that probably feels just as rewarding to some people as creating that environment on their own, with less personal financial risk (and of course, less gain).

> If you love hacking, why not keep bank hours at the office and work on your own projects outside of that?

I do exactly that. I work at an app startup, but I keep them limited to about 8 hours a day (well, 7, if you count lunch). I believe I provide good value for the company, at least relative to the other talent they're able to attract. I find being in an office to be very mentally draining, so I try to work from home (which would be much harder at a BigCo), so I'm not burned out by the end of the day.

When I'm done with work, at least a few days a week, I hack on projects at night. I've learned so much more in my time outside of work than at work, so I'm pretty happy with the arrangement. I'll be releasing an app that I've made using this approach pretty soon. If I can make an extra $40k/year from my part-time app development, I'm still ahead of what I could get at a BigCo, and I'm closer to my dream of going indie.

There's a lot that goes into it. Personally, I like to get things done, and experience the sense of accomplishment in seeing visible results.

Life at a big company can mean monotony and difficulty in seeing where your part of the big machine actually makes a difference.

I agree with this, of course, and would bear the same opinion if things actually worked for me.

This was my experience this year and I am now glad I have a regular salary now (in a medium-size public company ... the monotony is a relief. :))

I wanted to gain things from working hard at the startups I was employed at, but it turned into dead-ends. I even tried being a bit entrepreneurial myself with a startup founder, but that fell flat. In part, I think I was around the wrong people and in the other way, I was not being more critical enough.

I've come to the point that if a company wants me to work more, that a) I am fairly compensated for my value or b) give me partial ownership immediately and the dignity of my position. Otherwise, I am not interested.

However, there are also many companies that do neither. They are not worth the investment of time. In those companies, the investment of time is highly unproductive and therefore extremely detrimental.

Where you choose to work is a critical life decision. Many times people who become successful simply chose, by luck or insight, a better place. Effort is not a reliable measure of outcome, just as a wealthy individual can go broke making poor investment choices.