Yeah this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders. I'm selling my labor for money. If I work harder and the company does better, this translates into almost no extra benefits to me, with all of the net benefit going to the owners. I want "work/life balance" because I am being paid for a very specific amount of work and I want my employer to keep its nose out of the rest of my time.
At least with a founder they capture more of the economic output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for most founders.
"this is horseshit for everybody except maybe founders"
Well, who do you think PG's audience is?
A 45-yo welder? A school teacher who loves their job? Or even someone happy at their FAANG job?
This advice isn't meant for them. Like most PG essays, it's obviously meant for people who want to be founders (or already are).
You might think it's dumb. But given he's seen people go out and do this, what, 5,000 times now? (Not sure what the total YC company count is) with some median level of success? He's got something valuable to add.
Perhaps you'd like 10x more qualifiers, 10x more nuance, 10x more comprehensive treatment of ALL potential types of people in his essays.
But he'd be far less effective at reaching his real audience - founders and potential founders.
I think you're mostly right, but his writing never says or really even directly implies that it's relevant specifically to founders. That would be very easy to do, but by not doing so he lends an air or universality and depth to the whole thing that makes it feel more insightful to people. The examples about startups are interpreted not as specifics but as examples of universal truths when as you point out they almost certainly are not.
PG is making large claims about the nature of schooling. The essay is not just for founders. He laments that people sit in class learning about Darwin rather than building treehouses and does not write that this only applies to a tiny minority of people who he expects to become entrepreneurs.
I also think it can be bad advice for founders too.
You’re not just selling your labour though, you’re cultivating your own career. That’s why people generally advance with more years of experience. You are the 100% majority stake owner in the startup of you.
PG is not saying everyone are skaters, neither convincing everyone to become skaters. There are definitely such people and work-life balance indeed is not as standard for them. Moreover they being hated by people who are just for money on a work as they are raising the bar, but it does not mean they should stop.
I tend to agree it's a part of a character which also can be developed.
Tangentially to that, I've worked at exactly one place that had a really good profit-sharing system. On paper, everyone had a relatively low salary. But, at the end of the fiscal year, they'd tally up the profits, divide them up among the employees, and cut everyone a check.
(Naturally, this was not a publicly-held company, nor was it financially beholden to any venture capitalists. One rarely finds much equity in extractive economies, regardless of whether the thing being extracted is mineral resources or intellectual resources.)
There were a few peculiar social phenomena that might have been attributable to this setup. One was the natural culture of collaboration and relative lack of office politics.
A more interesting one, though, was that people rarely worked any overtime at all. My guess as to why is that more traditional pay structures encourage more ambitious people to overwork, because it sets up a situation where employees feel a lot of pressure to compete with each other for raises. (And it demotivates other people, because they understand that any level of productivity in between the minimum, and whatever it takes to get ahead in the rat race, is wasted effort.) If the rising tide really does, obviously, visibly lift all boats, though, then there's no particular need to treat your entire career like a Black Friday doorbuster.
I know what PG is saying. And I'm saying that it is stupid and is (consciously or not) part of a larger culture designed to allow owners to extract ever more labor from workers without paying them more. It is so easy for him to make wild decrees about the best way to live, because he happens to hold the keys to the kingdom.
Even if I care deeply about projects and software and even entrepreneurship in my own time - that should have precisely zero bearing on my work.
he writes that there are two kind of people. one who need to separate work/life aka the worker and the ones where it all belongs together. the skater.
in my understanding, he argues that if you are the former, become the latter and thats the key tk a better life.
now he might not give precise instructions, but knowing PGs work, i assume that path goes through entrepreneurship. i think he even hints at it by writing: be(come) your own boss.
That comment is entirely unhelpful, and a net negative with the condescension. If you think someone misunderstood, help them by restating the idea in a way you find more understandable.
At least with a founder they capture more of the economic output of their overwork, but even then you hear so many stories of families that have been sacrificed at the altar of entrepreneurship that I can't even support this approach for most founders.