The owner of my company is a workaholic, top-down control-freak type. He's been working 12-hour (or more) days his entire ~20 year career. I don't know anything about his first marriage, except that it failed; the presumptuous part of me assumes the "work first" mentality had something to do with it. Being the owner, he can make the rules, yet he only took off a couple days when his kids were born. In fact, at a company social event, he publicly thanked an employee for staying past 7:00pm only days after that employee's first child was born. I don't know what he's worth, but 10s of millions at the minimum. I.e., he could easily retire into an extremely posh life. The only guy he really trusts in the company earned that position by doing 16-hour days for him for a number of years; he missed a wrecked marriage by the skin of his teeth.
The upside is, he is a "job creator", and a creator of good, high-paying jobs at that. I believe in working hard and doing a good job, but that's tempered against
work-life balance, which has only become more important to me since having kids. The owner of my company lives to work; but sadly, he expects everyone else in his company to have the same attitude. I ranted about it
here. I never felt lazy or unambitious until I came to this company.
I just finished reading Dan Ariely's
Predictably Irrational. According to him, on Internet dating sites, men generally care about a woman's weight, and women generally care about a man's height and salary. So everyone lies just a little bit, either shaving off a few pounds, adding an inch or two, and/or inflating salary... but all the site participants know that this behavior is standard, so when they read the listings, they mentally adjust weight up, or height/salary down. The person who is completely honest, therefore, gets the short stick, because everyone assumes he/she is providing false-but-more-flattering numbers.
I wonder if the same phenomenon applies to salaried office workers. Everyone knows that they could typically do the same job even with fewer hours at the office. But nobody wants to be the "honest" person who leaves when his work is done---everyone else will think he's slacking off, even while those same people are they themselves just padding their at-work face-time hours.
Somewhere along the way, I read about ROWE, the results oriented work environment. The idea is, you get paid for results, not for time spent. I'm sure pockets of this exist, but in my experience, it certainly isn't the norm. But it seems more logical, as both parties' interests are better aligned. My ideal post-FI job is one that I can scale the hours proportionally with my pay, e.g. take a 50% pay cut for 50% fewer hours worked. Take a simple example: say you reach FI by saving 50% of your pay. Once you hit FI, can you keep working, but only 50% as much. Then you're still saving 50%, as you're letting your portfolio returns re-invest. Personally, that would be wonderful for me; I don't necessarily hate my job, I just hate the time commitment. If I could work 3.5 days a week or 5--6 hour days or something like that, I might never want to leave. That would never fly with my employer though (see above). I've seen a few people on this forum mention arrangements like that, but it seems they are few and far between.