I’ve spent the last 7 years working at startups. At one late stage startup we had to stop working every Friday at noon, because of some Jewish customs and we had a chief happiness officer. More recently though, at a seed stage startup I did work like 24/7. Our launch went bad and our ceo went full Elon Musk mode. After about two months of this regime, I took a 3 day vacation during thanks giving week, while others worked through the holiday and the weekend. I was the first to get laid off. But at least money was good for a startup, high base decent equity. Fast forward to today times. I’m wrapping up an on site, and Im possibly talking to the CTO. I’m not sure because they didn’t introduce themselves and mentioned substituting someone. 5 minutes into the conversation, they ask me “are you ok with working 55 hours a week?”. Upon diving in further it started to sound like there is an expectation to sustain this every week, it isn’t some sort of crunch period. I didn’t even process this immediately, it hit me later in the day. I was just asked to forfeit weekends completely and work every day? There is dinner, but to fill this quota without working on the weekends one would have to spend almost 12 hours in the office. I was able to wait it out and get dinner without working 12 hours a day. So, working 7 days a week, and getting that one hour off in the weekends… is this the new norm? Was this always the case or was I just lucky? Should I have asked if there is some issue with planning/management if people need to work this much?