One of the founding members of Facebook is speaking out about the lack of work-life balance in the tech industry and how it deeply impacted his leadership abilities. Dustin Moskovitz was Facebook's first chief technology officer and, later, vice president of engineering. In an essay he published on Medium called "Work Hard, Live Well", he looks back on his early years in the industry and how much better his life would have been if he'd made a work-life balance a priority.

"I wish I had slept more hours, and exercised regularly. I wish I had made better decisions about what to eat or drink???—???at times I consumed more soda and energy drinks than water. I wish I had made more time for other experiences that helped me grow incredibly quickly once I gave them a chance," he wrote.


And it's not just that his intense work ethic affected his personal life. Moskovitz also detailed that working too much impeded his ability to be an effective worker at all. In fact, by taking time for self-care and a personal life, he believes he "would have been more effective: a better leader and a more focused employee." His work-induced stress led him to several health issues, including panic attacks and regularly throwing out his back—in his early 20s.

He writes:

In short, I would have had more energy and spent it in smarter ways… AND I would have been happier. That's why this is a true regret for me: I don't feel like I chose between two worthy outcomes. No, I made a foolish sacrifice on both sides.

The essay's publication was sparked by The New York Times recent investigative piece on the work culture at Amazon, which was described by one employee as a place "overachievers go to feel bad about themselves." The corporate culture was detailed by current and former employees as incredibly competitive and intense, with some former employees stating they worked over 80 hours a week, despite battling personal health issues like cancer, sick family members, and miscarriages.

The thing is, as Moskovitz points out, working longer hours and eradicating any trace of a personal life among your employees does nothing but contribute to a high turnover rate and a brood of unhappy, less-productive employees.

The research is clear: beyond ~40-50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative. We have also demonstrated that though you can get more output for a few weeks during "crunch time" you still ultimately pay for it later when people inevitably need to recover. If you try to sustain crunch time for longer than that, you are merely creating the illusion of increased velocity. This is true at multiple levels of abstraction: the hours worked per week, the number of consecutive minutes of focus vs. rest time in a given session, and the amount of vacation days you take in a year. > Rest matters.

While a change for better work-life balance is slowly trickling in from several tech giants (re: Google's new parent benefits and Treehouse's four-day workweek) it's something every industry, and company, should be working toward.