"I complained, but I eventually gave in. As we grew, it was harder and harder to maintain our informal processes. (I remember a real inflection point at about 50-60 employees, and another at about 100.) We gradually gave up our homegrown way of doing things, and accepted normal HR practices — vacation and sick days, regular reviews, annual salary adjustments — and bit by bit, I let the “HR professionals” take over the job of framing and managing the internal culture. That was a mistake."

I worry about this with my own "company". I have two different projects right now, one that brings in money and I'm starting to add people to, one that has a couple of people and might soon bring in money. I see them separate only in so much as the people of the second one aren't interested in the work of the first one at this time. There will be opportunities in the future to merge the two.

I started working for myself because I hated working in modern office culture. I was always interested in being more than just a code-monkey. I wanted to understand the business and work practically and efficiently to create good value for our clients. I saw that a lot of programmers where architecture astronauts and a lot of project managers were unchecked salesmen and I thought I could be the best of both worlds by being honest with both the customer and myself about what could and couldn't be done. I didn't want to delay releases just because I was more interested in scratching an intellectual itch than getting the work done. But I also didn't want to over-promise on deliverables knowing that it would lead to an even bigger argument in a month's time when we didn't get 6 months worth of programming done.

And I got sick and tired of my health issues, fundamentally created by my overly demanding employers, being treated like they were a personal problem that I shouldn't bother them with. I'm sorry, you keep me in the office overnight, I'm not coming in on time the next day. It's not "unprofessional" for me to fall asleep in a meeting in which I'm not even expected to participate the day after you dumped last-minute changes on me, changes I know you kept to yourself because I overheard you on the phone talking about it and how you knew it would be easier to convince me to stay if the situation seemed dire. The chemical depression I experienced as a result of the poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and lack of sunlight you imposed on me through feeding me at my desk and holding my job over my head was fundamentally your fault, as was the resulting complete lack of productivity. You can't work someone 100 hours one week and expect them to be as fresh as a daisy the next.

Ahem, sorry, got lost there for a minute.

The last thing I want to do is be responsible for creating a business that becomes the very thing I despise. But I won't be able to oversee everything. I'm going to have to hire people who will be responsible for hiring more people. The fundamental structure of the company will have to be built on the understanding that treating employees with respect is not just a phrase for the promotional material.

The problem is that it's a whole litany of problems. You can't just focus on the vacation time or core hours or snacks and games in the break room. Frankly, even when I was in my early 20s I didn't care for snacks and games at work. I wanted to work at work and play at home. It's hiring practices, it's how you communicate with your customers, it's how you organize work, it's who you hire for work, it's the sort of work you do, it's 100% of everything that a company does, and if any one part of it is out of whack it's going to corrupt it all.

In O'Reilly's example of his "Rules of Thumb" manual, he hired the wrong lawyer, a lawyer that was only interested in viewing the problem through the lens of common corporate lawyering. He needed a lawyer that was just as devoted to recreating the work place as he was and understood that it was his (the lawyer's) job to protect that environment, not completely destroy it just because it wasn't easy to protect it.

And it scares the shit out of me. How many of my former employers started their own companies because they hated working for their own former employers? How do I avoid being ultimately responsible for someone's terrible work-life balance?