You are wrong. Work-life balance is extremely important, and suggesting otherwise is dangerous. First of all, health and well-being should always be your primary concern, and forcing your employees to throw that off balance is close to criminal.<p>Anecdote from past experience: Last year I worked at a successful startup, seeing it through an acquisition by a Fortune 50 company. At first, the startup was great… it pushed its employees to their very limits and shipped some pretty cool software. But one-by-one, the employees could not take it any longer, and pretty much the entire original team is gone. In its now almost 5 years of existence, very few people stayed for more than a year.<p>Personally, I'm a pretty good developer. I've done some very cool shit, and I love what I do. But if you expect me to be all work and no play, the quality of my work is going to start to decline very quickly, and I'm going to stop having fun and quit very soon. I live by the motto "work hard, play harder." I have no problem fixing the servers on a weekend, or staying at work late. But if you expect me to consistently work more than is fair, or are gonna give me shit for arrive late or leaving early, then it's not gonna work out.
Regarding both work/life balance and remote teams, I would say that it depends. We all see fairly small sample sizes in our working lives, but I've had much more success with a team that worked 8hrs/5days than the crazy 90/100 hour weeks. I think there is huge value in downtime, both to keep at-work productivity high and sustainable, but also to provide time to reflect on what we are doing.