There are a number of factors such as psychological ones that play a role here, but one major one is distributed teams. I'll go into below what my solution is to the whole off-hours problem is.<p>As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). For that and other reasons, there's an expectation that 'it's just part of the job' to 'be available' in case someone in the globe needs you.<p>After suffering such things for well over a decade, I've chosen the stubborn consulting route. My health care sucks and it's hard to find roles, but once I do I get paid hourly and well, and let me tell you something about company behavior when you're on the clock: suddenly they volunteer OTHER people for off-hours work, suddenly they're reluctant to let you work more than 40 hours.<p>That realization should clue you workaholics (employee workaholics, not founder workaholics) in on what's really at stake here, and the real reason you're checking Slack nervously at 3 pm Saturday before your colleagues do: it's free overtime for your company.<p>And quite frankly I think many of you are doing your colleagues a disservice by setting availability standards too high. There's no reason to race to the bottom.