Your premise is false. You're assuming that people are working in these situations. In my experience you can get one honest week of 40+ hours out of a team, then you will see people piss away company time on meaningless bullshit.
Study-after-study has shown that knowledge workers are useless after 40 hours a week, yet every body seems to think they are the exception. I'll tell you why:
Because we all know what it's like to work more than 40 hours a week on something we truly love and are passionate about, and we've sustained insane levels of work for a long time on such things.
The problem? Your bog-standard social-media/consumer app is not something your developers are going to be passionate about. They may find the odd project here or there in your company that they truly care about, but for the vast majority of applications your dream/company is work for them that happens to align with their skill set, it's not something they'd prefer to be doing.
I know there are exceptions to this rule, and I've even gotten a chance to land a dream job once. Do you know what a dream job turns into pretty quickly? Something you've mastered, and find boring.
Company runners/founders need to get over the idea that their employees should be as passionate about their company as they are, it's such a BS idea. Your workers, should be loyal, do what it takes to keep your dream up-and-running, and coming up with original ideas to make it great, but they should not be sacrificing their lives for your dream.
All-in-all I think you can still design a great product with two people in less than 40 hours. Hell...I think you can do it in 25.
Study-after-study has shown that knowledge workers are useless after 40 hours a week, yet every body seems to think they are the exception. I'll tell you why: Because we all know what it's like to work more than 40 hours a week on something we truly love and are passionate about, and we've sustained insane levels of work for a long time on such things.
The problem? Your bog-standard social-media/consumer app is not something your developers are going to be passionate about. They may find the odd project here or there in your company that they truly care about, but for the vast majority of applications your dream/company is work for them that happens to align with their skill set, it's not something they'd prefer to be doing.
I know there are exceptions to this rule, and I've even gotten a chance to land a dream job once. Do you know what a dream job turns into pretty quickly? Something you've mastered, and find boring.
Company runners/founders need to get over the idea that their employees should be as passionate about their company as they are, it's such a BS idea. Your workers, should be loyal, do what it takes to keep your dream up-and-running, and coming up with original ideas to make it great, but they should not be sacrificing their lives for your dream.
All-in-all I think you can still design a great product with two people in less than 40 hours. Hell...I think you can do it in 25.