I recently joined a 5 year old start up with ~200 employees, and I'm concerned about being able to maintain a proper work life balance due to employee behavior after only my first week there.

My question is how do I maintain a proper WLB when employees and teammates are working an almost 9-9-6 (sometimes even a 9-9-7)?

For starters, I have almost 9 YOE, I've worked every from start ups to FAANG, and even co-founded a company that's going through an acquisition. I have been searching for a new job for the last 5 months and feel super lucky to find the job I have now due to this awful job market. It's remote, pays a HCOL U.S. salary even though I'm remote in a LCOL area. The company itself is doing really well and the people I work with are very pleasant and collaborative, with low egos all around.

However, people are working and messaging me (and each other) on Slack all the time. On my first day there I was getting slack messages from teammates and upper management past 10 PM for non-urgent matters. People are holding meetings on Sundays. SUNDAYS. There was no mention of a 9-9-6 in the job description, and during the interview I asked about expected working hours and they informed me it's a place where you take whatever little (or a lot of) time you need to get your job done. No one is monitoring how long you are online, as long as you meet your job expectations. However, I see from a lot of people (specifically people on my team) that they're working at all hours of the day and night. People are submitting PR commits at 8 PM on a Friday night and often throughout the weekend.

Before you say quit and find a new job, know that I don't want to quit. I believe the company has a good trajectory and a truth path to IPO, and the work is interesting. I just want to set boundaries so that I don't burn out and my family doesn't hate me.

My wife and I are a bit at odds here, because while we do agree I need to set boundaries, I feel that I need to do a bit of 9-9-6 (maybe 9-9-5 and some hours on Saturdays) for the first 1.5-2 months so they know I'm a team player, then once I've proven myself I can set more boundaries and work a traditional 40 hours/week. My wife thinks I need to stick to \~40 hours/week now otherwise they're going to take advantage of me and expect me to do 9-9-6 indefinitely. We had a really bad experience when I was working at FAANG because I was hospitalized from all the stress (on-call, awful teammates and managers, terrible culture).

TLDR; joined a new company that I really like but many teammates and employees work an almost 9-9-6, I don't want to do that. How to set boundaries?

EDIT: I want to thank everyone for their replies and input. Consensus and takeaway for me is that I need to put myself and my family first, from day one. I don't have to exactly work 40 hours a week or a 996, but choose the schedule that works for me, get my work done and turn off my phone/notifications when I'm not working nor want to be bothered. I tried it today and declined a late end-of-day meeting, and no one batted an eye. Gonna keep it going.

I would like to know what key skills you consider important for people doing requirements gathering and/or project management.

Background:

I have students learning requirements gathering & project management skills.  What topics would you recommend?

  This is for 1st year students doing a bachelor's degree in IT. 

Resources:

Resource recommendation much appriciated. website, blogs, videos, books.

Current topic ideas :

•   Use case, Use case diagram, User story, Sequence Diagram / Swim Lanes 
•   Activity Based Planning (Joel on software)/ Mom test (book)
•   Team work (Google Aristotle Project) 
•   OKR  (Objectives and Key Results)
•   Work breakdown structure 
•   Baseline (Project Baseline estimates of time, cost)
•   Comparative Estimating (historical benchmarking), 1,2 and 3 point estimates
•   Kanban etc
•   MVP (Design, Evaluation, MPV Validation Techniques)   
•   Prototyping (Paper prototyping, Digital prototyping) 
•   Test-Driven Development 
•   Quality control (Defect density tracking)  
• Change Control/Change Management 
•   User personas

Hi all, almost-20 yoe lead here that absolutely loves their workplace but feels like there's no future here. I've become attached to the product having built majority of it myself, I can see an obvious gap in market where we can be a profitable company, but the company has not moved upwards in years. I'm thinking of moving on because I'm very frustrated: I have so many things I want to work on, improve, tighten and polish here, but there's simply no budget or fiscal sense for it. If only we had people that actually knew how to sell...

As a bit of a background: I joined this startup 4 years ago, joined a team of two mid-level developers, and since then we've hired only one more (also junior/mid-level so you can imagine the code quality). We work in HR/LMS area - nothing revolutionary except we do a lot of different things very well. Most of our dozen clients are with us because they got tired of paying for 5 different subscriptions and they love they can have it all in one, albeit with lower quality.

We've doubled our customer base since I've been here, landed a Series A through a couple of smaller VCs, but we're nowhere near net zero MRR let alone in-profit, and it's not looking like we'll go anywhere within the next 12-24 months. I 100% blame our founders for that because I think they're solid at managing a software company, but absolutely not suited to selling software.

• There are two founders, one has pure technical PM background in Microsoft and the other spent most of the career as a paralegal/legal for many corporates. Absolutely no sales experience between them
• They're targeting corporations with 1000/2000 employees and you know how slow they move
• On average we get 2 or 3 of these a year, but we also lose one or two. Progress is minimal.
• We're alive today because founders are running after (and landing) government subsidies, but this is one-time influx and not recurring revenue.

What frustrates me, and what I need your help with, is that I've become quite attached to the product. It's quite big and I know everything about it, and I know how much crap is in there. I could easily create a year's worth of backlog for 5 people working only on features, or at least 6-7 months of platform refactoring and improvement. Unfortunately, there's no sense to do any of this because we're literally running on fumes. Case in point - I've had to take on contractor work for the past half a year because money was not there for full salaries.

Having been here for 4 years I can see the potential in the software and I'm absolutely certain there is a place on the market for us, but I'm also very, very skeptical that we can reach it.

Have you worked at a similar workplace, seen it fail or just stagnate in front of your eyes? How did you deal with that? And also - when's the time to simply throw the towel in and look for something else? I'm not necessarily after money or status at this stage of my career, with kids growing up and all, but I can't imagine working anywhere else because of the sheer fun and freedom I have at this workplace.