I read the Jason Calacanis post about saving money and hiring workaholics and the first thing I thought was that it fit perfectly with his personal world view and experience.  A world view where the secret to personal wealth and success is to create something you don't care to last by building as much value as quickly as possible before selling it off to someone that's going to buy it before all your rock-stars burn out completely.

Check out his track record. One company that burnt out after the dot-com bust and another that he built enough value to be quickly purchased by AOL.  A purchase that, on the surface was probably cheap, but maybe AOL realized what they were buying was a bunch of overworked staffers. The company probably didn't have much of a future without the stability that was afforded to it by AOL. 

His third attempt was to rebuild netscape.com. Apparently he didn't have enough workaholics to make something more than a digg clone. 

Attempt #4 is Maholo.  A place you can be sure you won't find me working. I just hope the folks there get paid for their services. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with this view and it's certainly made a lot of people pretty rich... it just doesn't build for the long haul and so far the track-record agrees with me.

I saw Scoble aggreed with Jason.

The best rebuttal I saw to this point of view was from the folks at 37Signals who said "Fire the workaholics". I've included their first two points that I found most salient because I've seen examples of both of these people during my time at Microsoft.

Fire the workaholics - (37signals)

Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14 hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done...

Another related concern I have with people that work more than 60 hours a week is the lack of diversity you'll see in their ideas and solutions.  It's all to often that these folks get so single-mind with a shortsighted world view that they don't ever see the creative solutions to problems that are right in front of them or could shave hours off of their work.  You need to poke your head out of the sea of work you drown yourself in to learn from the world around you. 

So my rule would be to work smart and hire intelligent people that will challenge and push each other to success. Give those people work they'll love so their families will enjoy seeing them work extra during crunch times if needed because they'll know it's enjoyable. 

Surrounding yourself with intelligent people that compliment the existing talents of you and your staff is going to get you much further in the long run than looking for people who are dedicated to the 60 hour work week.  It's also going to be a lot more fun for everyone.