That's a good point. I'm all in favor of people spending less hours at work and more of it working productively and getting paid the same.

It's not just startups. In my experience, most people spend a good portion of their time playing around, chatting, doing stuff that doesn't matter to appear busy, etc etc at work. Then they come home tired. It doesn't really make sense.

I think the fear is, if hours were reduced, people would still would tend to do the same types of things. So, it appears the standard setup is underpay, overstaff, keep everyone there more hours than they need to be, and assume at least some of the people are working some of the time.