Employers, even the good ones, will put as much work on your plate as you can handle and then keep going. Systematically a workplace just isn't set up to help an employee handle stress, or even pay attention to an employee's stress level. They'll ask you to work overtime even if it is obviously killing you because that's just how the typical work environment is structured. Even moving higher up in the food chain, to be a producer or manager, doesn't change this.
You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.
So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.
You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.
The culture of the company also matters. Joel Spolsky talked a bit about administration as creating "abstraction layers", and what's happening here seems like tiered administration (which I guess is a working definition of bureaucracy). In other words, the administration themselves are isolating themselves, by means of more administration, from the "realities on the ground", which creates this tension between the people who really understand what's involved and the people who commit to involving the company.
So we shouldn't say "it's just up to the employee", because that attitude creates its own culture, one where the employees work just enough to not get fired and the management accepts this attitude as network damage and routes work around it.
Administrations have an opportunity to choose what they're doing. Advising a startup-laden forum like HN to aspire to massively-multiplayer mediocrity might not be wise, because startups exist in a high-failure environment and must strive for passion and excellence. It's the right culture for very large corporations and for franchise restaurants, but it's the wrong culture for the deli down the corner.
Surprisingly, I don't think the solution must require "giving up control" as a developer-manager, though that will certainly help. If you look at these stories, there is a perverse sense of alienation from the company. Maybe this metaphor helps: the manager should be conducting an orchestra. The conductor doesn't have to give up control of the whole orchestra necessarily, but they do need to be aware that it's a bunch of individual people, and you need to communicate your vision of the music you're playing, and they need to feel the same vision and work with you to express it. You also need to forgive errors in performance rather than stop the orchestra for every little thing, and you need to let the audience applaud everyone when success finally happens, and everyone needs to hear the whole symphony, their parts and everybody else's, to know what's going on. In this way, you could in some sense "keep control" even though you give up micromanaging.
No they won't. Plenty of good employers understand work life balance, they understand that output doesn't linearly increase with time, especially in development.
Good employers push their employees in terms of not letting them coast, giving them meaningful work and challenging them to be their best. That is not the same as piling on work and ignoring stress levels. There is an optimum amount of stress at which humans are at their most productive.
If your employer isn't like that then they aren't a good employer.
Do you even have any anecdotes to support this? I have literally never encountered an example of an employer proactively managing an employee's stress level. To suggest that an employer can somehow put employees at 'an optimum amount of stress' suggests a lot more understanding of employees than I think is possible in most scenarios.
I mean, yeah, we can spout platitudes all we want here. I agree that if you aspire to be a good employer, you should treat your employees well. But that's not the problem here: The example employee in the OP was a top performer who helped solve tough problems, and nobody seemed to suspect that anything was wrong until he snapped.
The problem is that workplaces are not designed to be able to identify an employee having problems with stress, let alone to actively manage it. I have never encountered a workplace that can do so effectively - some employers are better than others about things like work/life balance, etc. But the level of stress in your life is variable, and the level of stress being generated by your work is variable, even in the best of circumstances. It is difficult, if not impossible, for an employer to even understand how much stress you might be under outside of work.
For example, a lead artist at a previous employer got let go for getting into too many arguments at work. It was only at that point that we learned that he was having a really tough time because he was a single parent and his son was suffering from a severe, life-threatening condition. It's nice to think that if his supervisors had known they could have done something about it - maybe they would have - but from the outside it merely made him look like a bad employee. Maybe he wanted to keep his personal life private, maybe he thought he had it under control, or maybe they decided they had to set an example regardless of his reasons - but the point stands: Ultimately, it is up to you, not your employer, to manage your stress.
I've a friend who was told that he needed to take a vacation. Not in the "You're out of line" sense at all, but in the "We expect our employees to use their vacation time, and you've been working hard lately." He's also been told to cut back on the his hours, as his bosses didn't want him to sacrifice his personal life.
Usually when you hear stories like this, it's because the employee is screwing up. In this case, it's because the higher ups realize that proactively preventing employees from becoming overstressed is a good way to keep employees.
A "workplace" or "employer" can't do that, but a good line manager can, and will. That's why they're valuable - a well managed team is far more productive in the longterm than a team where you just replace the "spent" people with fresh ones.
Of course a workplace can do that - by encouraging a philosophy of work/life balance, and by encouraging their line managers to actively pursue this. Do you think workplaces just let their line managers roam free, with no guidance?
There is a lot of active effort in my field (consultant engineering) to manage the true productivity and quality output of individuals, because managing this irresponsibly introduces an unacceptable level of risk to projects.
That this (apparently) hasn't made great inroads into software development is another indicator of the field's immaturity and lack of liability. Because there are no serious consequences for shipping faulty software (outside of a very few fields such as industrial automation), companies are not required to care about things like employee happiness or productivity over time, and this is reflected in stories such as this.
The best comments in this thread have advocated a personal, proactive approach to managing your work/life balance. This is true of almost everything about work - career development, training, raises, opportunities, etc etc.
You need only observe how many workplaces will let employees who are obviously sick with a cold/flu come in and work to understand how poorly most workplaces respond to an employee in trouble: They will not send someone home who is actively exposing coworkers to infectious diseases, so do you think they're going to notice if you're risking your health with stress? Sadly not.
So, as an employee, it's up to you: Pay attention to your stress level. If you aren't sleeping well, do something about it. If the stress is making you gain weight, do something about it. If you're having serious, serious problems, do something about it. You can't count on your employer to support you if shit hits the fan - even if it's their fault - because 99% of them won't. You have to be proactive.
You won't get promotions or raises for managing your own stress level and working reasonable hours, but you won't get promotions or raises for literally killing yourself either. So play it safe.