- Startup founders almost by definition have unreasonable ambition -- a level of interest that exceeds their actual capacity.
- The best people to work with on a project are very dedicated to their commitments and are placed in positions where their dedication is a priority.
- People unfailingly place a higher priority on commitments that are existing, concrete, regular, place-oriented and are reinforced by the most social pressure from people they know well and interact with the most. (1)
So this is just what happens, I think.
I've totally seen this before, both been the person that had to say "no" (many, many times), "I guess I can try helping you out for an hour a day" (never enough) and "I guess I can help" (when a friend's technical co-founder was swamped for months at their day job - again, it's hard to replace a full-time commitment).
I really think that this was a good person to get with, they honestly wanted to do this, and they thought they could swing it if they made the commitment. But again, that's their ambition talking. Their dedication was stuck at their existing job. I can't imagine the stress this caused both of you and I hope you both move on wiser and more motivated from this.
1. This is why seemingly every company wants people to work on-site.
Yikes, this was the original version of my post above (I love to re-edit) and now it's too late to delete it. HN was having some problems when I was posting it, which must be why it's not on my threads page. If an editor can delete it, that'd be appreciated.
But so that this comment isn't content-free, let me tell you where I first saw a project in the "cycle of despair" I mentioned in a reply above. It's Daikatana. I worked on the legendarily-late PC game in late 1999 as a contract programmer.
It was basically this kind of syndrome, trickling down through the development team. John Romero was and has always been extremely ambitious and enthusiastic. He promised way more than the team he could round up was able to deliver. And that's understandable simply because he had a standard of technological feasibility that was based on John Carmack. That'll skew anybody's perspective.
Okay, it was also ludicrous to base the game in four entirely distinct environments.
But I think the basic problem was this cycle of overambition leading to overpromising leading to overcommitment leading to overstressed developers.