Hustle culture is a tax on people who think they will always be in the top 0.01% if they just manifest hard enough.

What if the output isn’t the real goal, it’s having a workforce that thinks more like footsoldiers than professionals?

Of course 2x hustle doesn’t scale to 2x output, you can’t tell me that all these smart people are just ignorant of that. It has to be a different thing getting selected for.

I'm cynical enough to think that such $10M will be fake money.

It will be diluted or in some other way made into nothing.

Instead of a 40 hour week, you find out you are within 50 hours of the goal. So you ask the team to come in for 60 hours that week, get 50 effective hours, and give everyone time off the week after to recover.

That's not what happens once you have the crunch mode button installed, though.

I used to live with a banker. He'd sit at the office all day, and at about 6pm his boss would come back from meetings, and demand slides be ready for the next morning. So the little bankers would be sitting in the office from about 9am to midnight. This went on for years. Same with weekends and presumed nights off: someone would see it fit to phone the analysts on their night off to have them correct the font on a slide deck.

Ultimately, this wears down everyone. People get stressed when there's no end in sight. The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.

Informal assessment here, re: how these versions of "hustle culture" have played out. First, people who can last a long time do make a lot of money. Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic. Yes, there's sometimes a price to pay in terms of bad marriages, early heart attacks, etc. but it's not so pervasive that everyone who chases all-out success comes up short. You can win at this game.

Third -- and this perhaps OPs best area for questioning: When you work 90-hour weeks, your judgment about picking the right projects goes to hell. You're the greyhound going round the track as fast as you can, chasing the rabbit that you'll never catch. Your rabbit-value assessment system doesn't exist. You just keep running toward whatever someone else points you toward. On Wall Street, a lot of marathon hours are spent trying to close deals that won't close. Or that turn out to have been identifiable mistakes/misguided obsessions.

I was chatting earlier this year with a former Big Law attorney who spent a frenzied year after Hurricane Katrina drafting blizzards of legal filings so that big insurers could dodge claims. Her work was valued enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work. Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?

I feel terrible for them, but recognize it’s upped the ante over here (if they can, we should, as the article lays out), so sympathy manifesting to empathy and struggle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

There are places where this sort of push is, manipulative. See the gaming industry where people are in it for "passion".

But no one in dot com or startup or IPO land worked the 60 hour weeks for no reason. They worked them to get paid, and for their lottery tickets / stock options. It was gambling with time.

And for a lot of people that worked out very well. For those that it didnt work out for they still did really well.

If you want a 40 hour a week, no hustle job, then engineering / programing / startups might not be the right choice for you. Your pay will be reflected in that choice.

It has always been this way, it will always be this way: it is a game of sharks and minnows.

Think of the operation of a pump and dump with extra steps. The mission is never about creating value, it's about pumping expectations and pulling the rug at the right time.

Maybe a few of them live in the delusion of improving society with their products, but even then, the fact that they don't give a damn about the quality delivered to customers (or are qualified to make any technical judgement) makes them de facto scammers.

Also there was camaraderie. If I didn't like my coworkers, I never would have gone through it. We certainly didn't do it to make our bosses happy. In a weird way we almost had this attitude like we were doing it to spite our bosses. Like: "We'll build this thing for you, but you better stay out of our way. Your job is to clear obstacles for us when we need it, and otherwise don't tell us how to do our jobs." Luckily our bosses were smart enough to just let us cook and not ruin our morale by micromanaging.

The NBA legend Bill Russell said his dad told him, "Son, if the man asks you for 8 hours, give him 9. That way you can look any man on the job site straight in the eye and tell him to go hell." I like that attitude.

I'm still friends with many of those coworkers, even though we haven't worked together since 2017. It's a bit like (I assume) sharing a foxhole in war. You'll always have that bond.