I think intensity is a symptom of circumstance not a cause for them.
If you're a startup that's on the verge of transitioning from broke to huge success, I'd imagine everyone would be bringing a lot of intensity to push it over that line.
If you're an established company with a track record of responding to record profits with layoffs, then I don't think it's fair for you to expect your employees to share your enthusiasm.
Go yell at your C-suite / directors with equity that have/will have F-you money from the success of the business. Don't think your ICs 3 levels down the hierarchy making 1-3x inflation-level raises will be as driven.
I'd honestly like to be able to put more effort into my job, but as a salaried engineer extra effort doesn't pay off on its own. I have to spend more effort making sure it's seen come bonus/raise time, since my outcome is largely dependent on what my boss thinks of me, not what I've actually produced.
Founders get a much more direct line to work and outcome -- but I guess they trade stability, and maybe even the perception game just shifts to investors.
It is such a stark contrast from corporate culture, where you survive and get promoted by learning to disengage from the mission, customers, and product, and focus on being quietly, not intensely, useful for your boss.
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
I once worked at a relatively small (<1000) person firm that basically had a near extinction event due to failing to fund a secondary datacenter / sensible data backup / business continuity strategy for years (despite engineering raising the alarm).
A team of 20 engineers worked 16 hour days for 2 weeks through the weekend to rescue them from their own decisions.
At the end of it they had a 10 minute zoom with the team to thank us and tell us they were going to - send us a ($10) bottle of wine, and grant "2 days off in lieu" (we were already on "unlimited vacation" plan) for the extra ~14 days of work.
That was a single-use only knob due to their behaviour.
No one cared enough again to do anything above & beyond, morale went to zero, and senior members of the team had all left within a year. The thank-you was so bad it was probably better that they not have done one at all.
I've never witnessed anything else affect intensity in my teams as negatively as forced RTO did.
I mean of course it is fully dependent on personalities and roles, and totally anecdotal, but in my experience, work was certainly *much* more intense when people had conditions for deep focus. I was literally just thinking about how slow everything feels nowadays, with everybody struggling to get focus time in a crowded office full of distractions.
In Buddhism, there's a saying: "though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour" - Padmasambhava. Having that attitude combined with an intensely focused engagement in building is an overall better path.
This is somewhat written for a CEO: "you must bring intensity and instill it on your blank-slate employees". In one case there's the assumption that onsite startups work better, and that assumed-to-be-true mystery is explained as being from on-site being higher intensity.
I somewhat caution against that mindset. I find myself frequently more intense about driving feature timelines and rollouts than my colleagues, even when I'm remote. It's part of the nature of me not my office chair.
The article quotes Apple like 5 times, and the only "non intensive" counter example is DMV office.
My take is that "intensity" is toxic, and Musk and Jobs succeeded DESPITE of it. Because both were technicality brilliant people, that offsets their "intensive" toxicity!
But I believe that that ruthlessness is the source of a lot of suffering caused by, and happening inside of, companies.
I think it’s really important to try to find a way to be successful that doesn’t just involve being obsessive and single-minded, and if you’re unwilling to do that you’re letting yourself off the hook in a bad way.
I will also say this is not the same as hard work. Hours and intensity is not the same. I would be considered a very successful person by most, but I have never "worked" more than 30 hours a week. But I've cared very very intensely about the results of the work that I'm doing.
You also can't expect it of employees unless you're paying them a fuck ton/have incentives.
mettamage•1h ago