Fundamental Flaw of Hustle Culture

https://brodzinski.com/2025/08/ai-hustle-culture.html

by flail • 11 months ago

61 33 11 months ago

brodzinski.com

moc_was_wronged• 11 months ago

The lottery is, famously, a tax on people who don’t understand probability.

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

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 11 months ago

I feel like the math is weird too.

Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time. Doubling my work hours as an individual contributor will not make the company twice as productive. It will not make my stocks worth twice as much.

Does anyone else see the math this way? Employee stock ownership does not give you linear returns with hours worked.

rightbyte2• 11 months ago

Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time.

40h work. 56h sleep. 72h free time.

80h work. 56h sleep. 32h free time.

Ok fair enough close enough to half I though the share would be worse. But in practice, your energy is spent and the free time will suck. Also a reasonable commute of 8h will make the share 64 to 24, a 'third'.

recursivecaveat• 11 months ago

Yeah the thing with stocks is you have to be in a very tiny company or a critical executive for your individual positive contribution to the value of your shares to be even worth thinking about. Maybe it works psychologically on employees even though it's pretty irrational.

rufus_foreman• 11 months ago

> The lottery is, famously, a tax on people who don’t understand probability

I buy lottery tickets. Usually if I'm at the grocery store, I'll buy one.

I have some understanding of probability. I have a minor in math, I took a graduate combinatorics class. Given the rules of a specific lottery I can tell you the odds of winning it, the expected value of a ticket, and back when I was taking that combinatorics class, I could have given you a proof of those odds. Probably couldn't do the proofs now.

I also took economics classes. I remember having a discussion in micro on the conditions under which it would be rational for someone to play the lottery. They're pretty obvious.

There's a condition called "engineer's disease". One symptom of that terrible terrible disease (along with a general disgust with humor and sarcasm) is that everything under discussion must be converted into the nearest available math problem. I think, sad to say, that the person who originated your famous quote probably had a bit of that condition.

Or maybe I'm just a stupid guy who buys lottery tickets because he can't math.

cma• 11 months ago

Those type of conditions are usually temporary things like you lost your wallet and have $3 and all the sandwiches at the convience store are $6.

mikrl• 11 months ago

This is missing one extremely cynical interpretation.

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.

Wonnk13• 11 months ago

This is why I'm not a consultant. It's a generalization, but there's a kind of learned helplessness almost in the culture of the big4. Client has a new requirement, and someone says "oh guess it'll be an allnighter, i'll start ordering pizzas". Nah man, this is like four extra hours of work- push the deadline, or just work smarter.

silvestrov3• 11 months ago

when someone dangles $10M in front of me

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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 11 months ago

Yep, hundred percent.

No boss will ever pay you enough to retire. Ten million is retire-this-afternoon money.

Especially a boss talking about 50 hour work weeks. If there's really ten million in it, hire my friend and we'll each get five million and boss gets 80 dev-hours of really solid work per week

Oh they won't do that? Maybe it's cause they're BSing up their own book

lordnacho2• 11 months ago

Crunch mode only works for when the finish line is in sight.

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.

MrGilbert• 11 months ago

The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.

And, ultimately, your life. I‘d assume that no company is worth dying for, blatantly speaking. Especially so, if it’s not your own.

lordnacho2• 11 months ago

This literally happened, and was one of the reasons my friend moved on from this kind of work.

malshe• 11 months ago

I have this experience working in academia too. Closer to paper submission, all the coauthors work longer days. Emails at midnight and sometimes even Zoom calls at ungodly hours are not unheard of. But once the paper is submitted, usually things slow down.

The people who don't slow down, usually end up burned out quickly. Their research suffers and it shows up in the quality of their work. Then the papers get rejected more often, which puts them more under pressure. It becomes a vicious cycle.

adamiscool8• 11 months ago

This is right but missing that the goal of these corporate cultural proclamations is optimizing for people who are true believers in the mission. Whether that leads to better business outcomes than optimizing for really smart people who believe in work-life balance… I personally doubt.

GCA10• 11 months ago

Wall Street and the big corporate law firms of NYC/DC have been championing extreme hours since the 1980s. Maybe earlier. So it's interesting to see the short- and long-term effects of this on people's lives.

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?

bloomca• 11 months ago

Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?

Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:

enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work

At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.

---

Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic

I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).

It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.

dfee• 11 months ago

An infection of Asian (Chinese?) culture on American work.

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

pizzathyme• 11 months ago

Exactly. Unpopular take: I don't understand how the "fundamental flaw" is just the author's opinion that it's "not sustainable". Asian companies have sustained 60+ hour workweeks with high-skilled tech workers for decades.

It's not fun. I don't want to do it. I don't support it. But it is one way to run a company.

lazide• 11 months ago

It is generally ‘sustainable’ with a stay at home spouse, lots of drinking, and actually not a lot of actual work. But they do spend a lot of time at the office.

pimlottc• 11 months ago

Sustainable for the company or sustainable for the workers?

ryoshoe• 11 months ago

I'd argue that the increased rates of suicide, and lower birth rates implies these systems aren't sustainable in the long term without depending on factors like immigration to make up the difference

const_cast2• 11 months ago

Japan famously has a killer smoking and drinking culture and absolutely awful gender dynamics. No doubt because all the men and women are slaving their lives away - no time for romance.

On a national scale, its actually not sustainable. You eventually run out of humans, or, more likely, your population pyramid gets super fucked and your economy implodes.

Japan's population pyramid has been getting progressively more fucked for decades - it's only a matter of time until their economy implodes. Assuming they don't reverse course.

zer00eyz• 11 months ago

Before it was "hustle culture" it was "dot-com culture" or "startup culture" or "IPO culture".

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.

Shog9• 11 months ago

IOW, a few sharks eat a tremendous number of minnows.

Something I try to remember whenever the urge to "hustle" comes back: taking payoff I got from years of startup work, subtracting taxes and spread across those years... Still put me at just above market rate for those years. But instead of that market rate for 40 hour weeks, it was that rate for 80, 100, 120 hour weeks. I could've been working two bog-standard jobs for normal companies, worked fewer hours, and come out ahead.

Everyone has a reason for gambling. It's rarely ever a good reason. But man, it's easy to lose yourself in rationalizations when you're in its thrall...

vemv• 11 months ago

A sizeable chunk of well-recognised founders are simply scammers - they take VC money, sell dreams to customers, and exploit engineers as a necessary step to keep the ball rolling.

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.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF3• 11 months ago

That's why the real total compensation from a startup is salary and experience. Does this look good on my resume? Will I learn something I want to learn? Will I be saving money here?

Stocks are worthless. If the company thought their stock was worth anything they wouldn't be giving it away to employees

silvestrov3• 11 months ago

Giving stocks instead of salary can be a solution for the company when it is strapped for money and it cannot raise good money on the stock market.

Most VC backed companies are not strapped for money, they are often drowning in money.

Family run business are often strapped for money but they would also like to NOT give stocks away.

suzzer99• 11 months ago

I've averaged 60-hour weeks for a year and a half, with bursts up to 90 hours. I only did it because we were working on new tech at the time, and I figured it was worth it to my long-term value as a programmer. I'd never do it in some stale tech.

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.

rightbyte2• 11 months ago

Also there was camaraderie.
It's a bit like (I assume) sharing a foxhole in war. You'll always have that bond.

What is up with the romance? Nothing makes people as numb as being dragged into a trench and waiting for the shell with your name on it.

mleonhard• 11 months ago

If the leaders of these companies actually cared about worker productivity, they would grab the low-hanging fruit and give their employees workspaces where they can concentrate, not crowded open-plan offices surrounded by meeting rooms.

Fundamental Flaw of Hustle Culture

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