hus·tle cul·ture ˈhə-səl ˈkəl-chər
noun

1. the performance of results when actual results are missing; specif.: a workplace ethos where the appearance of extreme effort is rewarded more than the achievement of tangible outcomes.
2. a management technique characterized by demanding longer work hours to compensate for a lack of strategic direction or a lack of management domain knowledge.
3. archaic: the belief that professional success is directly and exclusively proportional to the time spent engaged in work-related activities.

See also: performative work, burnout culture, toxic productivity

I could lecture you on the dangers of burnout in tech, the importance of having a life outside your job, and the ethics of exploitation. For many ambitious, high-achieving young engineers and students, those warnings simply don’t matter. The thinking is: I’m at a point in life when I can work hard and put in long hours, so why not? I’ll reap the benefits later. I’ll go where hard work is most rewarded and live for the hustle.

I was the same early in my working life. I tried to log as many hours as I could. My first jobs were paid hourly, so more hours meant more pay. I loved it when overtime was approved; it meant my bills were paid.

When I moved into a salaried tech role, I kept working long hours even without the direct financial incentive. Part of it was insecurity: I worried I wasn’t as smart as people thought, so I worked extra to meet expectations. I hid how much I was working so people would think I was effortlessly talented. I went home when everyone else did, then devoured books, built simulations, and pursued deep understanding. Older mentors talked about paying your dues and building a strong work ethic for life. And the truth is, I often just loved the work. Solving difficult problems was fun.

Just power through

I was a tech lead in an organization run by a GM who lived and breathed rise and grind. His credentials were impeccable (think, Harvard MBA, McKinsey, straight to GM). And he was furious when things didn’t go his way. I mostly avoided his wrath because my team hit our goals. But the teams that missed a deadline? Mandatory weekends in the office, late nights, daily standups.

I made the mistake of dialing into a large project meeting right before a long-planned family trip. One of my sister teams announced that a project due the next week was suddenly red and likely to slip by weeks. My GM exploded.

I became excited for my time to speak. My projects were going well, I thought their disaster would make me look better in comparison. And I was on that pre-vacation high, thinking about margaritas and the time I needed with family.

So, I said in a tone that was unmistakably smug:

“All our projects are on track and running as expected. As a reminder, I’ll be out next week in Cabo and won’t make next week’s meeting.”

Silence. I’d miscalculated.

“NO! NO VACATIONS! This is a code red! You are going to help the project get on track! We are all one team here!”

I protested that I knew nothing about the project. I even tried to cite Peopleware. All the wrong things to say. I was ordered to cancel my time off, join the team over the weekend, and personally guarantee the launch.

I canceled my trip; the rest of my family went, just without me. I tried to help the project but had no context. I was also tired; my body and mind had already prepared for a break and now it was yanked away.

The project was eventually abandoned before it ever launched. Several months later the GM stopped showing up to any meetings. A week-and-a-half later we got an email from our VP: our GM had taken a new role and they were looking for a replacement.

A little right beats a lot of wrong

That was a turning point for me. Something broke in me: I stopped seeing the world as a list of tasks that just needed dev hours applied to them. Rather than work that weekend (my typical routine), I went to a coffee shop and just relaxed. My mind naturally went to reflection and I pulled out my notebook. I started planning. I could either be a victim of the unfairness in the world or I could strategize. I chose the latter.

That became my go-to strategy for the rest of my career, and it served me far better than my “just power through it” approach ever did. The beauty of tech, unlike when I was a laborer on construction sites, is that there is often a ten-times better way to solve a problem in tech. What you actually need to build is usually less clear than people realize, and once you do understand it, there are often much simpler ways to get there. Overbuilding is the default in tech, usually because they never took the time to clarify the real need. The result is a generic monstrosity that only half solves the problem. Once you recognize that, you start to see opportunities to approach problems differently. But you cannot do that if you are stuck in stressed, execution-only mode.

Symptoms of hustle culture

The most dangerous thing about hustle culture isn’t just the long hours; it’s the systems it creates. Burnout becomes normal, vacations disappear, and leaders learn to paper over failure with stories of sacrifice. You see the same patterns everywhere.

Vacations that never happen

When I first joined AWS, I shadowed all the roles in the overall process I was going to automate; a process involving billions of dollars in infrastructure purchases. I was terrified when I discovered a single mid-level employee owned one of the steps in the critical path. They were the only person who had ever done the step. No one else knew how to do it. They scheduled their time off around performing that one step, and hadn’t taken a vacation longer than a week as a result since taking on the role. A single point-of-failure, dutifully keeping an empire running.

When a company culture demands always being on, it invites these types of systematic risks. Smaller versions exist on every team: the “indispensable” developer who never fully disconnects. Until they leave and you discover the trail of things they owned starting to fall apart. One of my first audits as a manager is simple: check when people last took real leave. Not a day off, but at least one week, preferably three. If it’s been over a year, that’s a red flag. It’s the easiest way to spot single points-of-failure.

Who you want at 3 a.m.

Most of my teams required on-call duties. The engineers I trusted in those rotations weren’t the ones who glorified all-nighters. They were the ones who slept, took breaks, and stayed calm. At 3 a.m., clarity matters more than brute force.

The people I don’t want on call are the heroes who think every problem can be solved by powering through. I’ve inherited teams with one developer who lived perpetually on call. That’s not dedication; it’s a disaster waiting to happen. It means no one else understands those systems, no one else can step in to help. And what happens if two of their systems break at the same time? Who are you going to bring in then?

Effort as a cover story

I believe a meaningful amount of the promotion of hustle culture is actually just covering for failure. I’ve helped companies with the metrics-side of public statements for many years.

When results are good, leaders talk about results. When results are bad, leaders talk about some obscure metric trending upward. When everything is bad, leaders talk about how hard everyone is working.

That’s what I assume when founders post something like:

Baby born two hours ago.

No time for sleep.

I’m back at the keyboard grinding on my lifelong dream: catpu.ai — Agentic AI for Cat Litterboxes.

This is what it takes.

#founderlife #backtowork

Or when a CEO says:

We work long, hard, and smart; two out of three doesn’t cut it. Our competition is working seven days a week, 15 hours a day.

If the product were compelling, they’d talk about the product. If the company was doing what it needed to, they’d talk about that. If they had a strategy to lead the company forward and innovate, they’d preach it from the rooftops. But when they don’t, the message becomes “can you guys, um, work harder?”

I’ve encountered different reasons otherwise smart people fall into this pattern of thinking. I’ve met the consultant-turned-executive who, after being trained on maximizing billable-hours, still thinks hours equal revenue. I’ve seen the non-technical leader who doesn’t understand what the team does, but just assumes the more, of whatever it is, the better. I’ve observed the too-far-away leader who is overwhelmed with the size of their org and is left with email blasts such as: “plz guys, can you just push until the goals are green?”

The Death Spiral

Push these symptoms far enough and you hit the Death Spiral. It always starts the same way: a missed goal, a new threat, leadership with no clear plan.

Let’s say we’re working at a social media company when TikTok first came out. At first, the company says: “not a big deal, totally different business than us”. Video view time starts decreasing. Maybe we broke something? Tell the engineers to look for any bugs. Meanwhile, once-golden demographics like US 15-22 year olds stopped showing up. What can be wrong? Then things get much worse. View time starts to nosedive. The engineers say nothing is broken, customers just aren’t showing up. Marketing reports are coming back saying our users are on TikTok. Competitive analysis points in the same direction.

What do you do? Now this is an emergency. You start the daily executive meeting to re-establish a sense of control. The CEO joins, your head of engineering, your head of product, some key engineers and product managers. Then the meeting grows and becomes more frantic. More action items are given. And they need to be done tomorrow. Tensions are high. No one wants to say the wrong thing. No one wants to push back.

For the people on the ground, it’s no longer: ‘How do I build a product people will love?’ Instead it becomes: ‘Please Lord, get me through this meeting without getting fired.’ Survival replaces results.

The team works more but accomplishes less. The best engineers leave, because they can. Progress collapses. Deadlines slip. Executives tighten their grip until—congratulations—they’ve killed the puppy.

Fear. Anxiety. Stress. These are not the ingredients for success. If that’s your leadership’s plan in a crisis, run. Innovation beats exhaustion every time. And exhausted teams rarely innovate.

Building runways doesn’t bring planes

Long hours arise for different reasons. When young engineers work late because they’re genuinely obsessed with a problem, good managers teach discipline to sustain that enthusiasm. When teams work late because management demands it, you get theater: a simulacrum of enthusiasm without the corresponding breakthroughs.

Weak leaders see correlation (successful teams sometimes work long hours) and force the causation backwards, as if excellence spontaneously arises from butts-in-seat. They set goals on the easy thing, hours, because they can’t create the hard thing: genuine engagement.

The best managers spend more time pulling excited engineers away from keyboards than pushing tired ones toward them. They protect the flame of creativity from burning out rather than trying to extract it through force. The worst? They celebrate their suffering hoping people assume it was worth it.

To my ambitious students

If you’re ambitious, don’t join the team making a virtue of late nights. Join the one building things they’re genuinely excited about and still going home for dinner. The best work happens when people have the energy and clarity to innovate, not when they’re competing to prove who can grind the hardest.

Work hard and have fun. But more importantly, take care of yourself. When you sacrifice everything for your job, you risk becoming someone whose only identity is a title; the person who, years later, still introduces themselves not by who they are, but by what they used to be.

That loss of self is the same trap hustle culture sets for your career. The person who believes late nights are the only answer eventually stops learning new answers. As a manager, I never promoted someone already at the edge; they simply had no capacity left to grow. Advancement comes from finding better ways to get more done, not by spending more hours in the same old ways.

If you truly want to aim high, remember this: The best teams aren’t defined by the hours they put in, but by the value they put out.