Fundamental Flaw of Hustle Culture

Summary

It’s all over the news. AI companies force their engineers to permanent crunch mode. Expectation for working long hours is like a badge of honor in Lovable job ads. Google defined a 60-hour work week (at the office) as a productivity sweet spot. But in the spirit of one-upmanship, everyone was beaten by Scott Wu, Cognition CEO. He announced 6-day work at the office, 80-hour weeks as the new norm. “We don’t believe in work-life balance—building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two.” You see? All it takes to suck twice as many hours from every engineer is to stop believing in work-life balance. Voila! Why All the Hustle? The visible reasons for all that hustle are obvious. Everyone understands that, at the end of the day, there will only be a very few winners of the AI race. They will get rich. Everyone else will go bust. To make things worse, the bubble has been pumped to its limits. If you want to get a prediction that AGI is just around the corner, there’s no shortage of optimists. However, notably, after GPT-5’s lackluster premiere, Sam Altman mentioned that AGI is not a very useful term. Seemingly, the rest of the AI crowd needs to catch up. The extreme hustle culture they install in their companies clearly suggests that they believe AGI is around the corner. Otherwise, how would we explain 60/70/80-hour workweeks? I mean, these are smart people. They do realize such work is not sustainable, right? Right? Cynicism OK, I’m not naive. There’s a ton of cynicism behind the hustle culture. The top leaders do it because everyone else does it, too. And people fall for this trap. Given all the hype, it’s easy to promise mountains of gold to everyone. If. You. Hustle. Just. A. Little. Bit. More. People will rationalize it by asking themselves a question: Am I fine coping with that toil for a couple of years and then walk away with $10M? Seems like an acceptable tradeoff, doesn’t it? CEOs of ...