The Silicon Valley Grind: When Tech Giants Push Too Far
Reading about Sergey Brin’s recent comments suggesting Google employees should work 60-hour weeks to achieve AGI faster made my blood boil a bit this morning. The tech industry’s toxic “hustle culture” seems to be reaching new heights of absurdity.
Remember when tech companies at least pretended to care about work-life balance? Those ping pong tables and free snacks were meant to create the illusion that working in tech was somehow different from the corporate grind. Now we’ve got billionaires openly demanding their already well-worked employees sacrifice even more of their lives for the noble cause of… making their employers even richer.
The irony isn’t lost on me. We’re racing to develop artificial general intelligence, supposedly to make our lives better and more efficient, yet the path to get there involves burning out the very humans working on it. It reminds me of those early industrial revolution factory owners who thought the solution to every production problem was just to make people work longer hours.
Looking at my own experience in tech, I’ve seen firsthand how the quality of work dramatically decreases after about six hours of intense coding or problem-solving. Those extra hours aren’t giving you premium productivity – they’re giving you buggy code and mental exhaustion. The last thing we need is sleep-deprived developers building the systems that might fundamentally reshape our society.
The thing that really gets me is the mathematical absurdity of it all. Google, sitting on billions in profits, could easily double their workforce and maintain reasonable 40-hour weeks. But no, apparently the only solution is to squeeze more hours out of existing employees. It’s the same shortsighted thinking that’s led to countless burnouts and failed projects across our industry.
Working in development for over two decades, I’ve watched this cycle repeat itself. Every few years, some new “urgent” priority comes along that supposedly justifies pushing people beyond their limits. First it was the mobile revolution, then cloud computing, now it’s AI. The goalposts keep moving, but the story stays the same.
Speaking with younger devs at local tech meetups, it’s clear they’re already feeling the pressure. They’re being sold this idea that extreme overwork is somehow noble or necessary for progress. It’s a destructive narrative that needs to be challenged.
Here’s a radical thought: maybe the path to artificial general intelligence doesn’t require burning out an entire generation of tech workers. Maybe, just maybe, well-rested, healthy humans might actually do a better job of solving one of the most complex challenges in human history.
The race to AGI is important, but not at the cost of our humanity. When tech leaders start treating their workforce like disposable resources, it’s time to push back. After all, what’s the point of creating artificial general intelligence if we lose our human intelligence along the way?