On the WeWork culture, and rise-and-grinder...

This NYTimes article on the WeWork culture, and rise-and-grind culture is interesting. The writer is absolutely negative about it, essentially dismissing it as propaganda and exploitative to young workers, at the mercy of employers, management, and investors.

Yet I can't help feeling something is totally amiss in its one-sided criticism.

To start, where is the agency of the millennials, arguably the target audience in this dawn-of-the-century cult where startups promote the constant need to hustle? Has the article tried to interview anyone working at Google anonymously, perhaps, to at least get a feel for whether these googlers truly love their work or not? According to the writer of the article, workers cannot possibly love their job, so she posits that they must have been so brainwashed by such "high priest" as Elon Musk who openly talks about long work week because, hey, he loves his work (well, he says he loves his work, and maybe he truly does, who in any case has been rewarded mighty handsomely).

The other argument was that, wages have been stagnant while workers are told to up their game and hustle some more. Here, the writer slips easily into the generalized conclusion based on stagnant wage level of the economy as a whole, while conveniently ignoring the fact that some of those young-and-ambitious workers who work long hours might very well have been rewarded quite handsomely. That would likely ease the pain of having to toll excruciatingly long hours at get the work done.

And then there is the ethos of "follow your passion," or what about the "find the job you love and follow your dream." Has it remotely occurred to the NYT writer that these small groups of IT workers might indeed be following their dreams, and doing the things they love? If one truly loves or enjoy their work, I very much doubt they think of their long hours as something to "increase productivity." Maybe the investors would think in terms of ROI, but the workers? I highly doubt it.

While I despise those words from Marissa Mayer touting their own long week as something for others to model on, I do find some truth in what Elon has said about the pain.

I said all these, because I've been there.

When I was fresh out of college, I was young, ambitious and full of energy. My colleagues were likewise. We worked long hours, but it was fun. (I don't say this sarcastically; I truly mean, fun.) Getting your codes to work the way you want it, can be a satisfying experience. I did have a few colleagues of mine who slept under their desks on occasions. We did this with a shared mission for the company because, yes, we had stock options, hence the vested interests to see the company (its products and services) to be successful. So, no, we didn't need some high priest or permission to do what we do, as if we don't have any agency. To say otherwise, is simply ridiculous.

I do want to say a few words about the constant need to hustle though.

When you are young, you're healthy, you can afford to thrash your body as if you can live forever. The high stress, protracted lack of sleep (and rest for your body), coupled with tons of caffeine, can be detrimental; in some cases, even lethal. Looking back, I would say, no matter how much the rewards might be, it's not worth one's health. When you get sick, when you die, no one will give a rat.

You love what you do? Excellent. But why do you need to work extreme long hours? If you are truly very good at what you do, you probably shouldn't need that much time to get stuffs done. And if you're a manager and you still have to work that much hours? Well well, that means you're just not very good at management since you can't even delegate and manage a team to produce the level of work that you need.

And then there is also the issue of sustainability. You might not feel the toll on your body and health in your 20s. As you age, you'll feel it. Do we really want to get age out of workplace by the time we reach 35 because you are so burnt out, you don't have much to offer anymore? I'm sure no one will say yes.

More importantly, life with just work only is just monotonous and boring. You don't have outside interest. You don't have any outside life. In fact, oftentimes it's when you're away from work that solutions come to you. That's what happens to me, time and again, when you walk away from some blockers in codes, that solutions would come to me when I seemingly am not thinking about it. Arguably that's because my subconsciousness is still thinking of my codes, but the point is, solutions can come to you when you're relaxed, not when your eyes are blurry from looking at the damn codes for 36 hours straight, with so much caffeine in your system that all you can feel, is heart palpitation and jittery nerve.

And so, while this NYT article almost sounds like sour-grapes type of annoying, there is an ounce of truth in it, but not by much.