Life & Death in Silicon Valley
This piece began as a presentation, but it reads as a retort to Zachary Slayback's recent defense of longer hours — most especially in light of Thomas Mackowiak's recent and tragic death at Apple. Let me be clear: this essay in no way disrespects the family or friends of Mr. Mackowiak, who undoubtedly mourn his passing.
What I want to address is the mostly ignored stigmatization of mental illness, addiction, and overwork that Silicon Valley has become synonymous with — not in all quarters, but in many. For the life of me, I can't see how anyone goes from Mackowiak's death to arguing for longer hours for young startup workers. Nor does it strike me as the wisdom one would expect from a fellow "Top Voice" whose domain expertise is education. To be blunt: Mr. Slayback lives in Pittsburgh and is clueless about how long and for how little reward knowledge workers labor here in the Valley. I invite him to come out, spend a week researching it, then spend seventy hours straight programming before penning another moronic defense of wage inequity.
Ask any MBA for a favorite business adage and you'll likely hear Peter Drucker's "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." As a strategist, I take offense at being classed among eggs and bacon. But how many MBAs understand what Drucker meant? He was not describing an esprit de corps that encourages people to work themselves to death. Quite the opposite: culture, to Drucker, was the human aspect of the organization — the mandate of care, commonality, and shared cause.
So what is culture today? And what has it got to do with the conflation of long hours in the hyper-paced startup market? Is culture-as-breakfast becoming culture-as-slave-wage-hours, on-site kegerator, and ticking time bomb? I think so, unfortunately.
Let me be clear: I don't believe a company should eschew the profit motive for its employees. I believe it should jettison the bad environments and unhealthy pressures that have people rolling in at 5 a.m. and leaving at 7. When companies persuade employees to accept exploitation in the name of prestige, fun, or future wealth, they deceive themselves about the longevity of that worker — and their own humanity.
The real bottom line: be careful with your company culture and your people's health. Very careful. A ping-pong table and a full bar on top of the refrigerator is not culture. Those are perks, and flimsy ones.
Three problems plague the modern American workplace: recreational drinking, long work hours, and mental health issues. Almost 20% of full-time American adults work more than sixty hours a week. Long hours are linked to hypertension, diabetes, sleep disorders, and poor psychological health. Working sixty-one to seventy hours a week raises the risk of chronic heart disease by 42%.
Wall Street grinds recent grads through brutal, demeaning hours. The Valley disguises the same expectation as lifestyle — "we don't care where or when you work, as long as you're always working" — with flex schedules, unlimited vacation, and espresso machines. Meanwhile the "programmer's gut" is a sight you see more every day.
The technorati elite have developed an ideology to justify their power and excesses. CEOs who valorize long hours and sleep deprivation are its prime exemplars: Marissa Mayer sleeps four hours a night; Sheryl Sandberg feeds her kids dinner, then goes back to work. The "10x engineer" — capable of working longer and harder to ship faster — is highly prized, endangered, and more recently dead in a conference room in Cupertino. Wake up, folks. Something is very wrong. This young man did not have to die, and that he died at work should send alarm bells through the Valley. I haven't heard any yet.
The damage report: almost a million American employees miss work each day from workplace stress. Untreated mental health disorders cost $79 billion a year in lost productivity. Depression causes more days of disability than heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. All of it worsened by lack of sleep, exhaustion, overwork, and alcohol.
It gets worse. These problems are born of a potent cocktail: newly minted wealth, male testosterone, intense competition, deadline pressure, and a robust regional black-market drug pipeline. Sounds like Drucker's breakfast now starts with a side of Adderall, a shower beer, and some Soylent.
Suicide rates have climbed steadily since the dot-com bust and now outrank traffic accidents as a leading cause of injury death. The Valley has record suicide-by-Caltrain rates, one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and widespread drug and alcohol abuse. Young entrepreneurs crack under the pressure to perform; tech workers spend more time with their laptops than their loved ones, and stop living by the values that once connected them to life.
