The Selection Effect: Exporting Burnout as Best Practice

A recent overseas work trip to visit an American-style startup revealed something troubling about how tech culture propagates globally. The employees I met (talented, dedicated professionals) had absorbed a particular vision of Silicon Valley work culture that bore little resemblance to reality. Due to visa restrictions, almost none had spent significant time in the United States. Their understanding came filtered through management books, YouTube influencers, and leaders who had themselves learned from these same sources. Their founders, who had briefly worked in Silicon Valley, believed they were importing authentic American tech practices.

What they believed about American tech culture was both familiar and distorted: a world where “founder mode,” extreme ownership, and sleeping in the office weren’t just common practices, but prerequisites for success. This wasn’t their fault — it was the predictable result of a selection effect, where the loudest, most extreme examples get amplified while quieter, more common experiences go unheard.

The Mythology Machine

In tech, a small but vocal segment of leaders has built careers evangelizing extreme work philosophies. These are the conference speakers, book authors, and Twitter personalities who preach work-to-burnout, no work-life balance, and “always building.” Their message spreads through buzzy books, viral posts about fourth consecutive all-nighters, and companies announcing their adoption of these practices for algorithmic engagement and social proof.

The problem isn’t that these practices don’t exist — some companies genuinely operate this way. The problem is the systematic overrepresentation of these extreme cases and the underrepresentation of the vast majority of companies that don’t.

The Incentive Structure

Two powerful incentives drive this distortion. First, companies that do adopt extreme practices have strong reasons to overclaim their prevalence. If employees believe every other company operates the same way, they’re less likely to complain or leave. “Why would you quit? This is just how tech works.” It’s a classic anchoring strategy that makes unreasonable demands seem reasonable by comparison.

Second, founders and leaders gain significant personal benefit from burnishing their reputation as extreme operators. Achieving “terminal velocity clout” provides insurance against whatever happens to their current company. If enough people think you’re smart and important, you’ll land on your feet regardless of business outcomes.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of companies quietly go about their business. They debate agile methodologies, discuss velocity improvements, and face normal organizational challenges. Putting tents in the office isn’t a viable solution to their problems, and they know it. But their mundane reality doesn’t generate conference talks or viral content.

These overexposed extremes shape not just internal expectations, but global perceptions of what tech success looks like.

The Information Asymmetry

This creates a dangerous information asymmetry. People in the Bay Area understand the distribution of company types. They know that many, if not most, claims about extreme practices are exaggerated for clout and engagement. They can push back against unreasonable demands with confidence because they understand the broader context.

But for those outside this ecosystem — whether overseas or in other tech hubs — their primary window into tech culture comes through the mythology machine. Their telescopic vision into Silicon Valley shows them only the extreme builders and shippers who claim never to sleep. They lack the contextual knowledge to separate signal from noise, authentic practice from performative positioning.

The Human Cost

This matters because bad advice can be worse than no advice, especially for those who lack strong mentorship and support networks. The influencer industry that has grown around extreme work culture does a particular disservice to those who need good guidance most.

In engineering, we recognize "hero engineering" as an anti-pattern (unsustainable bursts of individual effort that create technical debt and organizational fragility). No team would build infrastructure this way. Yet the workplace culture being exported globally expects every employee to behave like heroes, turning what engineers know to be a red flag into a performance requirement.

The pattern is predictable and troubling: regular 12-hour days become normalized, then celebrated. People falling asleep in meetings due to exhaustion aren’t sent home to rest — they’re praised for their "extreme ownership" and dedication. Knowledge sharing and documentation get deprioritized against building. Testing is skipped because it harms velocity and extends timelines. When crises inevitably arise, the only solution is to work more, because other commitments cannot be skipped.

This creates a vicious cycle where the very practices that would prevent future crises — proper documentation, thorough testing, sustainable pacing — are sacrificed for short-term speed. These crises regularly cause teams and products to fail outright. Key staff burn out and move on. Technical debt accumulates to the point that products become unsalvageable. Physical and mental health warnings get reframed as badges of honor, creating a culture where burnout becomes a performance metric.

Crucially, this is not a problem for those building clout on extreme work culture messaging. When the inevitable failures occur, they can simply move on elsewhere, leaving others to deal with the wreckage while their personal brand remains intact.

Despite all the hyper-capitalist rhetoric, the human bodies and minds working in tech are not fundamentally different from those in any other knowledge work. Rest is required to avoid mistakes. Time to think is necessary to solve complex problems. Human bodies age at the same rate whether you work in tech or not. People have families they want to spend time with.

Misaligned Incentives

The push for extreme work culture isn’t just driven by internal company dynamics. It’s systematically reinforced by the startup ecosystem’s incentive structure. For investors seeking quick multiples, encouraging overwork serves a clear purpose: it reduces the time their money is locked up. The faster a startup can reach exit velocity, the sooner investors can realize returns and redeploy capital elsewhere.

This creates a cascade of pressure that flows from investors to founders to employees. But each level of this hierarchy has fundamentally different incentives and time horizons.

Mentors, often compensated with equity in early-stage startups, face their own misaligned incentives. This equity is typically worthless. There’s no market for the shares and they can’t reasonably be priced. A mentor’s rational goal becomes pushing startups to move as quickly as possible toward a point where they can build a model of net positive payout probability on their time investment. Like investors, mentors benefit from speed over sustainability.

Of course, some mentors genuinely aim to nurture sustainable success. But the incentive structure often biases advice toward speed over durability.

This creates a systematic bias in the advice founders receive. The voices with the most access and influence (investors and mentors) both benefit from approaches that prioritize rapid progress over long-term health. Meanwhile, employees bear the full cost of extreme work culture while capturing a tiny fraction of any potential benefits, lacking both the equity upside and the exit timeline visibility that might justify the sacrifice.

The Founder’s Dilemma

Founders find themselves caught between these competing pressures. They face consistent downward pressure to work harder for reasons that aren’t necessarily aligned with their business’s long-term health. The advice they receive is systematically biased toward speed and intensity, not because these are optimal strategies, but because they serve the interests of those providing the advice.

For founders who want to build long-term viable products or companies, this presents a strategic choice. They can join the small, vocal minority of executives who amplify the extreme work culture chorus, gaining social proof and investor approval while potentially undermining their own organization’s sustainability.

Alternatively, they can serve as a buffer between these external demands and their team, absorbing the pressure while maintaining more sustainable practices internally. This approach requires more courage and conviction, as it means regularly pushing back against well-meaning but misaligned advice from people whose support the founder needs.

The Path Forward

The solution isn't to eliminate all discussion of hard work or high performance. Startups do require dedication, and building something meaningful often demands significant effort. But we need a more honest conversation about what sustainable high performance actually looks like.

Most successful companies don't operate in crisis mode indefinitely. Sustainable practices often produce better long-term results than extreme ones. Work-life balance and high performance are not mutually exclusive. The most visible practices aren't necessarily the most effective ones.

For those consuming tech culture content from a distance, it's crucial to understand the incentives behind extreme work culture evangelism. Ask yourself: What does this person gain from promoting these practices? Are they trying to help you succeed, or are they building their own brand?

The tech industry's greatest innovations haven't come from people who never slept—they've come from people who thought deeply, collaborated effectively, and built sustainably. That's a message worth amplifying, even if it doesn't generate as many clicks.

As the tech industry continues to globalize, we have a responsibility to provide more accurate guidance about what sustainable success actually looks like. The selection effect that amplifies extreme work culture creates a distorted view of how successful companies operate—a distortion particularly harmful to those who must rely on filtered information rather than direct experience.

The alternative is a world where talent burns out chasing mythologized extremes, serving no one's interests except those building personal brands on others' exhaustion. The future of tech doesn't hinge on who can suffer the longest. It rests on those who can build wisely, lead humanely, and sustain what they start. That's the culture worth exporting.