July 14, 2026
Employers Shouldn't Be Proud Of Overworking Their Employees
There's a difference between critical, high-stakes deadlines for groundbreaking technologies that can positively transform the world, and a highly bureaucratic, often fundamentally unnecessary corporation that arguably does more harm than good for the world, building absolutely nothing of substance. Simply, there are people like Elon Musk who quite literally sleep on the factory floor, sharing the exact same genuine-sourced passion as many employees, and there are managers sitting in air-conditioned corner offices, creating problems simply to justify their own existence, who then expect you to sacrifice your own health for a spreadsheet that won't matter in six months.
Extraordinary effort may occasionally be necessary, but an emergency should be temporary. When every deadline becomes a crisis, the problem clearly points towards incompetent management. Too many employers treat exhaustion as proof of dedication. They celebrate employees who stay until midnight, answer messages during dinner, work while sick and abandon their personal lives. Instead of questioning why the job demands such sacrifices, they turn those sacrifices into inspirational stories. They will often call it ambition, but much of the time, it's nothing more than exploitation and carelessness.
A company would never proudly announce that it regularly exposed employees to toxic chemicals, yet many will proudly advertise cultures built around chronic stress, insufficient sleep and dangerously long hours. Aside from the obvious health risks, a critical mistake made by employers is that they assume longer hours means larger amounts of useful output. This is simply false. Human beings are not robots, and we are not that simple. Stanford research found that after a certain point, each additional hour produces progressively less output. Long working hours are also associated with more mistakes and accidents.
A tired employee thinks more slowly, communicates less clearly and overlooks details. Their mistakes then create additional work. Managers may see everyone staying late and imagine maximum productivity, when they may actually be watching exhausted people spend ten hours completing work that rested people could have finished properly in six. In the simplest sense, overworking creates the appearance of productivity while quietly destroying actual productivity, and there is an epidemic of naive managers who either do not understand this or refuse to do anything about it. Corporations should never measure progress or fundamental success by how much of an employee's life it has managed to consume.
Of course, I'm not saying every corporation in the world is like this. Not even most. But there are undoubtedly a lot, and for some people, due to circumstances, working for such a corporation is one of very few options.
A deeper problem, in my opinion, is that employees are, more broadly, not treated like human beings. Many managers will treat firing/termination as the first solution to every human problem. An employee faces a temporary obstacle, so they are removed. An employee becomes slower after months of excessive demands, so they are labelled a poor performer. An employee expresses frustration, so management calls them negative or disloyal. Nobody asks whether the employee was trained properly, received clear expectations, had a manageable workload or was ever honestly asked what was wrong, whether related directly to the task at hand, or personal issues (which should also be understood by employers). Even Steve Jobs, who is hardly ever remembered as a soft or undemanding manager, when asked "What's the most important thing that you personally learned at Apple that you're doing at NeXT" by an MIT student, responded with "I now take a longer-term view on people. When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. It's to say we're building a team here and we're gonna do great stuff for the next decade not just the next year, and so, what do I need to do to help so that the person that's screwing up learns."
My point, ultimately, is that the best organization is not the one that consumes the greatest percentage of its employees’ lives, but the one that creates something meaningful for humanity without controlling or using up an excessive percentage of an employee's everyday life.