Wraiths of Silicon Valley

Burn-out is a serious problem in the tech world, and one that’s oft-discussed. A person who works too hard for too long and eventually collapses under the load. It’s not pretty, but the good news is that, one way or another, the Burnout stops working. They physiologically can’t continue.

If you’ve worked in this industry for any substantive period of time, you’ve probably encountered another type. Often disproportionately represented in leadership, but quite extant among the rank-and-file, this person is undoubtedly smart and fiercely productive. They’ll work whatever hours it takes to get something done, and they have the technical skill to do it. However, their expectations on their coworkers and subordinates are daunting. They have little patience for people who can’t deliver like they can. If they’re in the office, you better be in the office. Their life revolves around their work; if yours doesn’t it means you’re not committed. This person probably has a fucked up personal life and is deeply miserable. They hate to see anyone being less miserable than them. Obviously, if you were pulling your weight, you’d be miserable too.

There’s a more dangerous fate for the overworked engineer than to be a Burnout: if they don’t collapse under the weight and instead find other things to sacrifice to maintain their output. They don’t enjoy their work and therefore feel like they have no purpose in life. They’re stressed at all times and can’t ever relax long enough to unwind and recharge. Yet, they never burn out. Instead, their soul whittles away until they become an empty Husk of a person.

Becoming a Husk is a gradual process. An overworked engineer can survive for years before becoming a Husk. This is part of the danger: he¹ thinks he can maintain this forever, and he doesn’t notice the slow deleterious effects except in hindsight.

In what little time the Husk has to contemplate his own life, he wonders why he’s not happy despite having all the hallmarks of success. He’s rich, he owns a nice house. He probably has some technical influence, and when he tells people at work to do something a certain way, they usually do it that way. And yet, he’s not fulfilled. Maybe he’s married with a kid or two, but his family seems to keep him at arm’s length. Or maybe he’s single, despite his prestigious career and considerable assets; he wonders how that could be. One way or another, people navigate his presence like they might navigate a large cactus planted in their living room.

Being a Husk is incompatible with intimacy because it’s incompatible with happiness. Nobody wants to stare into the abyss.

One of the most reliable traits of the Husk is not realising he is one. If he did, he would see what a mistake he was making, take action to change his life, and stop being a Husk. The framework he builds up to prevent outright burn-out also convinces him he’s perfectly fine. On the weekends he might exercise, get dinner with colleagues, or produce a podcast about business innovation in the age of generative AI. “I’m a healthy, functioning human with hobbies,” he tells himself. He doesn’t realise his supposed hobbies are all coping mechanisms to stay alive, or actually just more work.

And yet he’s left to wonder: I check off all the boxes. Why am I not happy? Why haven’t I made a friend outside of work in the better part of a decade? I guess I have to grind harder.

The Husk has a fragile ego. When bruised, he might lash out. If he’s in a leadership position, somebody is probably getting capriciously fired. Alternatively, he might stew internally and blame himself for everything. Gotta grind harder.

Husks love to hire other Husks. They see famous Husks as heroes and try to emulate them. This is the origin of many a tech industry contagion, when some famous Husk executive makes a rash ego-based decision in a fit of divorce-induced mania, and his army of venture capital simps start squaking like sea lions at their portfolio founders to be more like that guy. He’s putting the Internet into space and you’re not. Get to work, slacker.

Husks in public are worshipped for their success, yet look uncomfortable in their own skin. Husks divorce their gorgeous wife of many years so they can exchange horny texts and go on yacht rides with a human blow-up doll. Husk execs have well-earned messiah status across wide-ranging areas of the tech industry but are a stranger to their own children.

Any time you hear about a tech wunderkind who is well-known for being a bitter cynic or a massive dickhead, your Husk alarm should be going off.

A well-circulated Blind post from an anonymous rank-and-file textbook Husk reads:

I hate my f***** life

I traded my health and youth for wealth. Now I’m fat and old and so hideous that no pretty girls want me. I’m in a lonely big house with my pet cats and my fleshlight and a bunch of bookmarked pdf research papers to read. It never ends. I’m getting fatter. I’m getting older. If I could do it again, I’d rather be making 60k a year but young with good looks going to clubs dancing and laughing with beautiful women

TC: 950k

I feel you, anon.

I started down the Husk path in middle school. I had this idea that people saw me as a nerd, and I wanted to max out my stats so they’d have to respect me. I went full grind mode and got my first full-time SWE job at AWS at 19. I was there for five years, much longer than most, surviving the infamously cutthroat environment by continuously operating at 110%. All the way, I fought with and got screwed over by Husks in every possible way. That didn’t stop the combination of my ambition and naïveté from leading me into the same trap they got caught in. I eventually became a Husk too. Only recently did I figure out what happened, and I had to rearrange my whole life to recover.

When you start looking for advice on feeling unfulfilled and lonely, you get a lot of advice for directionless young men who need to be told to get off their arses, quit watching TikToks and smoking weed all day and develop some ambition. You see a lot of men and women saying you need to up your stats by being 6 feet tall, have a $300k+ TC, go to the gym 5x+/week. I saw this kind of thing and went “I have nothing but ambition! I meet all of these criteria! Where’s the promised admiration and respect? I guess I gotta grind even harder.”

My malaise was not caused by insufficient grinding. For any burgeoning Husks out there struggling to meet people, it’s cause this is the vibe you emit:

People don’t like you for your accomplishments. They like you for your personality. Believe it or not, being likeable can’t be expressed as a set of real-life KPIs. The Husk probably has a personality somewhere, but it’s buried and invisible under several layers of misery, bitterness, and exhaustion.

Here’s the good news. It’s possible to work hard and not burn out or turn into a Husk. I’ll call these types Super Saiyans. I observe Super Saiyans to have these traits:

Passion for their work: Super Saiyans love what they’re working on. This isn’t something that can be readily manufactured. If you’ve a talent for physics and a passion for spaceflight, you might be able to create a lot of shareholder value as a quant, but you’re gonna be a lot happier in aerospace. This is the most critical place where job (be that as employee or as founder) and you have to be aligned.

Good time management: it’s a bit counterintuitive, but Super Saiyans use their working hours extremely efficiently. This doesn’t mean working long hours (some of them don’t even work the full 40 in a week), it means your work hours count. If you’re constantly pulling out your phone to scroll Reddit or X dot com throughout the work day, you’ll be in “work mode” for a lot longer and won’t have time to completely eject and do leisure activities when you’re done. You’ll feel like shit and your work will be shit too.²

Compartmentalisation: as something of a counterweight to the above, Super Saiyans are generally good at not being preoccupied with work stress outside work hours. They have hobbies that are fun, active, and not just more stuff that looks like work. They could be tech related but I think it’s better if they’re not. Bonus points especially if they’re athletic.

If you’re in search of a Super Saiyan role model, you could do worse than to read Masters of Doom and be John Carmack. Carmack is a beast who loves what he does. He’s serious about his productivity while working, and serious about making time for his hobbies too. Public reports suggest people like being around him. Key qualities of the Super Saiyan.

Here’s the other good news: you can recover. You can’t go Super Saiyan instantly. It’s gonna take some time, and if you do want to go Super Saiyan eventually you’ll have to find something to work on that evokes passion and pays the bills at the same time. But that can come later. Step zero is to rest the hell up and take some care of yourself.

Probably you’ll have to quit your job. It doesn’t mean you need to be funemployed, but if you’ve gone Husk in your current position, it’s gonna be hard to stop. Boundaries are challenging to rebuild once you let them be broken down. Find a gig that will respect you and your time. And if you have the runway, funemployment is always an option.

Don’t push yourself like you have been. Are the bills paid? Are you taking care of everyone you need to be taking care of? That’s all you need to do right now. It’s okay if you take a year or two off from career-maxxing. You have many years of that behind you and many more ahead of you.

Don’t give up on life or go “monk mode”. Touch grass frequently. Touch people frequently. There’s a time for ascetic seclusion, and this isn’t it.

Once upon a time, I didn’t care if people thought I was a sociopath or a bitter cynic, as long as they respected my skills as a programmer. Turns out, it’s a lot nicer to to be respected as a cool person who’s fun to be around than to hear people who don’t really like you begrudgingly admit that you’re pretty good at your job. It also turns out, it’s not a trade-off. Now people like being around me and they respect my skills as a programmer. Crazy.

I’m still recovering. It will be a while before I go Super Saiyan, if I ever do. I might just do a regular job and have a nice life until retirement, who knows. I don’t have to commit to anything right now. In the meantime, for probably the first time in my life since 14, I’m happy. If not, I can at least see happiness through the windscreen, approaching over the horizon. It’s awesome.

Social skills don’t develop overnight. I’ve stumbled over an introduction or two, made some comments that didn’t land, and subjected a few unlucky women to some awkward dates. I’ll surely subject a few more. Sorry, ladies. But such minor failures, which once felt like ego-destroying tragedies as a Husk, are now just funny. I don’t feel “incomplete” with my flaws anymore.

To the extent that I have regrets about this, I wish I had listened when the ones who loved me told me this:

ゆっくりでいいんだぞ。無理はしなくていい。私も待ってるから。
Take your time, okay? No need to push yourself. I’ll always be waiting for you.³

“Taking your time” is for chumps and stoners, I said. I’m gonna be more than that. Nobody needs to wait for me, cause I don’t wait for anybody. I didn’t listen. I wish I had, for my sake as well as theirs. Maybe my relationship with those people wouldn’t now be so strained, or over.

I’m not saying I wish I hadn’t worked hard. I’m glad I learned how to work hard. I’m not glad I alienated people around me in the course of making somebody else rich.

I’m publishing this because if there’s one of me, surely there are more of me. I want this to be a wakeup call for the Husks out there. Working hard for a bit is fine, often necessary, but if you’ve done it wrong and for too long, and you feel like “I just need to achieve XYZ, and then I’ll finally be happy,” you’re wrong. You will not be happy. Please do not waste your life for this. There are people out there who want to love you. Let them.