Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

Many founders/bosses often think that their employees are lazy because they don't work as hard as they do. They usually forget that their employees are usually paid a lot less or have magnitudes less equity.

Not everyone owns 15% of the company. I will grind too if I'm paid well enough and the potential reward is worth it.

Of course, some people never learn this but for those that do, I wonder if this sort of wisdom only comes with age and/or wealth. It’s easier to be nice/benevolent/decent when your back is not against the wall. When you’re in it, you might not even have your back against the wall but think you do.

Not enough thought goes into safely transitioning from scrappy startup to mature enterprise. Attitudes, culture, and practices have to change. It gets super awkward, and it's a rare CEO that does both well.

Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time paying down technical debt incurred during the startup years, and practices are only just maturing to where we're not digging ourselves a deeper hole anymore.

The MBAs don't care about the long term. Burnt out employees are an externality they can just lay off. Also, since there's a lot of risks in many dimensions, nailing work-life balance, but failing in another aspect will also end your company, so why not make them try their best in the short term while there's some runway left.

Supergiant games appears to have taken these lessons to heart given their output cadence and apparent low rate of turnover.

Also worth considering if there is survivorship bias in this wisdom.

Would Carmack be in a position to give advice on how to make Quake if id slacked itself into shutting down before Quake was finished?

Remember that Carmack also started a rocket company. You probably wouldn't take his advice about how to run successful rocket companies.

(this isn't shade on Carmack, he's my hero)

Pretty sure Carmack's idea of slack is what many companies would call "working as hard as possible"

unless I'm mistaken John Carmack is unbelievably wealthy. Like give away a Ferrari and start a rocket company for fun wealthy. There's a number of people who read this and conclude that the message is you can't push someone hard enough, it's impossible to fail if you just push hard enough.

Though it is interesting how many old-school game developer stories from the employee side can be summarized as "I worked out of college for low pay, long hours and I basically lived at the office with little/no outside personal life."

Tell that to Elon, Zuckerberg and the like

Part of it is the upside / skin in the game aspect changing from small startup days to big company with 100s or 1000s of employees.

You hire differently as well when you are hiring 100s of people instead of a cracked team of 5.

There is a world of difference between "work nights & weekends maybe we become millionaire/billionaires together!" and "work nights & weekends so that you get an exceeds expectations and eligible for a 5% increase on the annual review cycle".

As a leader, it is unreasonable to have the same expectations before & after that transition.

They could. But they rather get their "wisdom" from Steve Jobs trivia romanticizing the grind and being an asshole.

Like Elon Musk, who once wrote in a company-wide email in 2018: "Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value"

In my experience what I see happen is that executives look at comments like this as proof that grinding people into the ground actually work

They don’t care about whether or not a company lasts for 30 years or whatever they care that stuff gets shipped and point to this as:

“the best programmer in the world was only successful because he pushed his people super hard”

So I wouldn’t be hopeful that this is an effective warning

More likely it will be taken as a plan for "how to win at any cost and then humanize yourself later".

And yet, that is what they do, meaninglessly and stupidly enough.