Venture Capitalists are Forcing Forever Crunch
This has perhaps been the biggest, open, enduring labor conflict in software engineering: crunch.
Crunch is when management at a tech company crunches the heart, mind, body and soul of an engineering team, forcing them into what is called a “death march” to finish a release or meet a marketing deadline. During crunch, engineers may put in 60, 70 or 80 hour weeks with no break and no days off. This can go on for weeks, a month, even longer. They often sleep at the office, don’t see their friends and families. They live under a massive amount of pressure from the entire company and sometimes tens of millions of users who are waiting for their work. The impact on their lives can be catastrophic, long lasting, and even disturbing.
There has been a constant, mainly quiet battle over this, with one side being — particularly marginalized — workers, often ones who fared the worse during crunch due to familial obligations or health issues, trying to end this practice. Then of course you had the corporate perspective on it, which was: eat shit, crawl, beg, you are LUCKY to work 100 hour weeks, losing everything in your life and your cognitive performance and your sanity. These interests were represented by the equivalent of industry pick-me scabs who insisted that this was just the price of admission and the way that the weak were weeded out by the strong. Unfortunately, a number of technical workers saw crunch as a badge of honor, or worse, a way to stand out against other programmers who couldn’t make the cut.
Crunch comprises the glory stories of software engineering — mind-breaking work and heavy pressure leading to a triumph, a breakthrough, a couple million dollars even. But this whole time all it is is labor abuse that rarely has a happy ending. This has been a very serious labor issue, and it has been going on for 30 years, even where it was not specifically framed through the lens of worker’s rights.
A turning point in this battle was when the anonymous spouse of an EA developer published her story on Livejournal in 2004. For many people, this was the moment in which crunch came out into the open and when the debate about crunch spilled over into something public, thus allowing a public discourse on it. In her post, she describes the toll that crunch had taken on her family:
“The current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm -- seven days a week -- with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm). This averages out to an eighty-five hour work week. Complaints that these once more extended hours combined with the team's existing fatigue would result in a greater number of mistakes made and an even greater amount of wasted energy were ignored.
The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.
And the kicker: for the honor of this treatment EA salaried employees receive a) no overtime; b) no compensation time! ('comp' time is the equalization of time off for overtime -- any hours spent during a crunch accrue into days off after the product has shipped); c) no additional sick or vacation leave. The time just goes away. Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it. Further, since the production of various games is scattered, there was a concern on the part of the employees that developers would leave one crunch only to join another. EA's response was that they would attempt to minimize this, but would make no guarantees. This is unthinkable; they are pushing the team to individual physical health limits, and literally giving them nothing for it.”
12 years later, an author writing for my former tech magazine asked why, in so many years since the post, nothing had changed and crunch persisted.
In 2018, a renowned former EA developer described the long-term results of crunch in an article called “20 Years of Crunch Take Their Toll on a Game Developer”, featuring Shane Neville:
“Neville said he’d like to spend another 20 years making games, but there’s just one problem: thanks to crunch, his body is breaking down. His right eye frequently goes out of focus. His hip needs physiotherapy. His foot won’t stop going numb, making it difficult to stand for long periods of time.”
More recently, in 2021, the IGDA (International Game Developers Association) released a Developer Satisfaction survey that saw that crunch time had doubled during the first year of the pandemic. A third said their jobs required crunch time: “During crunch or periods of long hours, 26% of respondents worked more than 60 hours per week, 29% worked 50-59 hours and 20% worked 45-49 hours. The self-employed worked the longest hours during crunch with 19% working more than 80 hours a week.”
To the latter point, the discussion about remote work/contract work often misses the reality that people actually put even MORE hours in when they work remotely, compared to in-office work.
So this practice is still going on. In 20+ years of push-back against this practice, it continues to be used as standard operating procedure.
There have been some particularly ugly examples over the years. The famous case where the Digg engineering team was pushed to its limits in order to release a complete change to the UI/UX of the site; when it launched, users hated it so bad that they all abandoned the site for competitor Reddit in a matter of days. EA has remained consistently infamous for pushing its developers to the limit. It is widely rumored that the early team putting together ec2 for Amazon was worked down to the bone. One startup I worked at, most of the engineers on one project ended up in the hospital after an extended crunch period that had them all in the offices together working around the clock. Most of the software was never even put into production.
It was never that serious. None of us were saving lives.
Crunch is a favorite tactic of some of the people running this fine establishment. And it is entering a new evolution: crunch as the new baseline, the new bar for employment, that is actively being set across the industry, propelled, as it turns out, by a relatively small group of people.
Twitter was obviously a turning point.
Elon Musk is notorious and public about subjecting workers, including software engineers, to totally unreasonable and harmful amounts of work, stress, and disconnection from friends and family. Look at what they did to all the Twitter engineers; the CEO-in-waiting brought his wife and NEWBORN CHILD into the office in the early days of the transition and slept on the mattresses there. Depraved. Musk has locked workers in factories. He has made it abundantly clear that only “hardcore engineering” will do… i.e., forever crunch.
As a labor abuser, Elon is up at the top of the field; but he has a match in Zuckerberg, whose famous crack down on Meta engineers last year resulted in large-scale layoffs. Meta of course has a massive history of labor abuses of contract workers, both the ones providing service to their Bay Area campuses, and the legions of low-paid, outsourced contractors doing extremely punishing moderation work — work that often resulted in PTSD as it requires looking at such a depth of disturbing and violent content with no support and little rest, and little pay.
These parties are connected by a16z. Marc Andreessen was on the board of Facebook and was an early investor, and is one of the other parties that purchased Twitter along with Musk. Marc was also instrumental in the EARLY development of Twitter, serving as an advisor of sorts to Ev Williams. These parties are also connected to Peter Thiel, the FIRST investor in Facebook, who shares membership in the PayPal Mafia with Elon Musk and happens to be Marc’s best friend. Their two VC firms, a16z and Founder’s Fund, often co-invest in a portfolio of extremely sinister products that include AI piloted drone swarms and AI for “war fighters”.
With the layoffs and restructurings of the past year, it is clear that this drive to forever-crunch is coming from a specific group of people in the industry, and is not some organic hive-mind realization, but a deliberant push coming from a very small group of people who have worked together closely for several decades. This confronts the misconception that crunch is some sort of nebulous cultural spread throughout the industry as opposed to a concrete directive and concrete philosophy of specific actors who are responsible for these things. In a16z’s recent book, Network State, they openly refer to line engineers as “parasites”. Describing a growing startup, once the founder reaches the seemingly inevitable point where they need a bureaucracy:
“the parasites start entering. They don’t want the risk of a small or even mezzanine-size business. They want lots of perks, high salaries, low workload, and the minimum work for the maximum return… they know they don’t need to pull their weight…”
“‘’Strong men create good times’ … but as they scale… they also start attracting lazy parasites to the wealth they’ve created, people who want to join something great rather than build something great… no one wants to work as hard or be as ruthless as that early Spartan band, given the easy wealth available, so they enjoy themselves and busy themselves by fighting each other over trifles.”
However much we may feel that the VCs are filthy pigs for these sentiments, its important to keep in mind that this is, at the root, about philosophies of how to best do software development, what techniques are best to use in order to get engineering performance needed to drive a tech company / product. It is this demand for extreme performance that motivates an entire suite of abusive actions by engineering management: money.
The VC ideology, is that the best way to get people to perform, is by stealing their lives from them, subjecting them to brutal hours and massive amounts of stress, causing massive sleep deprivation and stress, and cutting off the connection from their children and families.
As an engineering management philosophy, that is something they are now rolling out across the board. The new bar is that crunch is all the time, the standard working condition in the field. This forever crunch, of course, has been used on contracted workforces for many years — outsourced development is the field’s dirty secret whose practices are about to engulf the entire field.
The VC machine and tech elite are working overtime (hehe) to roll out the new engineering management strategy across the industry. Even with just a few conspirators, this small group is able to effect massive, industry-wide change due to consolidation of money and power. In fact, they’ve been making quite the theatrical presentation of it.
Zuckerburg, who has gone round after round publicly humiliating and criticizing his software engineers, encouraging anyone who doesn’t think they could hack it or was an underperformer, to not even wait for the layoffs but to voluntarily resign.
Zuckerberg is perhaps THE most authoritative figure on engineering management of the top Silicon Valley brass. His entire persona was constructed around the idea of this highly technical, awkward nerdy hacker, he was always regarded as someone very involved in the technical operations of the company. Facebook has always been admired within the industry as a technical force; Facebook was operating at just massive web scale, they INVENTED web scale, through the web 2.0 era. They were at the bleeding edge of how much you can scale and how quickly. They had massively expanding data to deal with, they were THE poster child of big data. So Zuckerberg again, here is particularly influential in this specific space, and HE is saying it. And not only saying it but totally reorganizing his engineering team and doing mass layoffs and transitioning, in full view of the industry, to bring in the new engineering management — forever crunch.
Musk took the theatrics to even a level beyond Zuck, coming into the company, getting rid of everyone for not being “hardcore” enough, insulting former employees in public, and replacing them all with a compact, mercenary squad that turned their offices into barracks and moved in there.
This, and the Meta layoffs, marked an industry-wide official decree. Coming straight from the top. These were carefully thought through demonstrations.
Meanwhile, A16z and Marc Andreessen, considered top authorities on how to run startups, have been throwing their weight behind forever crunch. A16z has a GIANT, amount of swing in the tech industry, and this will roll out through all of the startups in their portfolio — somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000. It is being rolled out through all of a16z’s ecosystem of owned tech podcasts and blogs as well.
Eventually, you will see this spread to coding schools, university standard CS programs.
Add to that YCombinator, whose Gary Tan, is involved in the a16z conspiracy… they have a VAST influence over seed and early stage startups, and have funded over 4,000 companies. YCombinator is actually renowned for the network it creates, so even when you aren’t in the accelerator program anymore, everyone stays connected. In this way, YCombinator continues to spread that influence and to have that influence over all these startups, these founders and their future employees.
Incidentally, it is these types of networks which caused the run on Silicon Valley Bank.
You need to understand that this is a very material process; it is not being done organically and it doesn’t emerge from some intangible evolution in the collective engineering consciousness. It is specific people and firms and interests, working together, to change the working conditions across the field. Permanently. With just a small conspiracy, you see a shake-up that spans the entire industry, the entire field.
We are at risk of underestimating the implications of this shift. This is the moment where we lose the war against crunch. Far from eliminating crunch from the labor standard, crunch is the everyday standard of work. Instead of working to constrain and limit crunch, they are deciding to maximize it. For all engineering to be in crunch time always.
Important to keep in mind that crunch developed because engineering teams sometimes, or even most of the time, fall behind of initial projections; projections that are tied to critical milestones for the company such as the release of a consumer product. Crunch was originally used to bridge that gap, the rush to the finish line.
Indeed, the art of predicting the output of engineering teams and when their software will be ready for release, is elusive, much studied and barely understood. My wisdom is to take whatever the engineering team says, and count on half of the scope, and 3x the time to finish. There is no reason why this calculation is anything but arbitrary, pointing again to the difficulty of estimation.
The field has adopted numerous techniques for predicting and managing engineering velocity, using strategies like Kanban and agile. There is a natural affinity between software engineering and various forms of manufacturing; a lot of the thinking and practice of software engineering teams comes from the Toyota Production System, and an interesting bit of trivia is that Tesla actually worked WITH Toyota on evolving that manufacturing process itself. Any innovation in this space is a really, really fucking big deal because even seemingly small differentiations can result in crucial velocity, or how fast you are able to ship “good enough” shit. So, when Elon is talking about hardcore engineering that is coming actually from a particular perspective of engineering management, situated within the larger industrial problem.
Few people outside of the industry know that engineering teams are basically a shitshow. The vast, vast majority of software projects are never completed. Building and managing high-performance, professional-grade engineering is, as it turns out, a very difficult problem. For one, all of these people are assholes. But more saliently, you simply cannot anticipate what problems you will encounter in the project, and there will certainly be many. The question is more of what shape those problems will come in and how serious they will be.
So engineering finds itself in a constant face-off with management over the measure of velocity, the means of improving it, the strategy for managing it, etc.. This conflict indelibly has shaped our startups and technology and culture.
The management of the engineers themselves is the hardest problem in computer science. People don’t tend to think of software engineering on these terms, but the constant squabbling with management is a negotiation of what is reasonable, and management is trying to push that window as wide as possible, and engineering is usually pushing back on that. Unless they’ve been pilled by their disgusting awkward gross simping for psychopathic billionaires.
Barring that, you are looking at a culture where there is a ton of ongoing toxicity between management and the workers that is coming up naturally from these incentives. That toxicity becomes part of the engineering dysfunction itself and it’s just really really ugly. In my studies, I have identified that this friction and the resulting toxicity, is the #1 threat to high performance engineering teams.
In the early days of crunch, the scope of crunch was “special scenarios”, with concrete ramifications to end users. You had release dates and launch dates that you need to hit because the company’s entire revenue is counting on it. And because the video game customers were waiting for the releases, and they had been heavily marketed. It also evolved during the age when video games were distributed via brick and mortar sales, distributed as disks and cartridges of various kinds, so there was a lot of coordination required in the delivery process and it requires a significant distribution apparatus outside of the software itself.
Now, crunch has been widely expanded and applied to any of management’s often arbitrary or sadistic release schedules; crunch is justified for releases of software that have no customers, releases for marketing fodder, and to meet the aggressive deadlines of investors. Reasons that have basically nothing to do with end-users, and virtually nothing to do with real-world constraints, and everything to do with greed. The application of crunch from within the video game industry influenced the entire technical ecosystem, and it was applied totally outside the original crucible in which crunch is formed, and to contexts completely outside of those crunch solves for. I.e., crunch is being used as the everyday development standard, as we are starting to see now.
Conditions on an engineering team decay extremely rapidly under crunch. People begin to break down. Extreme conditions can produce extreme frames of mind, and unpredictable behavior. Often the team starts drinking together, sometimes heavily, with the few hours they have outside work. VCs and tech management pour alcohol on everyone and often have full bars and beer taps and cases of wine in the office. Adderral and other prescription drugs, like Nuvigil, are abused to let people stay up longer and be more alert. Addiction can develop. It is widely rumored that venture capitalists and executives in fact push and provide stimulants.
Anyone who already has a mental illness, is about to get that turned up about 10x. Under a lot of pressure, manic episodes from bipolar disorder, or depression, or anxiety, or a panic disorder, often come to the fore. Even a perfectly sane individual will see cognitive decline, become anxious or depressed. Sleep deprivation is quite literally torture and it gets pretty extreme to the point where you have people seeing things and falling asleep standing up. Wish I was joking.
They have engineers in this pressure cooker. Demands coming from everywhere and lots of the time of engineering management is taken up talking to other “stakeholders” in the situation and there is a constant drama of meetings and status updates. The entire rest of the company is depending on when the feature, app or otherwise product, is done; or at least, that is how the engineering team is led to feel. The extreme work hours means everything else is kindof stripped away and the crunch becomes the totality of this person’s existence.
One of the ways that we reason about labor is to look at what the worker looks like over time. And in crunch you see that over time, the software engineer living under constant crunch develops RSI, mental health issues, changes in weight, stress conditions, and may lose their families, who rightfully expect more from partnership and parenting. It also is directly linked to burnout — I wrote here about burnout as a complex work injury.
I think it makes sense to also look at this through the lens of financial crime. In the 80s hey-day of corruption and insider trading, it was finance guys who were in a state of constant crunch; in this environment, some of the most serious American financial crimes and indeed financial crimes period, were perpetrated. Den of Thieves, by James B. Stewart, describes the phenomenon of this Wall Street version of crunch. He describes an office environment in which Mike Milken’s employees fell apart. One began smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. One developed a drinking problem, another seems to have had a psychotic break. One became a hypochondriac, checking himself into medical institutions for fear of brain tumors. Another ended up in a psychiatrist’s office.
I was actually shocked to find that no one had died, once I began to see the accounts from this time period. Like we see in Elon and Marc Andreessen’s engineering philosophy, the behavior goes all the way to the top. “Milken rarely socialized with others in the office, and, indeed, spent little time with his own wife and his two sons and daughter… on a family trip to Hawaii… he worked every day of the vacation”.
Little discussed in the industry conversation about crunch, is how it may connect to ethical offenses by the company. In my mind a culture of constant pressure, exhaustion, confusion, addiction, and profound insularity, where a small group of other programmers becomes your whole life, leads to group think, maybe even paranoia, a sense of persecution that is then misdirected. All within this very top-down, authoritarian structure. In cults, one of the biggest strategies is to disconnect people from their other lives and families and jobs and friends and even spouses. Their world becomes the world of the cult and that becomes their friends and families.
In crunch, the world gets very small around you. There is only the people around you, with whom you are trauma-bonding, pushing each other forward at breakneck speed. The mental degradation, the loss of critical thought that happens under crunch, seems like it would also make them vulnerable to criminal and unethical behavior. The submission to authority replaces independent moral judgement.
From a psychological perspective, what I have seen in engineering teams and other teams within the tech industry generally, is that any kind of crunch-related behavior often has the opposite effect from alienating the employee from the company; rather, the employee becomes so dependent and engrossed in the company, becomes redoubled in loyalty, becomes obsessed with this thing. Of course they do. When people walk away from startups, they are often losing most of their social connections, most of their self-identity; for this reason, it can be absolutely devastating to leave a company.
Crunch is actually a recipe for blind obedience.
In time, people tend to recall crunch periods as highly traumatic and even ruining their love of the craft and the field. This causes TRAUMA. My former tech magazine was full of articles on how the tech industry wrecks havoc on mind, body and soul. That is not to say that I release its victims from their responsibility for what they build and the effect of the industry on society, if it was a harmful technology. But simply that, from a simple medical, psychological, human example, this is going to leave a mark.
Crunch was the biggest labor battle software developers fought, from in their workplaces to the tech press to the stages where we discuss the latest in our field. That battle has, decisively, been lost as venture capitalists implement crunch — once used only as a break-the-glass option — as simply standard operation procedure.
Again, the weight of this is coming from a very small group of venture capitalists and tech elite. This is one way that VCs are able to wield influence, by creating industry-wide changes in engineering management, as well as the more obvious large-scale layoffs. In the environment of extraordinary consolidation of wealth and power, just a few players are able to make decisions that more than 4 million programmers in the US.
And there is no dissent against a16z, in particular, allowed in the tech industry.
This is not only the new expectation but it is the new bar for participation at all.
This doesn’t just affect American offices; it also effects outsourced contracting from places like Kenya, India, Romania, even Ireland as more tech investment is built out in these areas and more people around the world are contracting for US companies. This becomes the standard for competitive performance in the global marketplace. In fact… the other place that crunch started, besides gaming, was in contracted software workforces out of the US, where for decades, those programmers have already been pushed to their limit by the demands of tech elite. Because Silicon Valley-based programmers always saw themselves as better and more important, they never thought that the practices used there would apply to them. Indeed, it was these very same programmers now plunging into forever crunch who ignored it and even applied it when directly managing contracted teams in other countries.
Increasingly, startups will be be operating through outsourced technical teams around the world, where labor is cheaper and more exploitable. There are actually a NUMBER of changes in how engineering is done happening around here. In this new model, startups will maintain a relatively small group of white male employees in the US, that are the center of the startup and that are the only ones to get good pay, benefits and stock - the only “real” employees; they will keep this group much tighter than in the past, and offload the rest to contracted workforces instead of building up large in-house practices. Coding AI will accelerate this process even more.
And what do you know, a16z startup Github is providing the entire basis for that as well.
We are already seeing this new “startup model” with blue chip startups like OpenAI, which has made a public show of its low number of engineers and how much they have been able to achieve with such a small team of “hardcore engineers”. But turns out, they had an entire contracted workforce from Kenya they were paying $2 hour to train the AI. And then laid off.
And OpenAI… you guessed it, backed by Elon Musk -and- a16z -and- YCombinator -and Peter Thiel, among several other members of the PayPal Mafia.
This is coming from SOMEWHERE. It is coming from a group of PEOPLE. That we know and can recognize and see them doing this and SAYING they are doing this, in the open light of day.
This is likely the decisive end of the war on crunch. Once this becomes the standard for the entire field, it will never go back again. Tech has a huge global talent pool to draw from and they will continue to use this mercilessly to drive terrible working conditions for the vast, vast majority of people in this field.
The sheep-like acceptance of this, clearly monumentally important campaign for forever-crunch, should tell you just how deeply brainwashed the tech industry is. With forever-crunch, they will be more zombified than ever before.