A few thoughts on intensity (2024)
tylerhogge.com
tylerhogge.com
It is such a stark contrast from corporate culture, where you survive and get promoted by learning to disengage from the mission, customers, and product, and focus on being quietly, not intensely, useful for your boss.
I think intensity is a symptom of circumstance not a cause for them.
If you're a startup that's on the verge of transitioning from broke to huge success, I'd imagine everyone would be bringing a lot of intensity to push it over that line.
If you're an established company with a track record of responding to record profits with layoffs, then I don't think it's fair for you to expect your employees to share your enthusiasm.
Go yell at your C-suite / directors with equity that have/will have F-you money from the success of the business. Don't think your ICs 3 levels down the hierarchy making 1-3x inflation-level raises will be as driven.
Operating at high intensity has a large physical, psychological, and personal cost.
There’s a reason why professional athletes train mostly in low intensity with reserved days for high intensity sessions.
This is somewhat written for a CEO: "you must bring intensity and instill it on your blank-slate employees". In one case there's the assumption that onsite startups work better, and that assumed-to-be-true mystery is explained as being from on-site being higher intensity.
I somewhat caution against that mindset. I find myself frequently more intense about driving feature timelines and rollouts than my colleagues, even when I'm remote. It's part of the nature of me not my office chair.
In Buddhism, there's a saying: "though the view should be as vast as the sky, keep your conduct as fine as barley flour" - Padmasambhava. Having that attitude combined with an intensely focused engagement in building is an overall better path.
A lot of people don't realize they want something until they've seen it. So founders have intensity, and vision for a need only they can see.
Imagine that slow-paced DMV with a lot of intensity, but towards nothing at all. In that case, the vision should be efficiency (without burning out employees).
As long as the other knobs show a generally positive relationship between input and output, then obviously turning the knobs up will generally result in higher output.
The questions are:
* What are the downsides of turning up the knob? Both in terms of the specific knobs you're turning, as well as "going to 11" in a more general sense.
* Why do people and organizations find it difficult to turn the knob to 11?
My take is that intensity is painful. This brings two things that have to be overcome:
You must somehow build a pain tolerant organization. You can do this by selecting for pain tolerant people, by inoculating a mission/message that positively improves pain tolerance (make people believe that it's worth it), by creating organizational structures that attenuates the pain feedback loop (ie, somehow insulate decision makers from the pain, while finding ways to mitigate or work around the pain where it is felt... ie, probably just accepting the churn) or other means.
The other thing to overcome is that pain is supposed to be instructive, and provide useful negative feedback. As you build up your pain tolerance, you ideally are still able to extract real information from the pain signals. If you achieve pain tolerance through blocking off or ignoring all pain signals, then you are probably at higher risk of just... doing stupid things.
I once worked at a relatively small (<1000) person firm that basically had a near extinction event due to failing to fund a secondary datacenter / sensible data backup / business continuity strategy for years (despite engineering raising the alarm).
A team of 20 engineers worked 16 hour days for 2 weeks through the weekend to rescue them from their own decisions.
At the end of it they had a 10 minute zoom with the team to thank us and tell us they were going to - send us a ($10) bottle of wine, and grant "2 days off in lieu" (we were already on "unlimited vacation" plan) for the extra ~14 days of work.
That was a single-use only knob due to their behaviour.
No one cared enough again to do anything above & beyond, morale went to zero, and senior members of the team had all left within a year. The thank-you was so bad it was probably better that they not have done one at all.
I'd honestly like to be able to put more effort into my job, but as a salaried engineer extra effort doesn't pay off on its own. I have to spend more effort making sure it's seen come bonus/raise time, since my outcome is largely dependent on what my boss thinks of me, not what I've actually produced.
Founders get a much more direct line to work and outcome -- but I guess they trade stability, and maybe even the perception game just shifts to investors.
Ideally what many senior engineers are probably looking for is - I can live on 50-75% of my TC a few years without setting myself too far back, and I'd work really hard on an interesting project that has a >25% chance of rewarding me 2-4xTC. It is not too expensive to roll that dice, and I have a reasonable chance of hitting in one career.
Instead we get a lot of lottery ticket profile things that are like "1% chance of 1000xTC". The EV looks good, but you don't get enough rolls of the dice for that 1% to pay off in a single lifetime let along career.
This year I had the chance to learn IaC and generally using AWS through a project, but I had to donate a bunch of my time learning. Now that's 2 things I can claim I have worked with in production. But fixing bugs and general dev work, no thanks.
If your company is larger than Dunbar's number (150 employees), you have low-level employees making median wage and a fraction of a fraction of a percent equity, it's not impossible to have a high-engagement culture, but it would be close to exploitative and at least unhealthy for them.
But a founder accepting a fatalistic viewpoint on this would be signing their own death warrant. There's no room for fatalism in startups. Rather, good founders need to both bring boundless optimism and work to ensure that there is a means for expansion and reward for employees that continues as the company gets larger.
I've never witnessed anything else affect intensity in my teams as negatively as forced RTO did.
I mean of course it is fully dependent on personalities and roles, and totally anecdotal, but in my experience, work was certainly *much* more intense when people had conditions for deep focus. I was literally just thinking about how slow everything feels nowadays, with everybody struggling to get focus time in a crowded office full of distractions.
I'm much more focused when I am left alone. no one in sight.
The article quotes Apple like 5 times, and the only "non intensive" counter example is DMV office.
My take is that "intensity" is toxic, and Musk and Jobs succeeded DESPITE of it. Because both were technicality brilliant people, that offsets their "intensive" toxicity!
But I believe that that ruthlessness is the source of a lot of suffering caused by, and happening inside of, companies.
I think it’s really important to try to find a way to be successful that doesn’t just involve being obsessive and single-minded, and if you’re unwilling to do that you’re letting yourself off the hook in a bad way.
Bezos was the same.
Start today. Start now.
It is sad to me that this is the benchmark for so many people. It is only a success if it is worth billions.
I’d think one can be “intense” or “work intensely” on something just by myself, without any need to have or exercise any sort of power/authority/control over anybody or anything.
It may surprise people here, but there are teenagers who set out with 10-20 year goals like "I want to found a startup / be a CEO / have my own venture fund / etc" and then make every educational/career/relationship/lifestyle decision in that context.
For most people we want to work on interesting projects that pay us enough to live the lifestyle we can enjoy.
I think this is why a lot of successful founder types come from upper middle class backgrounds. If your dad is a mechanic then "being good with computers and going to college" is an aspirational goal.
If your parents were first in their family to go to college then "go to a nationally known college and working at a Fortune 500" is an aspirational goal. If your dad went to an Ivy and runs his own business then the aspirational goals you have instilled in you are much higher.
I will also say this is not the same as hard work. Hours and intensity is not the same. I would be considered a very successful person by most, but I have never "worked" more than 30 hours a week. But I've cared very very intensely about the results of the work that I'm doing.
You also can't expect it of employees unless you're paying them a fuck ton/have incentives.
The Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance is a great example of this. His intensity, focus, and arrogance was/is maniacal. Even in a world of hyper-competitive egos, he's in a class by himself. And that mania resulted in his alienation of almost everyone around him - namely his own teammates. Steve Jobs, as mentioned in the blog, was similar. Loud firings, public insults, and fits of condescension haunt his legacy. And worse, the world is full of sociopaths mimicking the worst of Jordan and Jobs, mistakenly thinking being an asshole is the secret ingredient to great success. But it's not.
I'm friends with a semi-retired public high school basketball coach who is broadly considered a "living legend". He won 19 state championships, 1300 games, and is a part-time assistant even in his 70s. His winning percentage over his entire career is in excess of 90%, which is simply an absurd accomplishment.
As the son of a successful basketball coach (and have another HS Hall-of-Fame caliber coach in the family), I'm familiar with the passion and intensity of successful coaches. I know the hours they put in, the focus they demand, and how the best coaches build programs, not teams. I know how they commonly hate losing much more than they enjoy winning.
But this "legend" I know, on the surface, seems an outlier in both success and behavior.
He's broadly known for his calm, cool demeanor. He has only received two technical fouls in his career, one for a clerical error and the other for a technicality. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't get excited or upset. He's "mild-mannered" in a world of red-faced, hyper-competitive rage monsters. If it weren't for his peerless success, his mild temperament would probably be viewed as a liability.
He's universally loved by his players, his peers, and his assistants. He's generous with his time and energy, willing to share his knowledge and experience with anyone who will listen. Those that know him talk about him as a good person first, and a coaching prodigy second.
But underneath his calm demeanor is a tireless, never-satisfied intensity that demands the best from players, schools, and parents alike. He's examining every angle. He's using every moment afforded to him for maximum effect. Even if there is a day off, it's in service of a bigger plan.
He sees how all the little habits, the little behaviors, and little efforts achieve big goals in aggregate. He watches Junior High B-teams practice to make sure everything is done right and that his coaches are investing in each player appropriately. And he makes sure each player is investing in themselves. He's conducting a symphony and passionately ensuring each note is being played as best it can.
He's also very straightforward, to his players, to their parents, to the administration, and to anyone that will listen. He knows what he wants from his players in practice, in the game, and in all other avenues of their lives. He sets lofty but attainable goals for each of them. He doesn't sugar coat anything. He is willing to tell the truth even when a lie would be easier. But that truth is always in the same calm, cool demeanor he coaches with.
His ability to direct his intensity productively is world class. I don't think it's any surprise that other extremely high achievers, like Steve Jobs, were able to do the same. But he's proof you don't have to treat people poorly to succeed at the highest level in your field.