Work-Life Balance in a Cloud Career

A LinkedIn post landed in my feed last week that made my stomach turn. The post came from a leader at an AI-powered recruiting platform, and while it was short, it was quite revealing:

"We don't believe in work-life balance. We believe in customer balance. If they're on, we're on. There are no evenings. No weekends. No excuses. The match, the weekend, the dinner, the date... gone.... This is not a job. This is a mission."

This is not the first time I have stumbled upon a post promoting "hustle culture." While putting in one's maximum effort is certainly a noble pursuit, doing so at the expense of one's life is deeply harmful, and the damage is more significant than it may appear on the surface. That any leader demands this from their employees is incredibly sad.

Hustle culture promises glory, but what if it’s quietly destroying your team (and you)?

Fallacy #1: Employment is Just a Transaction

Why do businesses hire employees? On the surface, the answer to this is quite simple. A business hires employees to do work in exchange for money. Employment is a transaction, plain and simple.

But, isn't there more to it than that? Humans are emotional creatures by nature. We have feelings, personalities, and ambitions. We have lives outside of work -- families, friends, and communities. Yes, the core of employment is transactional, but our motivations are almost always more than just financial. They're human.

In a prior CloudHustle, I referenced the TV series "Mad Men," which follows Don Draper, a senior executive at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency in the 1960s. The show never shied away from exploring the complex relationship between employers and employees, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better example of hustle culture. What makes this particularly relevant to today's tech culture is how it shows the ultimate cost of treating people as expendable resources rather than valued team members.

In an infamous scene, Don is confronted by Peggy Olson, his former secretary, who ascended to the role of copywriter after showing potential. Peggy and the other employees of Sterling Cooper are constantly asked to work nights and weekends, and the show is replete with personal lives stretched to their breaking point by the demands of employment. An exhausted Peggy is frustrated that Don had won the prestigious CLIO award for an ad born from one of Peggy's ideas.

Peggy approaches Don not only as an employee, but as a person. She craves validation from Don that her contributions were valuable. She wants to hear from him that she is appreciated and is an important member of the team. Instead, Don demonstrates a total lack of empathy, shouting "that's what the money is for!" as Peggy pours out her heart. Don views their relationship as a simple transaction. You give me ideas, I give you money. Everything else doesn't matter. This is hustle culture's first fallacy at its worst, treating employees as interchangeable cogs in a machine whose only motivation is money. This is no way to build a lasting business!

Fallacy #2: Your Business Must Be Your "Mission"

The LinkedIn post that sparked our exploration has another insidious fallacy. 

It demands that its employees adopt the business's goals as their own, placing them above their personal needs and desires. The author's assertion that "this is not a job, it's a mission" attempts to transform their workplace into something resembling a Navy SEALs operation -- here are your orders, now follow them to the letter, and do everything it takes to complete the objective.

But here's the thing: that's not how you build high-performing teams.

The command-and-control approach advocated by this fallacy strips employees of their agency entirely. It treats them as soldiers who should execute orders without question, rather than as intelligent professionals with valuable perspectives, experiences, and ideas. When you operate this way, you're not just demanding blind obedience -- you're actively choosing to ignore the collective wisdom of your team.

The most innovative solutions I've witnessed in my career have come from teams where people felt empowered to challenge assumptions, suggest alternatives, and bring their unique backgrounds to bear on complex problems. You can absolutely have a team that believes deeply in your company's mission while still maintaining their individual agency and personal boundaries. In fact, that's when teams perform at their absolute best.

I've got bad news for our LinkedIn author: your company isn't Seal Team Six. I am sure that AI-powered recruiting is interesting, but it's not life and death, and there's no question that it will be a heck of a lot more effective if it considers the value of the very human beings that you want to match with employers.

Fallacy #3: Hustle Culture Rewards the "Best" Employees

The third and perhaps most dangerous fallacy of hustle culture is the assertion that it creates an environment where the best employees rise to the top by dedicating their lives to their work. If you want to advance, all you have to do is work harder than everyone else, and you'll be rewarded with money and power.

Therein lies the problem: if the only way to advance is working 80-hour weeks, you've created an environment that prioritizes a select few, excluding those that cannot sacrifice their home lives. In hustle culture, employees that have responsibilities at home are at a huge disadvantage. 

Do you have children? 

Are you a caretaker for an ailing family member? 

Do you have a disability? 

Good luck getting ahead!

Not only are you creating a culture of exclusion, you are damaging your business. Instead of a vibrant team made up of unique employees with different life experiences, skill sets, and backgrounds, you will end up with uniformity. This is not a recipe for a productive and innovative team.

These three fallacies compound each other, creating a toxic cycle where companies treat people as disposable, demand total life sacrifice, and then reward only those who can sustain this unsustainable pace. Organizations that look successful on the surface but are actually hemorrhaging talent, creativity, and long-term viability.

Work to Live

I am proud to be a part of Mission and CDW. Our culture acknowledges the value of each individual, embraces their differences, and enables them to be the best version of themselves at work. Employment is not just about compensation, it's about fulfillment. Where hustle culture rewards individual effort, our culture rewards shared outcomes.

In my experience leading technology teams, I've learned that sustainable high performance comes from trust, not fear. When people feel secure in their roles and valued as whole humans, they do their best work. I've watched teams solve complex technical challenges not because they were working 80-hour weeks, but because they were well-rested, collaborative, and genuinely excited about the problems they were solving. The best architectural decisions I've seen have come from engineers who had time to think deeply, not ones who were perpetually in crisis mode.

Hustle culture is an industry-wide scourge. If you ever feel like you are living to work, rather than working to live, it might be a good time to look for an employer that values team players rather than heroes and that prioritizes work-life balance.