The Lights Are On. It Doesn’t Mean You’re In.

I’m looking at a Tweet. That Tweet.

The open plan office, fluorescent lights, people glued to screens. The suffering must be shielding us from the silent cry.

We’re reaching the endpoint of hustle-culture content where CEOs and tech directors are virtue signalling at every possible juncture.

I’ve been around long enough to recognize the smell. It’s not ambition. It’s far from that.

The Cult of “Still Here”

There’s something deeply seductive about being seen working late.

Not working well.

Not shipping something meaningful.

Just… being present.

Late nights photograph beautifully. Slack timestamps do not.

Hustle culture optimizes for visibility, not outcomes. Inputs are easy to post. Outputs are inconvenient, slow, and are usually owned by more than one person so they don’t fit neatly into a tweet.

“Look how late I stayed” is a simple, easy to understand message.

“Look how I made the system easier to maintain” doesn’t come with moody lighting and a thumbs-up from morons on X.

A Morality Play?

Somewhere along the way, effort became confused with virtue and we all accepted it.

Unserious people leave at 6. When they log off they lack hunger. You need to sacrifice your evenings to show that you believe enough.

The whole framing is poison, and points to further problems in the pipeline.

Engineering is not religion, and going to work should not be a loyalty test where we enter a hunger games style contest against other developers.

Because the best engineers I’ve worked with weren’t the ones glued to their desks at night. They were the ones who showed up the next morning clear-headed, fixed the real problem, and quietly removed entire classes of future bugs.

Judgment is something you’ll never get from AI, and it’s a characteristic that gets destroyed by a lack of sleep. We need to preserve what separates us from the machines, and we need to do that right now.

The Fantasy

“If I just keep going, something good will eventually happen.”

Is simply a lie. You aren’t an LLM with thinking mode where you simply try the same thing over and over until somehow it works. A machine consumes inputs, produces outputs and can repeat.

A human questions direction. A human notices diminishing returns. A human can stop to ask whether the thing they’re building should exist at all.

That’s overcoming limitations.

The industry doesn’t need more blunt instruments. It needs people who can think, adapt, and occasionally say “this is stupid, let’s not do that”. We all need to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Conclusion

You’re not here to absorb infinite workload, you’re not a CPU that scales linearly with hours logged.

Your value isn’t how long you sit under office lights.

It’s how effectively you think when it matters.

Be sharp.

Be deliberate.

Be boringly effective.

And if someone needs a photo of you at 9:15pm to feel validated, that says a lot more about their system than your ambition.

Stop fetishizing the grind.

Dream bigger than being “still here”.

About The Author

Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.

The Secret Developer sometimes wishes that they were a machine. A Terminator with cool red eyes.