I mean, no

When you tell your engineers "You're salaried, so 40 hours is the minimum" when you used to promise them comp time if they went over 40 hours, when you constantly work them during nights and weekends, when you text them during morning workouts to sprint home and debug issues: 

You're telling us that we don't matter. Our thoughts and feelings don't matter; our lives outside of work don't matter -- we are just expendable cogs. 

This does not make us work harder. It just burns out what little spark we have left. 

Oh, I still have a spark for code. I love code. But that's completely decoupled from any toxic environments I may work in. 

All the energy is going into my job search and upskilling now. I won't be here for much longer. This chapter is over -- but really, it was over before it even started. The moment they built their app without CI/CD, they doomed it. 

Even the most grindy, stressful startups in 2025 have CI/CD. If you don't, your product will fail, because it will be held together by duct tape. 

I will become one of the best engineers out there, and I will not do it here. I am not even learning anything interesting with the extra hours. Where is the math? Where is the physics? Where is the science? There is none, there's just duct tape, panic, and anger. 

I can't become like Torvalds here, or those geniuses who code their own operating systems or write their own rendering engines. I can't be the computer scientist I dream of being. More hours does not mean more skills. There's no glory, mastery, or nobility in duct tape.