42 ms·

How hustle culture took over advertising

208 points by ilamont 8y ago

esotericn 8y ago
So, this is the industry that: - puts flashing colored boxes in front of our faces at any possible opportunity - requires us to click through multiple popups to access almost any for-profit website - has normalized the act of wasting human life at a mass scale by injecting multi-minute time-wasting sessions in activities "How hustle culture took over"? It's a hustle by default. I'd call it a swindle.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  I always thought that hustler was synonymous with confidence artist or a low level scammer. That it’s now considered a positive word is fascinating to me.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    Hustler yes, but hustling is a verb, often used in e.g. sports movies / events.
  - nkrisc 8y ago
    A hustler hustles, but one who hustles isn't always a hustler.
    - gitgud 8y ago
      Poetic, but that could be said about anything; A programmer programs, but one who programs isn't always a programmer...
      - nkrisc 8y ago
        Yes, it could be said about anything. And if someone thought that someone who programs must be a programmer I'd have said the same you said.
  - dec0dedab0de 8y ago
    I first learned the word hustler in the mid 80s when my soccer coach had a "hustler of the day" award for every game. It went to whoever worked the hardest that day.
  - sin7 8y ago
    Hustler is used a lot in rap. It's always been there. A hustler hustles. They put in work. They are in the grind. It's all about turning a nickel into a dime. In other words, they sell a lot of crack. Nothing deep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbwTCrnktY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbwTCrnktY - Cassidy - I'm a hustler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6CbP4kVno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6CbP4kVno - Lil Wayne - Hustler Muzic
    - haskellandchill 8y ago
      Selling drugs is pretty deep, try it sometime. You really feel every dollar. Now I’m more connected to money and survival. Great capitalism experience 10/10.
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Depends on the drug and where you are. Selling crack on Chicago’s southwest side used to be more fatal than Texas’ death row.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
      Reminds me of the other usage of hustling which is an incongruous clash with the macho image - male prostitution mostly to other men and the occasional older women. Not judging either and I fully understand that it is a serious situation - just noting the inadvertent humor in linguistic drift. Technically I believe it often meant any odd job to make money whether legal, illegal or a grey area. So selling weed, shoveling a driveway, and busking where you could get kicked out at worst all count.
  - cambalache 8y ago
    The word was gentrified.
- liftbigweights 8y ago
  Don't forget ads in movie trailers! Now that is "ingenious". Forcing you to watch an ad to watch an ad. The guy who thought of that deserves "Advertiser of the Year" award and a "Crime against Humanity" charge.
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- balthasar 8y ago
  The employees still deserve to be respected and allowed to live normal lives outside of this corporate "hustler culture."
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Why should employment be treated as a shroud? If you spend the majority of your time working to abuse your fellow man, I don't respect that, and see no reason why I should. That is not, and should not be accepted as, a "normal life". Advertising companies are a disease.
    - tome 8y ago
      (I found this usage of "shroud" interesting. It seems to be in the same sense as "corporate veil": https://www.guffo.in/lifting-corporate-veil-circumstances-can-lifted/ https://www.guffo.in/lifting-corporate-veil-circumstances-ca... )
      - epicureanideal 8y ago
        I agree... this is an interesting concept we should explore. As an analogy to the corporate veil, basically anything a person would do in their employment would generally be forgiven as "well, you've gotta make a living", unless it reaches a point where it's sufficiently morally wrong to still hold the person responsible for their actions on the job. For example, if their job were Winston Smith's (George Orwell character) job of editing historical news articles to distort the past, then we might say Winston is still personally responsible. The difficulty here is holding CEOs responsible for crimes with "piercing the corporate veil" is holding a high level, powerful decision-maker, with options, responsible... rather than a person who might be trying to support 5 kids and some elderly parents, and couldn't just choose to sweep the street instead of working at the Ministry of Information for 6 figures.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - edm0nd 8y ago
- lanewinfield 8y ago
  Hatred of advertising at a larger scale, nice. How are those people on said websites (and almost any other medium) supposed to make money?
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    > How are those people on said websites (and almost any other medium) supposed to make money? 1. Have less annoying ads that respect the user. 2. Charge money. 3. Some novel funding model that's unexplored because obnoxious ads dominate everything and suck all the air out of the room.
    - lanewinfield 8y ago
      Let me preface this by a large percentage of people in advertising are not creating #1. BUT: 1. That's fair, but it takes time and talent to create these. 2. Clearly that isn't working; see almost any news site in existence 3. This is a hope, and a nice one. https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        3. OK they have a different business model and lots of content partners, but they won't tell you what it is, just invite you to sign up. I'm guessing it involves monetizing email addresses. If this content free proposition is your idea of a nice prospect, what is it based on? Anyone can say they have laudable goals, like beauty contestants who aspire to bring about world peace and end hunger. Perhaps they're just saying nice things without any real capability or intention to deliver?
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      you know, sometimes I wonder how the internet would look like today if every time you loaded content from a server some money would automatically go their way (a tiny payment compensating for server time of sorts)
      - 8y ago
keiferski 8y ago
Just some random thoughts here...this strikes me as a consequence of the contemporary idea of work having to be the end-all to one’s identity, purpose and meaning in life. Advertising, perhaps the ‘original’ fundamentally meaningless career field to spawn from consumer capitalism, used to be mostly about just communicating your product/service. Eventually it morphed into lifestyle marketing and at this point has reached its ultimate conclusion: advertising workers themselves have drunk the Koolaid that used to only be peddled to consumers. I wonder if we’ll ever see a return to simple “hey, we make this thing, you might find it useful.”
- ThomPete 8y ago
  What you are already seeing is that advertising is baked into the product instead. I.e. the actual features, functionality or problem solved are themselves finding their ways to the right users. It used to be that the advertisers used their control over the primarily one way distribution channels to promote their products. Today it's the consumers who promote the products through the multiway channels and then only if you have exhausted most of your organic, social and viral growth channels do you promote through one-way channels again.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  I think it's a consequence of abundance. If you have a grocery store that has cantaloupes, and that's unusual because most grocery stores don't have cantaloupes most of the time, you just hang a sign in the window that says "Cantaloupes". Maybe you put a print ad in the newspaper. Those who decide they want them will come to your store. When they're all gone, well, your advertising did its job. But if every grocery store has cantaloupes year-round, you're not going to sell many extra cantaloupes by hanging a sign in your window. You need to get clever. And behold, advertising-as-hustle is born.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    this seems accurate to me, although I would phrase it as competition rather than abundance. When everyone has the same product on offer, differentiation comes from how you position that product in the market. This trainer is for aspiring marathon runners, this one is for aspiring basketball players. The reality is the difference between the two is minimal and they're both just trying to focus on selling to the subset of people with a particular self-image.
sharemywin 8y ago
I think companies are missing something. Just because I like to work on side projects doesn't mean I want to work for free for you.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Oh but you wouldn't work for them, you'd work for yourself! That's what they want to sell you anyway, so they have no obligations whatsoever to their employees.
Novashi 8y ago
>Hustle is public. And in the ad industry, publicity matters. There's your reasoning right there. I've drank a bit of kool-aid myself. It feels normal now to overlay a level of 'hustling advertising' because that's what the business culture does and you don't want to be the one guy in a client meeting who looks pained to be there. Another way of thinking about it: would you learn to do a little dancing for a good salary + benefits? It quickly becomes second-nature to at least be engaged in the hustling adverts and culture meetings. The real trap (which is toxic) is feeling like hustling is a competition and a second job. This stuff can push introverts to the sidelines though, and that can make their real world suffer if they feel isolated because they don't participate as much.
- esotericn 8y ago
  > would you learn to do a little dancing for a good salary + benefits? This isn't an appropriate analogy because dancing is harmless.
gadders 8y ago
I think "hustle" is over now. Someone pronounce the time of death.
nradov 8y ago
The "hustle" culture has been a key part of MLM (pyramid schemes) for many years. It's sad to see that crossing over into legitimate businesses.
bachmeier 8y ago
> it wasn’t just working hard — it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.” That reminds of this blog post by Jamie Zawinski[1]: "What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer. Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in." [1] [redacted]
- Ygg2 8y ago
  EDIT: Make sure you don't click the link but copy and paste it. It seems the author is intercepting all traffic from HN site to an interesting image.
  - eumenides1 8y ago
    I love that the author is doing that.
    - deleted 8y ago
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  - canadianwriter 8y ago
    The url is cut off in the web view of HN so I can't even copy and paste it.... nice.
    - gowld 8y ago
      Context-click to get the URL. If you can click it, you can copy it.
  - CaptSpify 8y ago
    alternatively: don't send them the referrer
apatters 8y ago
I'm American but I've lived overseas for nearly a decade, and I hardly ever go back. In recent years when I meet other Americans who are visiting my city, I often get this vague feeling that they're just trying too hard in one way or another. Maybe they're working too hard, or trying too hard to impress someone, or get attention, or assert themselves. I don't know if I've changed or if America is changed or if it's something else entirely. What I do wonder is, what's with all these Americans working themselves to the bone? I own an agency which is one of the types of businesses called out in this article. I tell all my employees very clearly, whenever possible, work 40 hours and then call it a week. We also happen to be mostly remote so I tell them, within reason, respecting a small number of important calls/meeting times etc. you can put in those hours whenever you want, preferably after a great night's sleep. There's nothing like "you're measured by how many hours you bill out," nor does there need to be, if we have more than 40 hours of work per person per week, we hire more people. Where does this all come from? This is an honest question. Why are people working themselves to death in the US and having this crazy mindset that doing stuff which puts you on the verge of a breakdown is good? When did this start? Is it good for health/happiness? Definitely not Is it good for productivity? Maybe, but I doubt it
- djpr 8y ago
  I'm curious, where do you work now and who are your clients? I worked in Asia and the work culture with the Chinese (mainlanders) and those of Chinese-descent (Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Singaporean) was more challenging than working with Americans. When I was in advertising, stories of people working and staying (as in sleeping over) during the weekends was not uncommon. Clients would call me at 11pm asking for a concall with my staff. 12 hours a day for weeks on end, including working weekends, were common place. We were able to hire great talent just by promising that we'd never ask our staff to work weekends and hardly ever after 7pm on a workday. We had mostly US clients so that was an easy thing for us to day. This culture shifted a bit when stories of young agency people in Hong Kong and other Asian cities dying from exhaustion became a big deal 4-5 years ago. But its still very workaholic culture. Don't get me wrong, Americans work insane hours compared to Indonesians or the French, but parts of Asia is a whole other level of madness.
someguydave 8y ago
Meanwhile over in this other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271834 We learn that you aren't really an "entrepreneur" unless you are a salesman. Business without "hustle" is unthinkable?
- varjag 8y ago
  Every traditional business is living from sales, it's incredible you find this shocking.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    I suppose it's surprising to me because I interpret the word "hustle" to mean something like "tricking the customer into paying more than needed to turn a profit on a trade"
nimbius 8y ago
As a professional diesel mechanic, I find most of the points in this article pretty difficult to understand outside the context of, say, Hollywood? or maybe iPhones? Do programmers really have to show this kind of reckless drive? This hasnt been a thing in tradecraft since...forever i dont think...and if it is, its punished pretty severely. An example: if im rebuilding the idler and pitman assembly on a fourteen ton truck, theres no hustle. there is no competition to do it "the fastest." You do it right, because if that assembly fails in a turn you could cause a pretty horrible accident. Depending on what that professional driver hauls (benzene, chlorine, pesticides, etc...), you might find your "hustle" on the evening news as the police evacuate some poor suburb. If you're writing a web application, shouldnt you take care to make sure its secure and well written? Just because nobody had to pick hair out of a windshield doesnt mean a hacked webapp doesnt ruin just as many lives.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  It varies from one company to another. Responsible managers (and, by extension, companies) don't encourage this kind of behaviour, precisely because when it goes south, it tends to blow up in your face, badly, especially in heavily-regulated fields where legal responsibility is involved. Irresponsible managers (and, again, companies) encourage this kind of behaviour because they think it better aligns with their business goals somehow.
- ensiferum 8y ago
  "sure its secure and well written?" There's no money in that, so why bother. Unfortunately.
- aaron_oxenrider 8y ago
  Office work is much different and programming is certainly different than a hands on job as you describe. It is far too often that the 'move fast and break things' ideology is pushed to meet deadlines or be the first to market, even if the product is broken. Also, more similar to what you are familiar with, dealership mechanics and jiffy lube style shops are closer to the hustle mentality than your professional role. They are bound by time constraints because normal consumers will only pay so much for your time and there are standard limits to charge for a particular job. If you take longer than the standard time you can charge for, then the loss is yours.
josefresco 8y ago
"Of course, every industry has its fair share of hustle idolization, but ad agencies and advertising in general are unique" Expand your horizons! Ad agencies are not unique. Boasting about the number of hours your work is one of the oldest, most tired tropes in many industries. I have clients across all sectors that simultaneously boast and complain about their long hours and how committed they are to their business, or employer. Early rise, stay late, skip lunches, skip vacations, work from home even on holidays - I've heard it all - how is this unique to just the advertising / agency industry?
everybodyknows 8y ago
Hustle Culture: What does it mean, exactly? From article: >"maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce" >To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. How anyone can imagine this is supportive of creative work, I just cannot get my head around.
sosuke 8y ago
To answer some of the questions as to why people do this. To try to get ahead. To try and advance. To move up. If you don't hustle, if you aren't trying to advance then how could you ever expect to move up financially? Think of it in the small scale at a fast food joint. You bus tables, sweep etc. If you do just that you can do just that forever. You can also do more to try and get promoted. You can also do less and get fired. If you want more money per paycheck then you'll want to get promoted. To get promoted you have to hustle. You have to do more. No one will give it to you if you weren't already born into it.
- sosuke 8y ago
  To my downvote. Tell me how you get ahead without working harder than you're currently working? How do you get a raise without showing you've put in the requisite work? How do you gain the experience you need to move from junior to senior other than working harder. I'd say you could get there with time. But how do you make future possiblities happen in the present without working harder.
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stupidbird 8y ago
"hustle culture" is a scam that's tricking you into robbing yourself of worker's rights I suppose when it comes to the advertising industry, hustle culture is at least better than misogyny and alcoholism
- i-am-charmander 8y ago
  A culture with a major component being the consumption of alcohol does not escape advertising, FWIW.
- dmux 8y ago
  Would setting up an LLC for yourself help protect some of those rights?
  - stupidbird 8y ago
    Probably not. As an LLC you might also be entering a whole new world devoid of worker rights by being considered a contractor rather than an employee — which of course means you don't qualify for benefits. Ask a freelancer about how wonderful their healthcare options are. The American variety of capitalism has successfully vilified unions and coined nonsense like "hustle" and "gig economy" to make it seem like this shift in work came from the bottom-up, but it's all just a guise to cut benefits and wages. It's essentially a system that rewards executives for doing anything possible to exploit labor as much as the law allows for. If you don't believe me, just look at the ever-increasing gap between employee and executive pay. Or check out the salary plateau despite the enormous increases in worker productivity. We've been suckered into doing more for less.
  - asdff 8y ago
    It would probably just confuse HR directors and your application would get passed over.
rando1812 8y ago
Seems fitting that this was on Forbes just yesterday - https://www.forbes.com/sites/alizalicht/2018/11/04/how-to-start-a-side-hustle https://www.forbes.com/sites/alizalicht/2018/11/04/how-to-st...
davidwitt415 8y ago
Nothing really new except the social media amplifier. After all, the Ad industry has been defined by this quote since the 60s: 'Please don't tell my mother I work in Advertising, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.' -David Ogilvie
mslong 8y ago
I don't think "hustling" has to be synonymous with overworking. When I think of hustling I think of my dad who used to pay for his life traveling around Europe by buying, driving, and selling cars in different countries he was visiting. Or how he was able to spot a pair of good tires in the junkyard that he could buy for 50 bucks but sell for 500. I always felt hustling meant you could see small opportunities in the world that could make you money, basically out of the knowledge that most people aren't paying attention and turn their "money-making" brain off when they leave the office.
- asdff 8y ago
  Hustling would be if your dad was buying more and more cars at a time, making more and more profit, eventually reaching a point where if he were to flip more cars he would need to hire people, and doing so. Hustling is exponential growth, not stopping at comfortable profits.
olivermarks 8y ago
https://youtu.be/zBfwIWblz5E https://youtu.be/zBfwIWblz5E Gary Vanyerchuk, IMO king of hustle culture BS, explaining why his glassdoor reviews by ex employees and employees used to be so bad.
robot 8y ago
Hustle != Struggle. The original meaning of the hustle culture is that you creatively find your way into an expected result, often creating value along the way. For example, instead of simply spending money for advertising, you create a valuable piece of content and share it in places your audience hangs out. Then repeat this and be consistent until you get to a result. Instead of using quick and lazy methods, you achieved something, often creating value for others along the way, and the whole activity was a 'hustle'. You can hustle 9 till 5 and be done with it. Though, I do get that if you were more persistent and focused on a result, this can easily become 9 till 7 or 12. So yes, while the term in my opinion was a positive one, it is worth being cautious when explaining it.
paganel 8y ago
> it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.” This sounds really dystopian, a mindset like this genuinely frightens me.
jimbokun 8y ago
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg
Justsignedup 8y ago
Hustle is an interesting concept. Most of the time the hustle is making sure the hours at work and at home are effective and not slacking off. Sometimes it means that as you build a business shit happens at unexpected times so make sure that when an opportunity comes by you take it and don't say oh but it's 7pm and I'm tired. However I never take it to mean that you should work 50 hour weeks until you collapse. And so far this has been the mentality pushed by fiverr and other companies because it means that they get to profit off your barely profitable labor. Having to work 60 hours a week is not a hussle. It is a horrible situation.
pl0x 8y ago
Gary Vaynerchuk is one of those clowns that encourages people to work to their bones and sometimes comes off as selling snake out. Leonie Dawnson did a great write up of him. https://leoniedawson.com/the-horror-pitchfest-an-honest-review-of-gary-vaynerchuk-success-squared-and-success-resources-australia/ https://leoniedawson.com/the-horror-pitchfest-an-honest-revi...
- jsonne 8y ago
  Getting hit with her course (For only $79!!!!1!!11!) at the end of the article is such a hilarious pot kettle situation and lack of self awareness I'm frankly stunned.
gowld 8y ago
This article is apparently about nothing, and it doesn't example" how" anything happened. People show off for other people to gain status and manipulate others. This is not news.
munchbunny 8y ago
I know this is a snarky comment, but... is it surprising that an industry built entirely on framing things to look better has a problem of workers having to frame themselves to look like better workers? I do think we should aspire to better, but the extra image consciousness seems like the common thread here.
- asdff 8y ago
  The problem is, this is affecting every industry. I have friends in accounting for instance, and if you aren't prompt with your emails over the weekend, if you aren't early at work and late to leave, etc, you will not be promoted. I have friends in law and its the same thing; If you aren't putting up 55+ hr weeks, you are going to get an awkward reference and won't get your next job. The problem is universal in early careers, and entirely absent in mid to late careers. We all know that for X amount of entry level hires there's only Y amount at the top of the food chain, but when people are being pushed out of the field for not being able to devote all their available waking hours to an entry level position rather than rewarding real skill and prowess, the situation is completely untenable. In 25 years, senior positions won't be filled by the most clever or bright workers, but whoever was able to slog through being overworked and underpaid and put their life on hold for their first 15 years out of college.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    That sounds like a stupid human cognitive bias of judging powerful less harshly by following their self serving standards. The CEO made a mistake and has a problem by showing up to work drunk. The janitor doing so is an irresponsible waste of space.
ACow_Adonis 8y ago
Out of curiosity, as a non-american, am i the only one who understands the word "hustle" to be synonymous-with/frequently associated with con-men, shysters, spruikers, boosters, etc? I mean, for me it has almost no connotations of busyness or hard work, but its basically all about defrauding/image-projection. The phrase "side-hustle" stemming from an almost ironic ghetto-esque-referential joke: like a scam or something a low level gangster or drug pusher is doing on the side to make money. But with complete openness that a hustle is, like his other activities, criminal and fraudulent...
- nitwit005 8y ago
  That's also what it means for me (California). But I am aware of the other usage. I haven't heard it used positively outside of music.
- hateful 8y ago
  I had to come to the comments here to figure out what they were meaning by "hustle". I had assumed what you thought and was thinking the article was about some sort of gorilla marketing.
germinalphrase 8y ago
So where’s the exit lane? If you’re willing to move to a low COL location and work remotely, how do you assure yourself a modest, if reliable, income?
BLKNSLVR 8y ago
>To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. I often find that the people that try the hardest to make it appear they're working hard are only working hard at maintaining that appearance, and are often doing only the basics of their job. If you're trying so hard to prove it, it's coming at the cost of actually doing the job you're trying to prove you're working so hard at. The double-irony is that in many cases, this over-proof effort is needed because of Managers that are dis-engaged from their subordinates and only notice the sizzle, not the steak, because the Managers Manager is the same, and so on up the chain. In time, the side-hustle will be all that's left. Which could already be the case given that people now live off their earnings as an "influencer", and if they have a day-job then that's just their side-hustle.

208 points by ilamont 8y ago

So, this is the industry that: - puts flashing colored boxes in front of our faces at any possible opportunity - requires us to click through multiple popups to access almost any for-profit website - has normalized the act of wasting human life at a mass scale by injecting multi-minute time-wasting sessions in activities "How hustle culture took over"? It's a hustle by default. I'd call it a swindle.

village-idiot 8y ago
I always thought that hustler was synonymous with confidence artist or a low level scammer. That it’s now considered a positive word is fascinating to me.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Hustler yes, but hustling is a verb, often used in e.g. sports movies / events.
- nkrisc 8y ago
  A hustler hustles, but one who hustles isn't always a hustler.
  - gitgud 8y ago
    Poetic, but that could be said about anything; A programmer programs, but one who programs isn't always a programmer...
    - nkrisc 8y ago
      Yes, it could be said about anything. And if someone thought that someone who programs must be a programmer I'd have said the same you said.
- dec0dedab0de 8y ago
  I first learned the word hustler in the mid 80s when my soccer coach had a "hustler of the day" award for every game. It went to whoever worked the hardest that day.
- sin7 8y ago
  Hustler is used a lot in rap. It's always been there. A hustler hustles. They put in work. They are in the grind. It's all about turning a nickel into a dime. In other words, they sell a lot of crack. Nothing deep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbwTCrnktY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbwTCrnktY - Cassidy - I'm a hustler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6CbP4kVno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6CbP4kVno - Lil Wayne - Hustler Muzic
  - haskellandchill 8y ago
    Selling drugs is pretty deep, try it sometime. You really feel every dollar. Now I’m more connected to money and survival. Great capitalism experience 10/10.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      Depends on the drug and where you are. Selling crack on Chicago’s southwest side used to be more fatal than Texas’ death row.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Reminds me of the other usage of hustling which is an incongruous clash with the macho image - male prostitution mostly to other men and the occasional older women. Not judging either and I fully understand that it is a serious situation - just noting the inadvertent humor in linguistic drift. Technically I believe it often meant any odd job to make money whether legal, illegal or a grey area. So selling weed, shoveling a driveway, and busking where you could get kicked out at worst all count.
- cambalache 8y ago
  The word was gentrified.
liftbigweights 8y ago
Don't forget ads in movie trailers! Now that is "ingenious". Forcing you to watch an ad to watch an ad. The guy who thought of that deserves "Advertiser of the Year" award and a "Crime against Humanity" charge.
- deleted 8y ago
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deleted 8y ago
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balthasar 8y ago
The employees still deserve to be respected and allowed to live normal lives outside of this corporate "hustler culture."
- esotericn 8y ago
  Why should employment be treated as a shroud? If you spend the majority of your time working to abuse your fellow man, I don't respect that, and see no reason why I should. That is not, and should not be accepted as, a "normal life". Advertising companies are a disease.
  - tome 8y ago
    (I found this usage of "shroud" interesting. It seems to be in the same sense as "corporate veil": https://www.guffo.in/lifting-corporate-veil-circumstances-can-lifted/ https://www.guffo.in/lifting-corporate-veil-circumstances-ca... )
    - epicureanideal 8y ago
      I agree... this is an interesting concept we should explore. As an analogy to the corporate veil, basically anything a person would do in their employment would generally be forgiven as "well, you've gotta make a living", unless it reaches a point where it's sufficiently morally wrong to still hold the person responsible for their actions on the job. For example, if their job were Winston Smith's (George Orwell character) job of editing historical news articles to distort the past, then we might say Winston is still personally responsible. The difficulty here is holding CEOs responsible for crimes with "piercing the corporate veil" is holding a high level, powerful decision-maker, with options, responsible... rather than a person who might be trying to support 5 kids and some elderly parents, and couldn't just choose to sweep the street instead of working at the Ministry of Information for 6 figures.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - edm0nd 8y ago
lanewinfield 8y ago
Hatred of advertising at a larger scale, nice. How are those people on said websites (and almost any other medium) supposed to make money?
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > How are those people on said websites (and almost any other medium) supposed to make money? 1. Have less annoying ads that respect the user. 2. Charge money. 3. Some novel funding model that's unexplored because obnoxious ads dominate everything and suck all the air out of the room.
  - lanewinfield 8y ago
    Let me preface this by a large percentage of people in advertising are not creating #1. BUT: 1. That's fair, but it takes time and talent to create these. 2. Clearly that isn't working; see almost any news site in existence 3. This is a hope, and a nice one. https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      3. OK they have a different business model and lots of content partners, but they won't tell you what it is, just invite you to sign up. I'm guessing it involves monetizing email addresses. If this content free proposition is your idea of a nice prospect, what is it based on? Anyone can say they have laudable goals, like beauty contestants who aspire to bring about world peace and end hunger. Perhaps they're just saying nice things without any real capability or intention to deliver?
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    you know, sometimes I wonder how the internet would look like today if every time you loaded content from a server some money would automatically go their way (a tiny payment compensating for server time of sorts)
    - 8y ago

keiferski 8y ago

Just some random thoughts here...this strikes me as a consequence of the contemporary idea of work having to be the end-all to one’s identity, purpose and meaning in life. Advertising, perhaps the ‘original’ fundamentally meaningless career field to spawn from consumer capitalism, used to be mostly about just communicating your product/service. Eventually it morphed into lifestyle marketing and at this point has reached its ultimate conclusion: advertising workers themselves have drunk the Koolaid that used to only be peddled to consumers. I wonder if we’ll ever see a return to simple “hey, we make this thing, you might find it useful.”

ThomPete 8y ago
What you are already seeing is that advertising is baked into the product instead. I.e. the actual features, functionality or problem solved are themselves finding their ways to the right users. It used to be that the advertisers used their control over the primarily one way distribution channels to promote their products. Today it's the consumers who promote the products through the multiway channels and then only if you have exhausted most of your organic, social and viral growth channels do you promote through one-way channels again.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
I think it's a consequence of abundance. If you have a grocery store that has cantaloupes, and that's unusual because most grocery stores don't have cantaloupes most of the time, you just hang a sign in the window that says "Cantaloupes". Maybe you put a print ad in the newspaper. Those who decide they want them will come to your store. When they're all gone, well, your advertising did its job. But if every grocery store has cantaloupes year-round, you're not going to sell many extra cantaloupes by hanging a sign in your window. You need to get clever. And behold, advertising-as-hustle is born.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  this seems accurate to me, although I would phrase it as competition rather than abundance. When everyone has the same product on offer, differentiation comes from how you position that product in the market. This trainer is for aspiring marathon runners, this one is for aspiring basketball players. The reality is the difference between the two is minimal and they're both just trying to focus on selling to the subset of people with a particular self-image.

sharemywin 8y ago

I think companies are missing something. Just because I like to work on side projects doesn't mean I want to work for free for you.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Oh but you wouldn't work for them, you'd work for yourself! That's what they want to sell you anyway, so they have no obligations whatsoever to their employees.

Novashi 8y ago

>Hustle is public. And in the ad industry, publicity matters. There's your reasoning right there. I've drank a bit of kool-aid myself. It feels normal now to overlay a level of 'hustling advertising' because that's what the business culture does and you don't want to be the one guy in a client meeting who looks pained to be there. Another way of thinking about it: would you learn to do a little dancing for a good salary + benefits? It quickly becomes second-nature to at least be engaged in the hustling adverts and culture meetings. The real trap (which is toxic) is feeling like hustling is a competition and a second job. This stuff can push introverts to the sidelines though, and that can make their real world suffer if they feel isolated because they don't participate as much.

esotericn 8y ago
> would you learn to do a little dancing for a good salary + benefits? This isn't an appropriate analogy because dancing is harmless.

gadders 8y ago

I think "hustle" is over now. Someone pronounce the time of death.

nradov 8y ago

The "hustle" culture has been a key part of MLM (pyramid schemes) for many years. It's sad to see that crossing over into legitimate businesses.

bachmeier 8y ago

> it wasn’t just working hard — it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.” That reminds of this blog post by Jamie Zawinski[1]: "What is true is that for a VC's business model to work, it's necessary for you to give up your life in order for him to become richer. Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in." [1] [redacted]

Ygg2 8y ago
EDIT: Make sure you don't click the link but copy and paste it. It seems the author is intercepting all traffic from HN site to an interesting image.
- eumenides1 8y ago
  I love that the author is doing that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- canadianwriter 8y ago
  The url is cut off in the web view of HN so I can't even copy and paste it.... nice.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Context-click to get the URL. If you can click it, you can copy it.
- CaptSpify 8y ago
  alternatively: don't send them the referrer

apatters 8y ago

I'm American but I've lived overseas for nearly a decade, and I hardly ever go back. In recent years when I meet other Americans who are visiting my city, I often get this vague feeling that they're just trying too hard in one way or another. Maybe they're working too hard, or trying too hard to impress someone, or get attention, or assert themselves. I don't know if I've changed or if America is changed or if it's something else entirely. What I do wonder is, what's with all these Americans working themselves to the bone? I own an agency which is one of the types of businesses called out in this article. I tell all my employees very clearly, whenever possible, work 40 hours and then call it a week. We also happen to be mostly remote so I tell them, within reason, respecting a small number of important calls/meeting times etc. you can put in those hours whenever you want, preferably after a great night's sleep. There's nothing like "you're measured by how many hours you bill out," nor does there need to be, if we have more than 40 hours of work per person per week, we hire more people. Where does this all come from? This is an honest question. Why are people working themselves to death in the US and having this crazy mindset that doing stuff which puts you on the verge of a breakdown is good? When did this start? Is it good for health/happiness? Definitely not Is it good for productivity? Maybe, but I doubt it

djpr 8y ago
I'm curious, where do you work now and who are your clients? I worked in Asia and the work culture with the Chinese (mainlanders) and those of Chinese-descent (Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Singaporean) was more challenging than working with Americans. When I was in advertising, stories of people working and staying (as in sleeping over) during the weekends was not uncommon. Clients would call me at 11pm asking for a concall with my staff. 12 hours a day for weeks on end, including working weekends, were common place. We were able to hire great talent just by promising that we'd never ask our staff to work weekends and hardly ever after 7pm on a workday. We had mostly US clients so that was an easy thing for us to day. This culture shifted a bit when stories of young agency people in Hong Kong and other Asian cities dying from exhaustion became a big deal 4-5 years ago. But its still very workaholic culture. Don't get me wrong, Americans work insane hours compared to Indonesians or the French, but parts of Asia is a whole other level of madness.

someguydave 8y ago

Meanwhile over in this other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271834 We learn that you aren't really an "entrepreneur" unless you are a salesman. Business without "hustle" is unthinkable?

varjag 8y ago
Every traditional business is living from sales, it's incredible you find this shocking.
- someguydave 8y ago
  I suppose it's surprising to me because I interpret the word "hustle" to mean something like "tricking the customer into paying more than needed to turn a profit on a trade"

nimbius 8y ago

As a professional diesel mechanic, I find most of the points in this article pretty difficult to understand outside the context of, say, Hollywood? or maybe iPhones? Do programmers really have to show this kind of reckless drive? This hasnt been a thing in tradecraft since...forever i dont think...and if it is, its punished pretty severely. An example: if im rebuilding the idler and pitman assembly on a fourteen ton truck, theres no hustle. there is no competition to do it "the fastest." You do it right, because if that assembly fails in a turn you could cause a pretty horrible accident. Depending on what that professional driver hauls (benzene, chlorine, pesticides, etc...), you might find your "hustle" on the evening news as the police evacuate some poor suburb. If you're writing a web application, shouldnt you take care to make sure its secure and well written? Just because nobody had to pick hair out of a windshield doesnt mean a hacked webapp doesnt ruin just as many lives.

alxlaz 8y ago
It varies from one company to another. Responsible managers (and, by extension, companies) don't encourage this kind of behaviour, precisely because when it goes south, it tends to blow up in your face, badly, especially in heavily-regulated fields where legal responsibility is involved. Irresponsible managers (and, again, companies) encourage this kind of behaviour because they think it better aligns with their business goals somehow.
ensiferum 8y ago
"sure its secure and well written?" There's no money in that, so why bother. Unfortunately.
aaron_oxenrider 8y ago
Office work is much different and programming is certainly different than a hands on job as you describe. It is far too often that the 'move fast and break things' ideology is pushed to meet deadlines or be the first to market, even if the product is broken. Also, more similar to what you are familiar with, dealership mechanics and jiffy lube style shops are closer to the hustle mentality than your professional role. They are bound by time constraints because normal consumers will only pay so much for your time and there are standard limits to charge for a particular job. If you take longer than the standard time you can charge for, then the loss is yours.

josefresco 8y ago

"Of course, every industry has its fair share of hustle idolization, but ad agencies and advertising in general are unique" Expand your horizons! Ad agencies are not unique. Boasting about the number of hours your work is one of the oldest, most tired tropes in many industries. I have clients across all sectors that simultaneously boast and complain about their long hours and how committed they are to their business, or employer. Early rise, stay late, skip lunches, skip vacations, work from home even on holidays - I've heard it all - how is this unique to just the advertising / agency industry?

everybodyknows 8y ago

Hustle Culture: What does it mean, exactly? From article: >"maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce" >To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. How anyone can imagine this is supportive of creative work, I just cannot get my head around.

sosuke 8y ago

To answer some of the questions as to why people do this. To try to get ahead. To try and advance. To move up. If you don't hustle, if you aren't trying to advance then how could you ever expect to move up financially? Think of it in the small scale at a fast food joint. You bus tables, sweep etc. If you do just that you can do just that forever. You can also do more to try and get promoted. You can also do less and get fired. If you want more money per paycheck then you'll want to get promoted. To get promoted you have to hustle. You have to do more. No one will give it to you if you weren't already born into it.

sosuke 8y ago
To my downvote. Tell me how you get ahead without working harder than you're currently working? How do you get a raise without showing you've put in the requisite work? How do you gain the experience you need to move from junior to senior other than working harder. I'd say you could get there with time. But how do you make future possiblities happen in the present without working harder.
- deleted 8y ago
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stupidbird 8y ago

"hustle culture" is a scam that's tricking you into robbing yourself of worker's rights I suppose when it comes to the advertising industry, hustle culture is at least better than misogyny and alcoholism

i-am-charmander 8y ago
A culture with a major component being the consumption of alcohol does not escape advertising, FWIW.
dmux 8y ago
Would setting up an LLC for yourself help protect some of those rights?
- stupidbird 8y ago
  Probably not. As an LLC you might also be entering a whole new world devoid of worker rights by being considered a contractor rather than an employee — which of course means you don't qualify for benefits. Ask a freelancer about how wonderful their healthcare options are. The American variety of capitalism has successfully vilified unions and coined nonsense like "hustle" and "gig economy" to make it seem like this shift in work came from the bottom-up, but it's all just a guise to cut benefits and wages. It's essentially a system that rewards executives for doing anything possible to exploit labor as much as the law allows for. If you don't believe me, just look at the ever-increasing gap between employee and executive pay. Or check out the salary plateau despite the enormous increases in worker productivity. We've been suckered into doing more for less.
- asdff 8y ago
  It would probably just confuse HR directors and your application would get passed over.

rando1812 8y ago

Seems fitting that this was on Forbes just yesterday - https://www.forbes.com/sites/alizalicht/2018/11/04/how-to-start-a-side-hustle https://www.forbes.com/sites/alizalicht/2018/11/04/how-to-st...

davidwitt415 8y ago

Nothing really new except the social media amplifier. After all, the Ad industry has been defined by this quote since the 60s: 'Please don't tell my mother I work in Advertising, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.' -David Ogilvie

mslong 8y ago

I don't think "hustling" has to be synonymous with overworking. When I think of hustling I think of my dad who used to pay for his life traveling around Europe by buying, driving, and selling cars in different countries he was visiting. Or how he was able to spot a pair of good tires in the junkyard that he could buy for 50 bucks but sell for 500. I always felt hustling meant you could see small opportunities in the world that could make you money, basically out of the knowledge that most people aren't paying attention and turn their "money-making" brain off when they leave the office.

asdff 8y ago
Hustling would be if your dad was buying more and more cars at a time, making more and more profit, eventually reaching a point where if he were to flip more cars he would need to hire people, and doing so. Hustling is exponential growth, not stopping at comfortable profits.

olivermarks 8y ago

https://youtu.be/zBfwIWblz5E https://youtu.be/zBfwIWblz5E Gary Vanyerchuk, IMO king of hustle culture BS, explaining why his glassdoor reviews by ex employees and employees used to be so bad.

robot 8y ago

Hustle != Struggle. The original meaning of the hustle culture is that you creatively find your way into an expected result, often creating value along the way. For example, instead of simply spending money for advertising, you create a valuable piece of content and share it in places your audience hangs out. Then repeat this and be consistent until you get to a result. Instead of using quick and lazy methods, you achieved something, often creating value for others along the way, and the whole activity was a 'hustle'. You can hustle 9 till 5 and be done with it. Though, I do get that if you were more persistent and focused on a result, this can easily become 9 till 7 or 12. So yes, while the term in my opinion was a positive one, it is worth being cautious when explaining it.

paganel 8y ago

> it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.” This sounds really dystopian, a mindset like this genuinely frightens me.

jimbokun 8y ago

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg

Justsignedup 8y ago

Hustle is an interesting concept. Most of the time the hustle is making sure the hours at work and at home are effective and not slacking off. Sometimes it means that as you build a business shit happens at unexpected times so make sure that when an opportunity comes by you take it and don't say oh but it's 7pm and I'm tired. However I never take it to mean that you should work 50 hour weeks until you collapse. And so far this has been the mentality pushed by fiverr and other companies because it means that they get to profit off your barely profitable labor. Having to work 60 hours a week is not a hussle. It is a horrible situation.

pl0x 8y ago

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of those clowns that encourages people to work to their bones and sometimes comes off as selling snake out. Leonie Dawnson did a great write up of him. https://leoniedawson.com/the-horror-pitchfest-an-honest-review-of-gary-vaynerchuk-success-squared-and-success-resources-australia/ https://leoniedawson.com/the-horror-pitchfest-an-honest-revi...

jsonne 8y ago
Getting hit with her course (For only $79!!!!1!!11!) at the end of the article is such a hilarious pot kettle situation and lack of self awareness I'm frankly stunned.

gowld 8y ago

This article is apparently about nothing, and it doesn't example" how" anything happened. People show off for other people to gain status and manipulate others. This is not news.

munchbunny 8y ago

I know this is a snarky comment, but... is it surprising that an industry built entirely on framing things to look better has a problem of workers having to frame themselves to look like better workers? I do think we should aspire to better, but the extra image consciousness seems like the common thread here.

asdff 8y ago
The problem is, this is affecting every industry. I have friends in accounting for instance, and if you aren't prompt with your emails over the weekend, if you aren't early at work and late to leave, etc, you will not be promoted. I have friends in law and its the same thing; If you aren't putting up 55+ hr weeks, you are going to get an awkward reference and won't get your next job. The problem is universal in early careers, and entirely absent in mid to late careers. We all know that for X amount of entry level hires there's only Y amount at the top of the food chain, but when people are being pushed out of the field for not being able to devote all their available waking hours to an entry level position rather than rewarding real skill and prowess, the situation is completely untenable. In 25 years, senior positions won't be filled by the most clever or bright workers, but whoever was able to slog through being overworked and underpaid and put their life on hold for their first 15 years out of college.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That sounds like a stupid human cognitive bias of judging powerful less harshly by following their self serving standards. The CEO made a mistake and has a problem by showing up to work drunk. The janitor doing so is an irresponsible waste of space.

ACow_Adonis 8y ago

Out of curiosity, as a non-american, am i the only one who understands the word "hustle" to be synonymous-with/frequently associated with con-men, shysters, spruikers, boosters, etc? I mean, for me it has almost no connotations of busyness or hard work, but its basically all about defrauding/image-projection. The phrase "side-hustle" stemming from an almost ironic ghetto-esque-referential joke: like a scam or something a low level gangster or drug pusher is doing on the side to make money. But with complete openness that a hustle is, like his other activities, criminal and fraudulent...

nitwit005 8y ago
That's also what it means for me (California). But I am aware of the other usage. I haven't heard it used positively outside of music.
hateful 8y ago
I had to come to the comments here to figure out what they were meaning by "hustle". I had assumed what you thought and was thinking the article was about some sort of gorilla marketing.

germinalphrase 8y ago

So where’s the exit lane? If you’re willing to move to a low COL location and work remotely, how do you assure yourself a modest, if reliable, income?

BLKNSLVR 8y ago

>To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard. I often find that the people that try the hardest to make it appear they're working hard are only working hard at maintaining that appearance, and are often doing only the basics of their job. If you're trying so hard to prove it, it's coming at the cost of actually doing the job you're trying to prove you're working so hard at. The double-irony is that in many cases, this over-proof effort is needed because of Managers that are dis-engaged from their subordinates and only notice the sizzle, not the steak, because the Managers Manager is the same, and so on up the chain. In time, the side-hustle will be all that's left. Which could already be the case given that people now live off their earnings as an "influencer", and if they have a day-job then that's just their side-hustle.