I did not go to MIT but spent my entire career in Boston startups and tech. It is impossible to overstate how influential CSAIL was (and is?) in addition to it sounding here like a wonderful place.
This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit? Why did he feel so little control?
Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
“The vehicle is stable near or at our intended landing site,” Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines said during a NASA news conference on Friday. “We do have communications with the lander.”
This is the quality of communication we can expect from commercial mission CEOs.
In the startup world and in much of the tech corporate world in practice predictability is valued above all else. It's because investors, perhaps reasonably, value and therefore demand predictions.
But as we know that is fundamentally difficult. So many tech orgs make up a "hero-hustle" culture to compensate. "We're top 10% and we work all the time, this is the best we can do!"
Strong leadership is strong leadership, building the right product development culture is really hard.
The first two machines I touched were a CDC 6400 and DEC 20 at Lehigh University in the 70s.
Both - while built by large teams - "felt" like they were designed by a single person, complete consistency across hw, OS, tools, and apps (programs). It's so foreign from the experience we have now it's difficult for me to describe.
"Middle management" gets a bad rap I think, I moved from big company middle management positions to startup founding teams and back my entire career. More senior managers in big companies typically lacked operational chops.
Just the questions show you may be on the right path. I'd look for emotional blocks inhibiting the implementation/coding work. In my aged experience virtually all procrastination is based in emotion.
"If you were to heed Timnit’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared."