Redefining Productivity: Hustle Culture Isn’t Helping Your Tech Team

Hustle culture is burning out cybersecurity and channel teams in the name of productivity. Here’s how redefining productivity through alignment, efficiency, and wellbeing can drive sustainable success for service and technical professionals.

Say it with me: productivity is more than output; it’s alignment. You read that right – productivity is about alignment, not just output. Too often we measure productivity by how much we can deliver and the speed at which we deliver it. And while KPIs vary across the ecosystem, our operational definition is incomplete. From how many tickets are closed and how quickly. Calls answered. Tickets closed. Code shipped. These are measures of production but not true productivity.

True productivity, especially for technical teams, requires working in alignment to build efficiencies and improve wellbeing. Focusing on organizational alignment with goals and values builds efficiency, ultimately improving the actual capacity of your people. It’s not just about doing more; it’s about doing what matters better.

Let’s break it down:

• Alignment: Are your technical priorities in sync with business goals, or are your engineers chasing disconnected tasks?
• Efficiency: Are you optimizing workflows—or just adding tools to compensate for unclear processes?
• Wellbeing: Are your people thriving, or surviving? Burnout isn’t just a personal issue; it’s an operational risk.

A productive technical team isn’t the one working the longest hours. It’s the one working with clarity, creativity, and cohesion. That’s how resilience is built into systems and people.

Service, Security And The Channel: The High-Wire Act

Technical professionals in service and security roles face constant pressure. You’re in reactive mode more often than not—troubleshooting, patching, preventing breaches, keeping clients calm. And for MSPs and channel partners, that stress is doubled by the responsibility of being the bridge between vendors and end users.

Productivity in these environments must account for complexity:

• Security teams can’t be productive without trust, tooling, and time to think proactively,not just respond to incidents.
• Channel pros can’t deliver quality service if they’re working from 6 AM to midnight across multiple client SLAs with no strategic breathing room.
• And everyone loses when teams are too burned out to adapt, upskill, or innovate.

Hustle Culture: A System Disguised as Self-Discipline

Hustle culture is the belief that constant work is the path to success. And if you’re not hustling, you’re falling behind. It’s glamorized in tech: Red Bulls at midnight. “Crushing it” every day. Side gigs on side gigs.

And yes, for many, especially folks supporting families, navigating debt, or trying to break generational cycles of working, a “9 to 5 and a 5 to 9” is a financial necessity. This isn’t a judgment on that reality.

But hustle culture becomes harmful when it’s sold as a virtue instead of a survival strategy.

Why it’s a problem:

• It rewards burnout over boundaries.
• It erases invisible labor (like mentoring, documentation, or DEI work).
• It ignores structural inequities, pretending everyone has the same hours, energy, or access.

The result? Teams that are exhausted, disengaged, and quietly quitting if not literally resigning.

What We Can Do Instead: Toward Sustainable Productivity

If we want high-functioning, people-centered technical teams, we have to change how we define and reward productivity.

Here are four ways to start:

• Reframe Productivity as Strategic Alignment: Ask “Does this drive value?” before asking, “How fast can we finish it?”
• Audit Your Tools and Meetings: Cut the clutter. Fewer tools and cleaner workflows beat more dashboards and constant context-switching.
• Build Psychological Safety: Encourage engineers to ask questions without fear. Security professionals need space to say, “I don’t know...yet.”
• Normalize Rest as Readiness: Create team norms that reward rest, not just recovery. A well-rested team is a well-defended one.

The Real Flex? A Team That Can Thrive, Not Just Survive

Here’s the truth: hustle might get you through a sprint, but it will wreck your marathon. And in the channel, in security, in tech we are in a marathon of change.

What if productivity wasn’t about working harder but working wiser? What if success was defined not by how many hours you grind, but by how well your team can learn, adapt, and breathe?

Let’s leave hustle culture behind. Let’s build teams that last.

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Photo by Garrhet Sampson on Unsplash