This is a sore subject for me because I think that there is a weird equivalence drawn between two fundamentally different groups: Companies led by sociopaths of the highest order and Companies with truly massive goals and a short timeline. There is certainly a venn diagram that would show good overlap between the two - but nobody is making the distinction. It's the second group that I think gets a bad reputation because of the first.

Pardon the military metaphor I am going to make, but it's the closest thing that I know of that can compare.

In the U.S. and most first world nations, you have two distinct groups within the military: The line military which makes up 95-99% of the force and special operations which is somewhere between 1-5%.

The line military generally works 7-4, has most weekends off and generally you can have a normal family life. There isn't much of a selection process for the troops and you only need to put in a huge effort for a small portion of the time. They mostly do low intensity training and in a really big conflict a subsection might see combat twice or three times.

Special Operations has a long selection and initial training process that can last years. This group is at the top of their game 90% of the time and is constantly in high intensity training. They see combat constantly regardless of if there is a big war going and a good portion have significant trouble maintaining a stable home or family life without significant effort from the spouse. If they start to fail, they get removed from the unit and sent to the line (fired). You've never seen "eat your own" like there is in Tier-1 Special Operations units - because you have to, to stay that good.

In my opinion, high tech, "disruptive" high growth companies by definition are the Special Operations groups of the business world. It's a tiny percent, but you have to be at the top of your game 90-99% of the time. That means dedicating your life to the job. That means hiring "killers" who are intensely driven.

The rest of the business world is the line and cannot, or do not want to be in that kind of "always on" 24/7 environment.

I think the disconnect is that there is a large group of people who aren't special operators, they are line soldiers, but they joined special operations companies. This is partly the fault of the company for not making it clear to them before hiring what they would be getting into, and partly their fault for not seeing the company for what it was.

This metaphor seems to apply to companies like SpaceX, Amazon, etc...

You can have a well run company with empathetic staff that crushes spirits constantly because they have such a high bar and a subset of their people were just not up to the task. "Your best isn't good enough" is a constant mantra during Special Operations selection and I don't see why such a bar would be any lower in an elite business organization.

This quote was great: "Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

This same quote has been applied to Harvard, Stanford, the US Military Academies, Goldman Sachs, EXXON etc...so it's not unique to tech by any means.

Any relation to Objectivism may only apply to that first group I mentioned before, but is certainly not a prerequisite for a company which has insanely high standards.