Last month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered a provocative talk at Stanford's School of Engineering. He claimed that Google is falling behind Anthropic and OpenAI in the latest wave of technological innovation because Google prioritizes engineers' work-life balance over winning the innovation race. The recorded talk went viral on YouTube sparking widespread controversy and heated debate—before mysteriously being taken down. Schmidt’s assertion is puzzling.
Does Google truly prioritize its employees' well-being over the relentless pursuit of technological dominance? I have my doubts. What’s certain is that Google, like every tech giant in Silicon Valley, is fiercely committed to staying ahead in the innovation game. The truth they all know too well, yet rarely acknowledge, is that there’s a trade-off between maintaining engineers’ work-life balance and driving the breakneck pace of innovation—it’s the elephant in the room. So, how does Silicon Valley navigate this dilemma? What does the reality of engineers' creative work and their work-life balance actually look like? To explore these pressing questions, my book—Playing to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm—embarks on an ethnographic journey into the core of a U.S. tech company, pseudonymously named "Behemoth."
Squeezing Out Creativity
Playing to Submission starts by reviewing a paradox embedded in the information technology sector. On the one hand, two decades after the dot-com bubble, capitalism has continued to evolve toward “informational capitalism,” where creativity becomes the principal productive force. The informational capitalists’ gamble on technological innovation gives engineers access to privileged positions in the labor market and inherent power in the production process. Yet, the desperate demand for a constant flow of high-quality creative ideas fuels greater compromise in workers’ autonomy and freedom. On the other hand, to maintain their edge, tech firms push their employees into a relentless "permanent-beta" production mode. They are tasked with constantly fixing issues and patching bugs as they arise. This way of working squeezes every drop of creativity out of workers in the fastest, most intense way possible. But without engineers sacrificing their work-life balance in "crunch mode"—working 100-hour weeks—this system would collapse. The question then arises: why do these seemingly empowered workers submit to such grueling conditions?
At first glance, the U.S. tech industry’s primary ways of navigating the labor dilemma described above are simple and brutal: tech companies aggressively recruit new graduates and replace senior employees with fresh talent (for example, the median age of employees at Google and Facebook is between 28 and 29). Although these new engineers are energetic about technological innovation, their creativity is difficult to discipline. For instance, these young employees’ resentment levels rise dramatically when their prioritization of technological innovation over profits conflicts with the priorities of their firm and its financial backers.
As resentment simmers, the industry has devised a cunning solution: exploiting the "gamer traits" of this generation. Born into the rise of the video game industry, these young engineers embody the "gamer generation." Many self-identify as "gamers" or "game addicts" who are driven to programming by their love of video games. Their long-term gaming experience has equipped them with quick learning, fast reactions, modder traits (i.e., players’ habit of improving companies’ video games by endlessly tweaking the game system, providing feedback, and fixing bugs), and a crisis mentality—traits that informational capitalists have turned into a gold mine.
It seems inevitable, then, that informational capitalists developed labor games as a strategy to extract surplus, and eventually turned work into a game. Capitalists simulate the excitement of video games within the workplace by capturing engineers' imaginations with characters, plots, and adventures that blur the line between work and play. To understand these labor games on the engineering floor, my study follows the labor research tradition launched by Michael Burawoy, a Chicago School labor ethnographer who described a game of “making-out” used on the manufacturing shop-floor to motivate competition between workers in a piece-rate system and drive high levels of production.
Gaming the System: How Labor Games Trap Engineers
After immersing myself in the Behemoth for over thirteen months, I discovered that gaming had become a pervasive part of every aspect of the engineers' work lives.
Tongyu Wu - Manager’s desk: a beer tap next to his desk (used for software launching celebrations) and a toy gun on the desk
For example, simulation games have become an integral part of core software development at Behemoth. By incorporating gamification techniques, including mythological storylines and heroic characters, managers create an artificial video-gaming environment within the development process. For instance, the tech lead of the Knight team, known as "Bloodseeker," once led his team in organizing a “defensive battle” to protect their beloved team poster from being taken by a sister team. The poster featured a clever twist on a Game of Thrones quote—“In the game of security, we only play to win”—depicting the security engineers as brave and loyal warriors, fearless in the face of a security challenge. The Knight engineers felt such a strong connection to this poster that they strategized a defense to ensure it remained a symbol of the company’s idealized vision of their work life.
To further enhance the gaming atmosphere, Behemoth encourages engineers to blur the lines between gaming and work, relationships, and activities. Engineers collaborate as development teammates during the day, and when they return home, they continue as teammates in the virtual world, playing video games together. They view this gaming time as essential for building rapport, which they believe is critical for their software development collaboration. Eventually, the boundaries between work and personal life fade, leaving engineers with little separation between the two. As a result, their leisure time becomes intertwined with the labor cycle. Ben’s story is particularly telling—as the model worker and gamer, he often expressed how lucky he felt to work at Behemoth, where he could earn a living doing what he loved while spending time with like-minded friends. However, shortly after I left Behemoth, I learned that Ben abruptly quit—one day, he simply stood up from his desk, handed his badge to the manager, and walked out.
The Consequences of Gaming Culture: A Toxic Work Environment and the Erosion of Work-Life Balance
These games construct a world with "no exit," where the boundaries between work and home life disintegrate. Engineers' leisure time is co-opted into the labor cycle, and their "gamer subjectivity"—disruptive creativity, crisis mentality, modder traits—is exploited to fuel the innovation machine. Gaming used to be an escape from work, a way for engineers to disconnect from the space of production and engage in a precious nonwork space of reproduction, now it mirrors the pressures of production. The inevitable result is burnout. Engineers like Ben, a rising star at Behemoth, are walking away from their jobs with a simple message: "I couldn’t do this any more." Ben's story is not unique. Engineers are leaving in droves, as evidenced by the shockingly short average tenure at Behemoth—just 1.88 years among sixty-six interviewees, even below the already low Silicon Valley average of 3.8 years.
Engineers’ quitting should not, however, be considered an expression of dissatisfaction, let alone resistance. They view this exit strategy with a “take it or leave it” attitude combined with a belief in meritocracy. The general sentiment is that if you want to survive in this work environment, you must force yourself to become more creative and efficient. Engineers’ reluctance to contest or rebel may be related to the “chaotic fun culture” constructed through the field of games. Once labor games are positioned to enable free play and perceived as an expression of individualistic interests—and once engineers internalize such a discourse—there is little or no space for them to organize resistance, especially large-scale, collective resistance.
In the end, the true tragedy lies in the engineers' willingness to be complicit in their own exploitation. Their passion for games blinds them to the reality that their overwork is not a byproduct of their enthusiasm but a tool of exploitation. Games are often embedded in the work process, and winning can enhance an engineer’s status and respect in their workplace. As a result, they can become willing conspirators in their own exploitation as long as they are winning gaming and work-related challenges. The system, cleverly disguised as a game, ensures they stay divided, skeptical, and ultimately, exploitable.
Playing to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm is available through Temple University Press.
