[mbillie1]

Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.

But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"