I don't think hustle culture alone is enough if there are no results in personal growth, mission, or economic growth. One of these factors must be exceptional to justify the unbalanced life required to do well in this industry.

As a pure SWE, the code / systems that you work on are not at all as technically nuanced or challenging as what you'd get at a startup or big tech co. Your ability to go deep technically is sacrificed for an emphasis on speed and functionality. The focus required to do anything else is impossible in such a dynamic (volatile) environment.

As a more entrepreneurial engineer, you will get to grow horizontally (https://alexkondov.com/the-t-shaped-engineer). You'll drive product decisions, have more agency on direction, and get to interface with customers/users. You'll also have to get really good at saying "No" and stakeholder management.

On the mission side, a good amount of VCs claim to be making the world a better place somehow. I'm not convinced the secondary impact of money / company support they provide is moving the needle significantly here. You can have more mission alignment at a startup.

Financially, big tech is probably the best risk adjusted investment of your time. Startups have better outlier results, but are riskier. VC is somewhere in the middle if you get carry and the firm performs well.

The surprise is the asymmetrical expectations.

I would not expect a paycheck from the new company during the in-between-jobs vacation time (which I pre-arranged before accepting the new position).

I would expect them to think that such an "ask" is outrageous bordering on insane.

And then there is the normalization of wage-theft through manipulation.

To clarify my position: while this may represent a type of startup work that is very commonplace there is nothing at all normal about it -- it is just a clever form of stealing.