I want to make a specific and narrow distinction between a hard company and a grindslop company. Because from the outside, it's easy to think these two things are the same. They both involve long hours. They both involve sacrifice. They both involve pushing people far past the point of comfort. But the difference is what the hours are for. In a hard company, the hours serve an output. The hours are the cost of the thing being built and no one is documenting the cost because the cost is not the product. In a grindslop company, the hours are the output. The documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product. The suffering is the thing being built and the company is, in some very real sense, a machine for converting human effort into the feeling of exerting human effort.