Silicon Valley needs to stop with the ‘grindslop’

Have you ever heard of ‘grindslop’? It’s the latest dig aimed at what some internet users see as tech’s performative, startup hustle culture. The unflattering term was coined by tech entrepreneur Will Manidis, who argued in a post on X that by glorifying work at all costs, Silicon Valley has turned overworking into a religion—and a product in and of itself: “No one asks what the company does,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter . . . What matters is the suffering that preceded it.” The term is now making the rounds on the internet, where the insult is usually aimed at tech workers, often young men, who wear extreme work as a badge of honor, by flaunting or bragging about it on social media. It’s part of a broader backlash to tech’s hustle culture, which was demonstrated by the internet response to a post on X last month from Han Wang, the co-founder of Mintlify. “Remember not to smile,” Wang wrote, before referencing Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s recent podcast comments that compared working til 4:00 a.m. to a marathoner on mile 21. “Someone who signed up for the pain . . . will go harder and further because of it,” Wang wrote. The post went viral—but many social media users disagreed…