There's sustainable and unsustainable work practices, which are separate.
People thrive when high performing sustainably and don't thrive when low performing, but unsustainable is unsustainable.
I have never been more burned out and depressed than when I was in a low performance culture.
Completely wore me out.
I feel like both ends of it can be exhausting. Dealing with other people just not caring or executing poorly can easily burn you out or make you lose faith in your coworkers, but so can having everyone else working late hours and feeling the social and perhaps practical pressure to keep up. They're different flavors of exhaustion and burnout, but both can be dangerous.
Same. Possibly personality styles. When low performance, gap between personal identity of skill and output causes me pain. Prefer high-speed cultures. Feel accelerated by peers. In moments of doubt, feel invigorated by peers. Good feeling.
My experience has been that low performance cultures tend to have a lot of cynical naysayers that like to block things from happening. High performance cultures tend to have optimistic enablers who also know how to do a lot of things and are happy to share their knowledge.
It can be, but doesn't have to be. "High performance" is just too vague to try and draw inferences about individual companies.
I work somewhere with what I would consider a high performance culture. We all show up to work and consistently put in ~8 hours of high effort work. A few times a year that may mean some late nights, but mostly not, and folks usually take 4-8 weeks of vacation a year. Working around the clock is not rewarded. I find the whole setup fun and invigorating.
That said we do sometimes make a bad hiring decision and those people may end up working 80 hours a week to try to match the output everyone else. We have to let those people go.
I doubt that. Not the opposite part but the high performance one. Sounds like a road to burn out and depression.