The only time I’d actually consider crazy schedules was if I was the founder with a huge equity stake and a once in a lifetime opportunity that would benefit from a short period of 996.
For average employees? Absolutely not. If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extraordinary compensation. Pay me a couple million per year and I’ll do it for a while (though not appropriate for everyone). Pay me the same as the other job opportunities? Absolutely no way I’m going to 996.
In my experience, the 996 teams aren’t actually cranking out more work. They’re just working odd hours, doing a little work on the weekends to say they worked the weekend, and they spend a lot of time relaxing at the office because they’re always there.
As a rank and file employee, you get none of that. The investors don't even know who you are. The outcome for you if the company fails is that you're looking for another job while fighting burnout from longer hours and from working somewhere that doesn't respect you enough as a professional to let you manage your own time (which tends to come with other things that encourage burnout). All that to juice an "hours worked" KPI that research tells us is a questionable thing to focus on. You can do better.
Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claims that makes them not an AI startup.
But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do, mostly through taking fewer holidays rather than working Saturdays. And the Chinese have caught up to the cutting edge of AI very fast, despite facing trade sanctions, Great Firewalls and other obstacles. It is reasonable to infer that they did this by working really, really hard.
I was once told by a US executive that the rule of thumb is people in America (vs "Americans") work ~20% more than people in Europe. Skill level is the same, but Europeans both get more vacation time, have more national holidays, and are harder to fire for low performance. It adds up to a big difference, especially compounded over time. If 996 adds another 20% for China over America, then the Chinese will take the lead. They might burn out a lot of devs along the way (in fact they will), but maybe not as many as you think - after all America has not suffered mass burnout from having 15 days of vacation a year instead of 25 - and success will continue to accrue.
This is a painful truth. I myself work part time and get European vacations. It is pleasant. Yet I know it cannot last. Europe has become a vassal continent, in which Trump dictates terms and the EU accepts them without negotiation, because of the decisions its society has made; one of the biggest being to take life easy.
IMHO your view demonstrates the human bias to attribute simple and easy causes to complex phenomena.
> But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do
I think we can all agree that there's more to this problem than hours. Now the question is if it is just money. Probably not considering that list, but hey, that money doesn't hurt either.
No one is arguing that hours aren't needed. People are arguing that output is not linearly correlated to number of hours worked. Personally, I think it tends to look more S-curved. Imprecise because sometimes 30 minutes of work can be very useful and sometimes it can be even detrimental. But it can take some time to get into the zone and be very productive. At the same time, too much and you are less effective.
The only situations where more working hours directly equates to more output is when you have a very clear widget machine. We've already automated a lot of tasks because of this, but hey there are still hard problems like fruit picking. Though I think it isn't hard to understand how the human becomes less productive as they get tired... I'm not sure why you think that isn't true about coding. I'm really not sure why you think that is true when it comes to doing research. Some of the most famous scientists in history famously worked <6hrs per day because frankly in a research job you're working most hours in the day even when you're doing something else.
tldr: I think you vastly oversimplified the problem.
Also, as a person who worked with a lot of Israeli engineers, from juniors to senior architects, I can only say haha, try catching any of them in office after 4pm, or at most 5pm :) . They surely don't work 996, they work the same hours like western EU, just start early and finish early.
I think your framing is backwards.
Getting hired as a random employee, going in expecting 9-9-6, with the sort of comp these companies manage to pay, means there is a smartness ceiling, not floor.
does that work? how do you convince investors to give you money if you don't have a network/didn't go to stanford?
This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.
Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky
With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.
It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.
s/smart/stupid/g
Imagine if ownership of a company was divided according to the amount and skill level of work.
- Builders produce food, mine resources, build houses/machines, do research, provide essential services, etc.
- Redistributors take a cut from builders, by providing a non-essential service like salesmen or assistants who call themselves managers, by getting themselves into a position of power where they have many builders work "under" them or simply by holding and "renting" limited resources like housing
I feel like this division is at the core of inequality (money per unit of work only as long as you work vs money for no work in perpetuity). Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.
Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.
Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.
The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.
One who can both build and sell is indeed a rare specimen (unicorn?). I know many builders and less than 10% of them can sell.
I am against some specializations getting paid per unit of work regardless of the market value of their product while other specializations get paid a cut of the market value.
I am against positions of power which allow people who don't produce anything to decide how much other people who do actually produce something get paid.
Etc.
I am fundamentally against inequality.
You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.
Of course it is. You are limited to 168 hours in a week that you can do work.
But there is no limit to the hours that other people can work for you.
Because this can't be that hard to understand even for the average person.
A lot of people who care are unable to do anything about it because representative democracy is too indirect.
And yes, I think a lot of people don't fundamentally understand this, otherwise things like co-ops would be more common.
And all of the risk.
Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.
so how is it different being a salaried employee at one of these companies? You say they're likely to fail; shouldn't you get the bigger lottery ticket then?
For a CEO founder, 996 is necessary to even have a shot at building and fundraising, and even then you're likely to quickly fail. Instead an IC banks on joining a founder who has funding and can get more while you build and collect a reasonable salary, and save for rainy day.
From what?
Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.
That's not just false but very often false.
An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.
Never said they weren't. But they're taking _less_ risk because they are at least taking a salary the whole time.
It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you.
I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever.
It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling. That seems obvious, but what do I know.
Don't get me wrong, I agree. I'm just pointing out that for those who do manage to get funding (however fickle and/or unfair the process may be) all the natural risks of true entrepreneurship are moot.
So, where's the risk? You still just were working anyway, pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years. And now you have "Founder" or "Founding Engineer" or "CEO" or "CTO" on your resume. So you didn't have a good exit. So what?
We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working".
If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my mental model of the whole situation, and b) thank you for bringing it to my attention!
If they can't get funding off the MVP then yes they're 20k in the hole, but at least they were working in the meantime.
I speculate that most people here, have come under the receiving end of what "At Will" contact.
E.g. I'm from New Zealand, and at-will contracts are not legal for employees. A company can use contracts (employing a contractor) but contracts are effectively restricted to professional specialists. A company can use temping agencies but the agency takes a big commission on top of wages. A company that has to sack someone can often get hit with financial penalties through the employee rights protection laws.
What they really want is for all of their employees to be so in love with the work, so bought into the mission and so compelled by the vision that they want to work until late.
Of course building a company that inspires that is actually very difficult (though is possible for sure) so it’s easier just to enforce a crazy and unproductive schedule.
There's a lot of grit-flavoured cool aid being sold by CEOs
Here's one that came up recently selling work as the answer to life:
https://joincolossus.com/article/the-amusement-park-for-engi...
And another saying that burnout only exists if the work is not inspiring:
I agree celebrating regular workers putting in crazy hours is a terrible idea. It shouldn't be the norm, but it is also something that some people will reasonably choose to do.
Instead, they're offering something worse: the _chance_ to cash out equity that _might_ be worth that at _some_ point in the future.
Versus spending time with my kid right now. Or any of the hundreds of other more enjoyable things I can do with my time.
They're dangling a lottery ticket in front of us. I've seen the end of that movie several times myself now; enough to know the odds are long.
So yeah: no thanks.
Depending on the specifics, for that level of comp. I would consider it even having 2 kids.
I have my own (and only) life and I don't value money above that.
That's exactly what happens. Some companies' management values asses in the office, and the fitting kind obliges. They come in at 9, leave at 8/9 in the evening, but a lot of the times they are scrolling the social media, doing chit chat, reading blogs, etc. whenever they can (can't do other serious work/learning, as such companies tend to actually spy on what you are doing).
They take 90 minutes long lunch breaks, take walks to smoke, etc. But the bossman can hold a meeting with them at 1 or 3 in the morning sometimes. These get a lot of praise at such companies.
They retain the worst kind of 'talent'. These companies often hire decent technical talent, but with another dimension lacking, like poor communication skills, or a no-name college- knowing that they won't land better offers soon.
Often fearing market, some good people oblige, too, but then tend to quit after a year or two due to burnout.
Managers are the worst. They are perpetually in meetings having conversations much worse than free ChatGPT, but they can say that they are 'working' long hours, and in weekends, setting the bar for ICs.
Productivity is lower than 9-6-5 teams. But many people haven’t come out of the sweatshop/manual labour mentality.
Don't be a scab
Besides, their 996 is the usual nonsense of posting faux thought leader crap on linkedin. Not being shoved Jira tickets and hurry up with it.
[1] "If you're rich, you're more lucky than smart."
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i...
Not necessarily.
On-call is not the same either, there’s pay for being available then there’s pay for being called, so they’re not comparable at all.
> especially if you’re not in a life-critical industry
Most on-call isn’t in life critical industries. My dad had to drive to Leicester through the night with a generator in the bed of a pickup so the Walkers factory there could get back to making crisps. I’m sure Britain would have survived a slight reduction in supply of salt and vinegar crisps, so again, your idea that on-call should only exist for critical industries is an idea that seems to only exist in the heads of a relatively small number of software engineers. And I’ve no idea how you came to this conclusion.
> if I was the founder with a huge equity stake
This kind of equity is batshit insane to me. These very early employees are much closer to co-founder than to a typical employee. I wouldn't demand to split the founder's equity with me but 3% seems pretty low to their 50% considering they're asking that I essentially be a founder but with <1yr delay. Unless I completely misunderstand startups, there's a lot that matters far more than the first year. At this low of a rate it generally makes more sense to go work for big tech where you'd get (near) guaranteed profits and much greater work life balances.
TBH, the low equity to founding employees makes me almost think there is a conspiracy to disincentivize people to work for them. I mean you see these 0.5-2% numbers seem crazy. It's got to be a real "unicorn" company for you to make more money than you would at the big tech. I imagine it's got to end up with a lot of bad feelings too. I mean let's say that 3% gets diluted to about 1% while founder has 50% and gets diluted to 20%. Is their value 20x more than mine? Don't get me wrong, if we got to a real unicorn and did like a $10bn IPO I'd be happy with my $100m, but I can imagine a lot of people feeling ripped off seeing the person they worked neck and neck with become a billionaire.
I agree, 996 is insane. Like the author said, pulling an all nighter just results in the next day being unproductive. I think of it like going to the gym, but with your brain. You can't become a body builder by just lifting weights every single day and pushing yourself to the limit every day. That only results in injury. It can be worth it for a short period of time, but I think we've also created this weird situation where no one sees that it is not worth it for anyone but the founder. IMO, if you want a successful startup, one of the key aspects is that your founding members need to be as dedicated as you. And I just don't think you're going to get that kind of investment if you're pricing yourself as 20-50x more valuable than them. It just seems doubly bad and I can't figure out why we've normalized such situations.
Or a helpful signal to join that company if it’s something you’re excited about.
It’s crazy to me that people are so arrogant to say that somebody else is “wrong” for being excited about something.
if folks were actually excited and motivated, you wouldn't need forced hours, you'd just trust people to work in the best way for them
Do you think there are 0 people in the world who are excited about long hours at work?
This is the same argument about how when a company is remote anyone is still free to go into the office.
The people who want to work 996 likely want to do it with other people who want to work 996.
A company whose team values 996 should put it as a job requirement to filter applicants.
This seems like a straw man. Where you work from is different from how/how much you work. You’re hired to do the job, what if you do the job in 8 hours?
It also seems like a given that when you work at a startup that work life balance will be at a minimum. What more do you want?
No.
You’re hired to do the job, what if you do the job in 8 hours?
Keep working if working is what you enjoy doing. Is the entire mission of the business “finished” after 8 hours?
> It also seems like a given that when you work at a startup that work life balance will be at a minimum. What more do you want?
To work somewhere where the other employees and the company leadership values the same thing.
No, but as a rank and file employee you only have access to so much information. The ones who want to work 996 will try to get this but even then that doesn’t mean you’ll get it. At least that’s how it was at a couple of the top companies in China and SEA, and I speak from first hand experience of half a decade. They just want you to jump when they tell you to jump.
Also, ironically the leadership are the least to be seen in the office.
It’s all a show dude, been there. Yeah there are a lot of people who work there but they themselves refer to themselves as dog. You fetch when the owner says fetch. It’s a toxic, mostly unrewarding effort. But they do pay well enough to have people clock in the next day.
I’m impressed that you’ve surveyed everyone to confirm this because surely you wouldn’t cast a value judgment based on your own beliefs?
> No, but as a rank and file employee you only have access to so much information
But surely if I enjoy spending time at work and thinking about work then I do have that opportunity to continue contributing ideas and effort after 8 hours?
I get that you don’t like the 996 idea. But that doesn’t make it objectively bad which is what you seem to believe.
I don’t know about “everyone” but my sample size of n=50+ isn’t that small as far as anecdata goes. Have you worked 996 or are you just hypothesizing? If not, why don’t you work at a 996 company if you like it so much and then report back?
I don’t care how much you like your work, there’s a healthy way to do it and there’s an unhealthy way to do it. 996 is unhealthy.
Or do you just like making insulting judgements when it comes to work?
996 mandated by the company is 1/ illegal 2/ straight up illegal 3/ a clear signal that they do not see you as a human being.
Worst case scenario, 996 is dumb. Not a super high bar to clear.
Hint: it’s not.
1 & 2. I don't believe this to be true in the United States.
3. If a company mandated 9 to 5 for 5 days a week isn't that equally distasteful for someone who is excited to work 996?
That's a naive approach. If you're in a place where people are fanatically devoted to the mission, it's a benefit in it of itself.
First you'll learn a lot. Residency is often grueling in terms of hours. The payout is much later as you learn more.
Also you're surrounded by very smart hard working people. Every high achiever I know hates working with low achievers or people who are lazy, incompetent or don't care. This is selection. So you learn a lot, in a very intense way, you'll learn a lot from smart people in a very short period of time.
But the most important thing I learned is that there is a huge universe of knowledge you can't learn from books or derive logically. You would learn more doing 996 following around a high performer over a short period of time than you would from years of school.
Some people like doing hard things. People do Ironmans and marathons, they train months for them and what do they get in return? Some endurance and strength that will dissipate within months of the end.
Finally it depends on your stage in life. If you're coming out of college, I would definitely recommend doing the most challenging thing you can find in your area of interest. If you have a family and kids, maybe pull back a bit.
If some job requires more than strictly 9-5 and cannot be done by a paraplegic, visually impaired, neurodivergent individual, the job should just cease to exist, lest we be called some kind of 'ist'.
It's also a betrayal of your future self, because maybe you don't have a partner or a family now, but later if you do you will be in the same position as your coworkers. Workers' rights are for everybody, even if they're not for everybody right now.
Wow, this is a cartoon level villain. You're working too hard making us look bad! Didn't know there were people that actually thought like this.
Perversion of egalitarianism. Reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator as not to allow for any differences in people. Basically remove free will. Truly dystopian stuff.
ofcourse it is. You are working for the time you are not getting paid for dude
The CEO of one of my employers was smitten with his new China office because they bragged about operating 996.
To everyone else, it was obvious that they weren’t working more. They were just at the office a lot, or coming and going frequently.
When they’d send a video from the office (product demos) barely anyone was at their seats, contrary to their claims of always working.
Their output was definitely not higher than anyone else.
However, they always responded quickly on Slack, day or night, weekend or not. The CEO thought this was the most amazing thing and indicated that they were always working.
And it's shocking that it works for leadership/management so well
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/210z3FRgTPU
Carry a clipboard around too.
Maybe a paper notebook is the new clipboard these day though, some moleskin hipster thingy, nice fountain pen with a nib, I dunno.
Anyone else have suggestions on how to shine on management in 2025?
I guess more people are just starting to realize this because many powerful people are actually dropping some of the well-accepted optics (particularly in tech, where people felt they were treated better than the average employee for a long time)
So, while it's 12 hours at the office, it's not 12 hours working at your desk. It's probably more like 8-9 hours by American standards where you have a quick lunch, don't take an afternoon siesta etc.
The mythology of the ultra-hard-working Chinese is just that. Americans work pretty damn hard too but the optics are different. Americans also consider the hours at work as wasted time, with people who are irrelevant to their "real" life (the L in WLB), whereas the Chinese consider the socialization and the relationships of work to be pretty core to their life experience.
Also, the Chinese don't raise their own kids. The grandparents raise the kids while the parents focus on earning money for the family. The parents in turn are expected to raise their grandkids. Some kids don't even live with their parents until they get a bit older (around 10-12).
The West is still mostly oblivious to the Chinese way of life.
Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.
Only young people can support this schedule, how a company like that is expecting senior and experienced people to stay?
I also never understood how it differed from the popular “death march” project management style popularized by companies like Epic and Microsoft.
On paper, PRC employment law is pretty strong on employee side compared to USA.
Management seeing this and doing the calculation: “if they’re gonna be checked out half the time, we’re really only getting 36 hours of the 40 we’ve been promised.”
I get the feeling the push to 996 is in part due to the social media epidemic - everyone spends so much time doomscrolling, might as well keep people in the office much longer to account for that extra wasted time too.
Good times
9117
The latest innovation in Management (unlocked with the power of AI)
they question the “work enthusiasm” of those who leave office by midnight.
I mean thinking about it rationally, China is huge. It doesn't make sense to use the '996 practice' to judge the morality of all of China.
Saw this happening even at YC companies. There was always that stupid expectation of overworking, staying until 9.
The reality is that people twiddle thumbs.
And the disorganization and micromanagement power plays are enough to negate any additional worked hour.
This ranges from pure disorganization in terms of what to build to having 3 hour meetings with the whole fucking company where the CEO pretends they have something worthwhile to say for 3 hours.
Investors who have not heard of the research into productivity that says long hours have no significant benefit for skilled work? Who have not heard of diminishing returns? Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?
So in that context theatre in general makes sense. Not sure why long working hours would be - its not something people fund managers about with regard to an IPO, for example, so it probably does not hugely raise exit values.
Irritatingly, every time, people use this to claim that the dumb trend is the next big thing. A few years ago, anyone sensible could see that NFTs were bloody ridiculous, but you’d have lots of people on here proclaiming a glorious new NFT-based future, because, after all, the VCs were pumping money into it.
And being able to convince yourself that your team is special, not just average, is an ability that is more often found in people taking big crazy swings.
Especially if you have a history of working overtime in crunch time in your own career in the past and believe that you couldn't have finished certain projects on time if not. (Which could be different than working long hours every day for years, but then you're back to the potential for nuance around "on average" and "for me and my team, because we're exceptional.")
Once in a while, they're right. Most of the time, by the definition of the law of averages, most of them are not.
Maybe I just have no ambition to become the next trillionaire because I'm lazy or whatever, but I am under no illusion that me or my team are exceptional. We're good. We get stuff done. We make money. Investors like us. Our customers like us. Our business partners like us. And many people here on HN are likely in a similar boat. Many without working 996.
The majority of rich people do not work for their money. They inherit or "soft inherit" the money. They do investment stuff because it makes them feel big and powerful and important.
You can tell by their speech patterns. Meet some rich people in real life and pay attention to just how slow their patterns of speech and movement are on average. Most of them act like they don't have a care and all the time in the world. Because they do and they always have. Hustle is for the plebs.
Look back at some of the big scams like Wework, FTX, theranos. I've read the documentaries and its the same story. All the rich people they bilked say the same thing. "THEY PAID SO MUCH ATTENTION TO ME" more or less.
I have met quite a lot of rich people in real life and I do not recognise your description. It is true hustle is for plebs, because hustle is born of desperation, but rich people act much the same as non-hustling plebs.
I assure you that banks do not have huge luxury lounges with expensive drinks(like 1k+ bottle)and such for the employees of rich people. True rich people have lots of time and they do occasionally drop in to make face appearance and "Show face" as I've heard it described. As well as the very rich bank c-suite that would regularly drop into the department. Though they had their own private area on the top three floors. (which I also scavenged from lol)
That said due to my helping them I often got to see private info about the people that came to visit specifically to exactly how much money they had with us(and they would always say umm you are really not supposed to see this ok?). Anyway my point is I've probably met more verified rich people than most people so for what my opinions are worth thats how I got them. Even a couple of billionaires whom's name would not show up on any list because its private wealth.
I don't know how true it is, as I am not about to take this grifters sales pitch at face value, but given that the grifter exhibited a lot of traits that I see in some of these rich investor people, I suspect that some investors actually use other people's money to invest, in some way that my plebe mind just cannot fathom.
Commendable that a grifter is actually following their own advice!
This was when I was deep in MLM land, which fortunately I have exited. But it seems like some VCs and grifters have the same mindset.
The vast, vast majority of investors are nepo babies that inherited dad's company and his trust fund. The rest of them that may have worked have deluded themselves into thinking it was because of their "hard work" they got there
So uh, yeah, they're dumbasses. But even then: they don't care that long hours have no significant benefit: the people that will accept 996 will do it for the same salary as someone doing a 9-5. Don't anthropomophize investors, they never see people, they see numbers.
Citation needed.
Now the average VC fund isn’t _as_ incompetent as the average Theranos investor, but it’s still a field where decisions by ‘visionaries’ are often valued over expertise.
I just said it because this website belongs to YC.
Silicon Valley has a reverse-Midas touch, everything it touches becomes shit.
I have no idea what we would do if we had to work 12 hour days. There literally isn't enough work to do. Probably just shoot more shit.
Only teams able to shoot the shit have slack for actual emergencies or actual required improvements.
But essentially it was about a secretary who wasn't booked wall-to-wall with meetings and tasks. She had some meetings but otherwise just able to do whatever she needed to do.
Then, when an emergency happened and she was needed right away to cancel a meeting or make a last minute adjustment, she was able to hop right onto it.
When a team is slammed with P1 tasks all day/week long, and every task is P1, then when an actual urgent matter happens then the team is unable to respond in an efficient manner.
No way man. You get hard workers (tm) working hard. I can’t tell you how many h1b Indians are more than happy to respond to my every bark any time of day to work on my visionary line of business SaaS app. People like you are obsolete bozo.
Not saying your overall point doesn't stand, but at least for some people remembering a name isn't a consistent indicator of their impact.
I think he should have remembered your name, but he hadn't forgotten you. Who knows why he forgot your name.
silicon valley toilet paper.
If someone who actually like this kind of thing freely enters into it, well, best of luck to you. I think the shouting "996" thing is just stirring up attention.
It's also cringe how this kind of comments on "how long one works" come from north americans. It's not cool.
I've not had much choice in life as to what kind of work I can get. I was not born with rich parents and could only afford a non prestigious Uni. I absolutely hate that this kind of exploitation is common (in USA).
Its nice that some people like you have a spoiled life and can dump on the less fortunate though.
I've also heard from executives and management discuss how they work longer hours (from 1:1s as a dev myself). Now as a founder, many of my peers discuss working 24/7 or close to it. Most don't - but there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor.
The reality is that the "work" is very different for these different groups of people. Executives and management work by delegating and chatting people up. Founders can vary between executive duties or building or many various other founder duties. But (L3-5) engineering at corp is basically expected to code nonstop or to work oncall.
Working 996 as an executive is not comparable to 996 as an engineer.
For all of the pop science/bro science/measured self/life optimization stuff that percolates in this world, it’s funny to me that glorifying a lack of sleep persists, when sleep is effectively a performance enhancing drug, and a lack of it effectively makes you dumber.
I recall an anecdote from a sports medicine doctor interviewed somewhere, about how his patients with overtraining syndrome-type issues were overwhelmingly high-powered professionals who were accommodating their Ironman training schedule by sleeping less, as opposed to Olympic athletes who often sleep a lot to properly recover from their training.
I have been a software developer for 30+ years now, and I have avoided working outside the 8-5 hours at every opportunity. I had bosses who very much chaffed at this, who were spending literally their entire lives working, and wish that we drones did the same.
I didn't, I just didn't show up if such a thing was expected, and made sure my work was good enough that they wouldn't think to fire me.
Now, I spent time with my kids, I stayed healthy and happy. My wife adores me for the time we spend together. The loss - nothing. I invested my income wisely, low risk, starting in my 20's, and am now sitting 9 million in assets and cash.
My bosses? One divorced, alienated from their kids, their companies sold and disassembled, and super sadly then contracting cancer because they could never give up their cigarettes with the level of stress they felt. They'll never get to enjoy the money from their sold company, they'll never get their family back.
Another, shunned by all their ex-employees, their own children (and grandchildren), suffering from the need to "get back in the game" when they're way past their prime, and when they were near useless at their job before anyway. But they worked all the time!
And another (years after I worked for them), fresh from a failed startup where they had invested all their money, and convinced their friends and family to invest, and having to lay off their entire staff after a failed pivot where they worked 24/7 for 5 years, going slightly nuts and now living in a commune in Massachusetts.
You get one life folks. I don't care if you're having the time of your life with your 24/7 job/startup you love so much. It's like taking drugs - it's great while you're doing it, but the repercussions come later in life. And they're awful.
I like working. I like making money. But I love my wife and daughter. As long as our needs are covered, and honestly, a lot of our wants, and save enough for retirement/emergency, I see no need to overwork myself.
I hope the working class just rejects this notion altogether. This is toxic for our society. If people don't push back, then companies will keep asking for more and more and it affects everyone.
Since I'm (mostly) work-from-home, my wifi router is configured to firewall my work devices outside of working hours.
This is frustrating for the IT department because it likes to push software updates overnight, but tough noogies.
The company pays for 30% of my internet connection, so it only gets to use my internet connection 30% of the day.
Anyhow I got to be paid for the hours that I actually did for well over a decade on off IIRC, and survived most of the purges of consultants/contractors there over the years, so demanding honesty from management was apparently survivable even if unusual!
The transparency makes it that much easier to avoid them.
Plenty of employers do not operate with this expectation. In the US, I’d replace “plenty” with “most”.
Plenty of employers recognize an opportunity to differentiate themselves to candidates by publicly not being 996’ers.
As employees realize they’re getting a bad deal and that they can find a better ratio of pay to hours worked at other companies, they leave.
Individual employees are far more numerous (therefore harder to coordinate) and have way shallower pockets than companies, so the negotiation power is always going to be lopsided.
What happened with that litigation is it got shut down and those companies pay some of the highest compensation now.
One of the few jobs you can get that pays that much compensation with fewer educational requirements and better hours than alternatives in that compensation range (surgeon, specialist doctors, lawyers at demanding firms)
I don’t think that’s a great example for your point since by comparison FAANG employees have some of the best pay you can find in an attainable job for someone with a 4 year degree and the demands are lower than many of the similarly paid jobs that require a lot more education.
Or possibly the incentives that led to this are still in place, and the current judicial climate is way more lenient towards big companies. Who's to say?
If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed?
If so, then yes you should only work those hours.
However, if you’re a typical full-time employee in most countries you don’t have agreed upon hours.
> If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed?
Again, if something was agreed upon you should follow that. In most full-time jobs they’re not going to specify a maximum number of working hours. It’s your job to explain what can be done in a workweek and push back when something can’t be done. If it persists and you don’t like it then you find another job. Vote with your feet.
In most countries there are labor laws which specify fulltime working week as 35-42.5 hours.
Any time more than that should be logged in as overtime and compensated properly.
If it’s a great company, people will work extra hours to move ahead, knowing it will pay off in their careers. “Great company” is always relative to the individual and where they are in their careers.
As people mature in their careers, they split off into “people with equity who continue to work hard for it” and “people without equity who have a good work/life balance”.
But as long as there’s the promise of a life-changing development, people will (sometimes rationally) work outside of their agreed hours.
j/k. You make a valid point about the limit to expectations from the employer being the sky and yet what the employee get is static.
My belief has been very few lay on their death bed wishing they had given more to their jobs. But many lay there regretting they didn't invest more in their families.
I also believe that 40 truly focused hours is more productive than many people who do 50+ hour weeks just because of the limitations of human physiology.
There are times when a crunch is warranted but they are much fewer than any would be lead to believe. If, on principle, you take away "overtime" as an option, then it makes your more focused with the time you do have.
I've employed people doing software development mostly billed by the hour for almost 20 years. So my personal wealth is directly tied to how much my team works. And in all that time, there was only once that I asked a dev to do 45 hour weeks for a summer due to exceptional circumstances. And I truly asked, I didn't insist.
I've also personally put in more time than that in some weeks/months, but I compensate by working less when that period is done. And, I always know it's not long term sustainable, so there needs to be a goal in mind.
It's not perfect, but I'm confident my priorities are in the right place. And I'm confident my team benefits greatly by being cared for in this way.
But 72 hour weeks for a shitty AI wrapper for the same salary that someone working 40h weeks? Pass.
Anyway, I’ve noticed I can only work 6 hours if I write code myself, but can easily hit 10 hours vibe coding / reviewing / writing the tricky bits.
Has anyone tried 10-4 these days? It’s still 40 hours per week, but feels more sustainable.
To me this fragmentation removal also privided a surprising converse effect: for the 4 days I could think about work uninterrupted and guilt-free which put me in a state of sustained multi-day focus that provided tangible boost to the quality of my results.
For sure it's impossible to do concentrated work for 10 hours straight, but a typical job isn't only concentrated work. Onve you learn what your energy levels are through the day, and manage your workload accordingly and have discipline , it is perfectly possible to have sudtainable full-output 10 hour workdays.
Not for everyone, but definitely beneficial for those who know how to use it.
I have ~5 hours of productive creative energy per sleep, others may be different but that's me. Ideally I give 4 hours to the job, spend 4 hours reviewing/meeting/etc. and have 1 for myself. If I push myself beyond that, I start doing substandard work, so 10-4 meant I either did fewer hours of productive work per week, stole my personal creative hours, or delivered substandard work. I did all three depending on the week, but in any case my productivity overall suffered, that appeared in my peer reviews, and the stress slowly built up until I went back to working 5 days.
I have been self employed for 12+ years, for 9am-1pm is a very productive day, and anyone that claim they can do much more actual knowledge work than that either is pushing papers or has a lot of down time and faffing about.
Also I’d rather work fewer hours 6 days a week, than pushing way past my productivity cramming everything in 4 days.