When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company.
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.
A founder who commits to 996 is as a side effect building a brand of "grit", "hustle", etc with their investors. That gives them options, regardless of whether 996 is actually useful for productivity and regardless of who is actually working harder as a result of 996: a golden jetpack into an executive role elsewhere when the company is sold for scrap, fundraising terms that give them liquidity not available to employees, a VC job, etc. They're also insulated from 996 to a degree that employees aren't. No one is going to count hours or badge swipes for the CTO/CEO of the company, and no one's going to tell them they can't leave the office early to spend time with their family. Even if they do work those hours, their job is different enough from normal employees to provide some protection from burnout.
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.
People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit.
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.
If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles, and you're willing to work 996, be just a little bit smarter and found your own startup and take all the upside.
> If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles
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.
I don't think you answered the question. I'm pretty sure everyone knows this. But I think most people also know that it can be very difficult to pitch investors and that this is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.
Depends what you want to define startups as, "lifestyle" businesses are often just a derogatory term that VCs use that don't mean anything in real life.
This sounds nice on paper but difficult to implement. I'd love to hear how you'd go about this. But I'm also pretty confident that if you show me a metric I can show you 10 ways to hack it.
Funny that you say that because at some point I started dividing people in my head into what I call builders and redistributors:
- 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.
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.
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?
It is different because you collect a salary the whole time and build your resume. Its not like you file an LLC and then receive a check in the mail for two years of whatever you want.
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.
If you're a founder and not paying yourself a salary, you're one of the class of dumb canon fodder founders that VCs have indoctrinated to create a steady supply of cheap assets they can acquire and cheap engineers trained and vetted for their real investments.
Well, sure, if you can raise capital then go for it. But if I'm burning savings trying to bootstrap that is just riskier than enjoying a salary with some risk of job loss.
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.
> It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling.
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.
Er, we're posting this on a website run by a VC firm that routinely gives out investments to huge numbers of tiny teams from around the world. Literally anyone can apply. And we're supposedly in an AI bubble caused by investors ploughing hundreds of millions into any company with .ai in the name. It can't be true that getting investment is hard and requires connections.
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?
There's a lot of people on HN that are not from the USA: at-will doesn't exist in many other wealthy countries.
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.
I don't understand what kind of job, except for some very, very fringe cases like a NASA active mission or an atomic threat, would require a person to pull all-nighters. And how is that productive in the long-term? It's not exactly easy to hire talent.
People who enforce 996 or whatever other schedule are treating the symptom and not the cause.
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 are certain things, being an elite athlete, a movie director (and a lot of the key talent), a team that makes a really great video game, a medical resident, where you are going to be competing against people willing to make incredible sacrifices for success including long hours and sacrifices of their personal life.
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.
I have not pulled an all nighter proper (the worst was going to sleep at 6 and waking up at 7:30), but working late into the night is usually distraction free. During work hours, I feel obligated to quickly respond to coworker's emails and help requests, so most of my own work is worthless during that time unless it’s the equivalent of updating a config file
College trains people for this. Basically anything with strict deadlines. Most of my coursework was done at the latest possible time, in the early hours of the morning. I think these workplaces just carry over that vibe.
College does a terrible job of training you for anything like a startup; it's a marathon game, unlike the 12-16 week semester sprint. What you do in the most "polished" college project is like < 25% of what goes into a marketable software product.
A company touting its 996 culture is unfurling a huge red flag that it doesn't have the best talent. The very best companies/workers accomplish extraordinary things in ordinary working hours, because they are extremely good at what they do and thus extremely efficient at it. Work smarter, not harder, as they say. If a company needs to work 996, it simply means it isn't all that smart.
They're taking advantage of kids right out of college that don't know any better and don't have any other personal obligations. Anyone with experience or a few more years of life can see right through it. I agree, if you expect these hours you better be offering significant skin in the game to balance the scales.
> 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.
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.
Your refusal of 996 is relatable for senior or mid level workers. But that's something less experienced people can not afford and in this market even unlucky seniors are forced to accept things they wouldn't have to 2 or 3 years ago.
I think even if someone offered me couple million a year I still wouldn't do it. My kids will only be kids once - all of the money in the world is completely worthless if you miss out on your family. I appreciate some people here don't feel this way but to me that's not a trade off I would ever make. Especially since as software engineers we are privileged enough to usually command both high salaries and the ability to log off at 4-5pm and not think about work anymore.
The reality is also that nobody (aside from Mark "I Want To Buy a State of the Art AI Research Lab" Zuckerberg) is even offering millions in cold hard cash.
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.
Consider 2 million carefully, though. Collectively in a 9-5 job over decades you would probably lose more time with your kids than you would with how much earlier you could retire with even doing the 2 million grind for one year.
Depending on the specifics, for that level of comp. I would consider it even having 2 kids.
You've hit the nail on the head. If you own the company, feel free to do your 996 bullshit. If you want me to work that hard, give me an equity stake that makes it so.
We need to collate this. Is there a repo where we can mention companies that do this? I’ve talked to HR reps who extol their amazing work life balance only to find engineering is expected to work close to a 996
Isn’t 996 paid more than 955? Software engineers on-call is not a great practice, especially if you’re not in a life-critical industry (and most engineers aren’t), even though it’s been normalized.
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.
A few startups have reached out to me to be a founding engineer. The largest equity stake offered was 3% for being employee #2.
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.
Crunch time for companies? Making billions? Hire more staff. A lack of planning on your part, does not constute an emergency on my part. The jackpot payday helped, but not by much. I worked from 10 til 10 6 days a week, and the product still stunk in ice.
These founders who tout this nonsense are convinced they got to their position by "hustling" (and not their background, privilege, etc) and think motivated employees should do the same (even if it makes no economic sense for them).
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.
> This is the same argument about how when a company is remote anyone is still free to go into the office.
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?
> Is the entire mission of the business “finished” after 8 hours?
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.
996 done on your own time without expectations of it being done can be understood if you're excited about it. It's dumb, it ruins your health and your social experiences, but whatever, you're usually young and dumb. A good employer would actively tell you to slow down and manage your energy if it goes on for too long..
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.
>If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extraordinary compensation.
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.
Yeah, you're right. I think every job should be available to every person regardless of the things required from the job, personal circumstance, skillset or anything else.
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 an office job. There is no requirement. Working extreme hours is a betrayal of your fellow workers with families who are put in the impossible position of having to choose between competing against such people or spending time with their family.
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.
In China, its birthplace, '996' always seen as practice of failed management. Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼). Although middle managers know their subordinates are inefficient, they still impose working hour KPI on their team, so they can demonstrate their own value to upper management.
> Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼).
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.
To executives, responding to communication is equal to working because communication is all that they do. Same reason that so much time is wasted on meetings: for the people who organize meetings they are what work is, rather than wasted time.
Life is always about optics. Medieval kings wore a piece of gold over their heads for optics.
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)
I used to work for Huawei where 996 or worse wasn't uncommon. While middle management definitely pushed for extended working hours, I didn't get the impression that anyone viewed it as failed management. If anything, upper management knew exactly what was happening and was encouraging it.
Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.
I worked for ByteDance in Singapore. People would show up for work between 10 and 11am, lunch would start around 11:45am or 12, then people would nap until 2pm at their desk. A good, focused engineer could produce the same output as these engineers while only working in the morning
Chinese work culture is very different from American culture that makes 996 not as bad as what Americans imagine. For example, it's common for people in China to take long naps in the afternoon. It's common to take 1 hour long lunches and dinners where you socialize with your colleagues. These days most people hit the gym at the office as well. So that's an easy 4-5 hours just written off.
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.
Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout
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.”
That’s sadly the reality of the push to 996. When Google added early breakfast and late dinner, it was the same reasoning: if people stay “in the zone” longer, you end up squeezing out a bit more.
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.
China is not the birthplace of so called '996'. Long before tech scene in China, there are a lot of investment banks doing that in HK especially for junior analysts. Calling 996 a China thing is just orientlalism. Everything bad is Chinese, everything good is western.
At least the recent popularity of the 996 originated in China, and I believe most Chinese people would agree with that. Besides, even if it started in Hong Kong, saying it originated in China is still technically correct.
China is the birthplace of the term 996. Of course it's not the birthplace of people being coerced into unhealthy work hours - that's been around for thousands of years.
There is probably little to nothing specifically Chinese about workaholism as a concept, but the word is definitely Chinese(as in language). Dialect continuum for East Asian languages are contained within borders, or in other words, each of the languages expanded and dominated to the full extents of continuum and hit with stagnation at major geographical features before entering the modern era.
It's an over-simplification of Chinese idiom "浑水摸鱼", which is literally 'catching fish in muddy water'. Origninated from Thirty-Six Stratagems (三十六计). It generally mean "to take advantage of a chaotic situation or a crisis". It is later extended to express slacking off.
It really seems not very different from how it is outside of China. I feel, as with may things, there is a lot of western propaganda about the "communist enemy" that remains.
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?
The market for this is people who are convinced that the research only proved most people are lazy and unproductive. Surely these wiz kids we’re backing are too jazzed about their startup dreams to have their output decrease after the first 24 hours of constant caffeine and hacking.
12 hours max then the crash of undecipjerable gibberish. See? Your brain requires rest. My 12 hours days had two naps. While the rest of the team did not, in only a month, everyone but me literally crashed and burned...the first clue was them not finishing sentences. Next was searching for words, and then the pause while they stare off into space. All the Facebook prison experiment.
A lot of their investments are made on the basis of what they can sell it for before it all falls apart.
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.
They seem, as a class, very susceptible to dumb trends. This _kind_ of works for them, because occasionally something that looks like a dumb trend turns out to work (remember Facebook games? Still amazed that became a thing), and VCs only require a rather low success rate to operate, but usually a dumb trend is just a dumb trend.
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.
You should see the code they crank out. All rated in characters per second/lines of code. And now with AI? Super crap. Ultra processed sterilized caca del Toro.
It's easy to believe that on average longer hours may not have much marginal improvement to productivity but that for you specifically they do.
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.")
Everyone thinks that they are special and that their take on X is special.
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.
>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?
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.
That is true, but the majority of rich people pay other people to manage their investments. They might manage the family business or similar but there are who industries and careers built around managing rich people's money (private banking, family offices, etc.).
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 went to a seminar a lot of years back. The grifter on stage was hawking a product on how to invest in venture capital or something. The pitch was "got no money? Use other people's money! Pay $300 to learn how"
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.
The funny/sad thing is that the house always wins. Even if an investment deal goes south, _someone_ still comes up ahead, somehow. Again, something my plebe brain can't grok.
It's not about that. The first thing any investor wants to know, and almost goes without saying in the venture world, is that the team is committed. 996 puts on the show that everyone's all-in. All things equal, those who work harder will win. Investors won't audit your code, in many cases won't use your product and this is a dumb and simple proxy metric for the kind of work you're putting in. Especially now that AI reset the field and has a ton of startups dashing to the finish line to establish category dominance, investors are the Coliseum crowds that want to see modern day gladiators (their founders and teams) giving it all or die trying.
See the story of Theranos. Pretty much everyone who did basic due diligence declined to invest in Theranos; they apparently didn’t even have faked audited accounts for the purpose. But there were enough dumb rich people willing either not to ask the person who knew, or to ignore them, that Theranos had no trouble getting funding.
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.
>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?
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.
This is incorrect for ‘investors’ in general (in many countries practically everyone’s an investor because that’s how pensions mostly work now) and _may_ even be incorrect for large investors as a class, but specifically for the type of investor who invests, either directly or through a VC fund, in startups, well, I don’t have numbers, but I’d be willing to bet it is correct for _them_.
Yeah they point to Chinese work culture but I think it probably resembles more Japanese work culture where you're just filling a seat until your boss leaves.
From what I’ve heard, the 996 culture in China isn’t just for appearances. It’s a real grueling grind and employees have not much choice to find a different job. But obviously it’s bad for health and happiness and unfair.
I go to the office once a week. We get stuff done. But we spend a lot of time just shooting the shit. Ironically (or not), our boss is the biggest shit-shooter. And we work 8 hour days.
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.
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.
True story. I grinded hard at a startup for years. This was a decade ago so the concept of 996 wasn't part of the lore yet. But it was fun. We stayed late and I made life long friends. I worked closely with the founder (really awesome dude) as I was an early-ish employee. The company ended up not working, our equity went to zero and we got what you get when you don't get rich, experience. I ran into the founder randomly on the street years later. He didn't even remember my name. He recognized me and was excited to see me, but he had no idea what my name was. So yah, prioritize your life.
I will forget names of people I haven't seen in a long while but whom I legitimately value and am glad to kave known. And I am not a founder type, who are being exposed to 10x people compared to me. It's just a human thing, don't let it bum you out.
Totally. The point is, this guy who's mission I dedicated a good portion of life to clearly doesn't think about me at all after the fact. I'm sure he's gratefuland values me. But if I was part of his story he'd remember my name.
As someone who's just terrible with names, I hate that this is how people interpret it. There are plenty of people who have had a big impact on my life whose names have slipped - and, plenty of inconsequential people whose names stuck for no good reason. It has very little to do with how much that person mattered to me.
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.
same here, names and dates elude me. I can't even remember some of family names and dates, can't remember almost any of the schoolmates names, let alone surnames, but I do remember conversations, moments together etc.
I don't personally have any regrets, because I'm that kinda person. But there are people who prioritized travel, dating, health and personal experiences who have better stories from that period than I do knocking out bugs or shipping a feature that no one ever used. I bought into the mission of the founder. Sure he remembered me when he saw me, but I doubt he thought of me once in the period in between. I remember feeling pretty disappointed after that encounter. Like I bought in, put in the work, it didn't work out and the guy that I followed didn't even remember my name. Prior to that encounter I shared that experience as a badge of honor. After reading this thread and posting here I can't help but think what a waste of time...
Having worked at several startups, I’ll say that 996 is a lie. The best startups were ones that worked HARD for 8 to 10 hours, 5 days per week. What I always found at companies “working” 996 (or something close) was that mostly everyone was hanging out in the break room playing foosball or video games (or watching someone else do it). Sure, they were “in the office,” but the productivity of those hours beyond 8 was really low. Everyone would have been better off going home and coming back in fresh tomorrow after a good night’s sleep and having spent some time with friends and family. In fact a startup CEO friend of mine told me that he considered it a win to get 2 to 4 really productive hours per day. He found the rest of his time was typically wasted in meetings that could have been handled via email and in minutia that someone else should have dealt with. If somebody’s telegraphing crazy work hours in a job post, just walk away.
If you're doing R&D and you're actually into the problem, you're probably devoting the majority of your waking hours to "working" regardless. This is a different 996 than stitching shoe welts 996. Hanging around and passively considering the problem with others can be good, productive work.
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.
Yea, sometimes you need to take a break and walk outside for a bit, noodling on an issue. I get it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people hanging around the office to be seen at the office.
Right. That's what I'm saying. The posts cited in the article are from leaders in those hype companies essentially rebranding a term and using it to recruit. One is explicitly inviting employees that are about to be assimilated into Atlassian, and he's betting that some are not thrilled about going into traditional corporate.
Agreed. I work at a highly successful small company with a reputation for being grindy, and what that looks like in reality is probably 55 hours a week of largely focused productive work: typical core hours are 9-6:45ish, and you work longer a day or two a week and put in the odd evening or weekend hour. It’s hard to imagine working 9-9 every day
I've been part of startups, big corps and have recently started my own startup.
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.
> there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor
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.
Very true, even true below the executive level. I can be utterly exhausted from lack of sleep and still have productive conversations and keep my team unblocked and productive, but when I try to develop software in that state its a complete shit show, making lots of stupid errors that I waste hours debugging, etc.
Let me share an anecdotal but very telling story about this attitude of more work is better work.
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.
Thanks for sharing! I think another comment pointed out, no one on their death bed ever said "I wish I had worked more."
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.
I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.
You give an inch and capital will take a mile, especially in this environment where they have completely eliminated any opposition from unions and we have an economy that is failing to create jobs.
It took a while, but I reached a point in my career where I just said, "Fuck it", and went for a run (or walk) a few times every day "on the company dime" so to speak.
What happens when the companies band together to compress wages? Like what happened with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.
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 happens when the companies band together to compress wages? Like what happened with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.
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.
Possibly it's just a one time thing that was limited to just these companies.
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?
Sure, but why does this rhetoric both persist, and only go one way? You never hear anything about an expectation from employers to pay more than what was agreed.
If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed?
People without equity will work harder if they expect it to bring career or compensation growth.
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.
Are you actually agreeing to specific hours? For example, in a contract, as an hourly worker, or with some formal arrangement with the company?
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.
I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.
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.
I had a huge row with my prospective US investment banking client manager because we had a conversation that went something like "we'll pay you for 8 hours but we expect you to work 10" (or 12). I said, why lie immdiately in our contract? We could try adjusting the expected hours or the hourly rate or both...
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!
Yes it is, it's fine if the deal I'm making is 996, then I can judge whether I'm getting paid enough. What I don't like is "you may have to put in the extra hour here and there" and it's 996.
I've always told my team: focus on being super productive in the 40 hours a week you are working. Then go home and do something that really matters.
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.
I like that philosophy. 40 focused hours. My wife is an accountant and so she has to work 65 hour weeks during tax season (Jan to April). I think it makes sense to work overtime in this case (and she gets paid time and a half). And even then based on what she's told me about her workdays, most of the time is spent doing bullshit (important but bullshit work like scanning papers or hounding clients to send in paperwork). I feel like there are tangible things that management could do that would reduce the amount of bullshit, like actually adhering to the document submission deadline, or requiring clients to scan paperwork themselves, but whatever, I don't know anything about running an accounting firm.
But 72 hour weeks for a shitty AI wrapper for the same salary that someone working 40h weeks? Pass.
All the engineers that I’ve worked with that were doing 12 hour x 6 days ended up being drags on the rest of the team. Their 2am fever dream garbage would hit prod, and then it’d take a full time support person to apologize to customers while two full time engineers wasted a week refactoring production into something that worked.
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.
10-4 is great because it removes fragmentation. It gives you one full, non-fragmented fresh day of life, rather than low-energy little bits in the evenings. It's way easier to do something meaningful with the day than with the bits.
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 tried 10-4 for 6 months at a company that had a mix of people working 4 and 5 days, it made me less productive and more burnt out as a senior engineer.
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’ve been the same way for most of my career. If I’m using a coding assistant, I end up doing 2-3 hours of hard thinking and 7-8 of babysitting. Unlike meetings, I don’t have to use any emotional/social energy with the coding assistant.
Exactly what I thought. 10am-4pm is sane, 10 hours a day is still crazy, but I guess to employees talking about 996, in comparison it seems a good deal.
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.
The third quote is from a VC who has never founded a startup himself and has a clear interest in pushing founders to trade work-life balance for his own quick returns.
So none of these people worked on anything longer than 2 years. I wonder what will happen if we check back in 5–10 years. Will they still be doing and promoting 996, or will they be burned out and have changed their minds? Make your bets.
Every one of these quotes is from someone who would be junior or midlevel at best at any company. Not trying to be ageist but mid twenty somethings are filled with enthusiasm and fantastical ideas which are yet to be vetted or guided by real world experience. I agree with your skepticism here
Sure, but they don't have the absolute most sought-after skills at the peak of the AI bubble? That's the issue. The dude is asking for 996 to work on an LLM/Patchright wrapper library that also works in the cloud. And with these skills, you can get twice or more at more mature corporations.
Technically, they are also writing their own CDP implementation now.
Why work for less if you can work for more, with a better work-life balance?
Spending 8+ hours a day training to avoid death is a pretty good motivator. Mental requirements lower but not gone, physical requirements much, much higher.
One thing I appreciated at early Google (2001) was how folks mostly worked normal hours. Roughly 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Maybe a bit longer if you wanted to stay for the free dinner. Maybe you checked email at home in the evening or had a week of being on call. But in general the company did just fine on a humane schedule.
(There were exceptions, particularly the product folks working on early AdWords partnerships. But even in ads most of the engineers kept to more regular hours. I certainly did.)
Early Google varied a lot. There were a lot of fires in those days that required long hours by engineers. Jeff Dean received a little statue IIRC for taking part in the "index wars", where due to a pervasive lack of checkpointing in the indexing pipeline they had been unable to push a new index to prod for months. And Lucas Pereira regularly had to ship new indexes to the east coast by loading them into his car then driving across the USA.
It's also easy to forget that Google established product-market fit in an uncompetitive market immediately, then found a cash geyser business model only about six months later (or rather copied it from Inktomi). They didn't need to work crazy hours because web search was viewed as a dead end problem that didn't make money, so nobody was chasing their tail. Google's early culture of strict secrecy was a direct consequence of this strange birth: if anyone had found out earlier how much demand existed for AdWords they'd have faced much harsher competition much faster. But Google swore everyone to absolute secrecy, and so the first time the industry discovered how valuable search is was in 2004 on the day of the Google IPO. By then Google had invested so much in R&D that it was impossible to catch up.
Very few companies can be compared to early Google, unfortunately.
I think that reasonable hours are still the norm at much of Google.
I worked there as a SWE for over decade before I left last year. I never once felt pressured to work long hours or extra days. I do recall several times when management folks emphasized that if you're working long hours, it's a sign that something went wrong in our planning, and we should look into it. The few times I stayed late for dinner, the office was mostly empty.
I understand that others may have had a different experience, but for me Google was way healthier than any previous company I have worked at over my decades-long career, including the two companies that I started myself.
I am skeptical that you can get anywhere near 12 hours of productivity out of an engineer. Even in my 20s, I was mentally fatigued after 8 hours of (mostly) work with a few breaks sprinkled in. Once that fatigue sets in your productivity craters.
I’ve noticed people who promote these extreme work hours seem to spend a lot of time posting on (and I assume reading) social media. Perhaps they feel 12 hours is reasonable when they dedicate 4 hours to brainrot (ahem, or “building a personal brand”)
A materialist culture inevitably leads to this. It is the logical conclusion of a society that atomized the wholeness of life without realizing that the sum of its parts is less than the whole.
But it is the reality the collective chose. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better.
It is where the slippery slope leads but a lot of materialist cultures manage to find a midpoint and stick there.
In a sense this isn't even materialist: you are chasing numbers in an account for their own sake. A materialist wants things, and might sacrifice everything else to get them, but doesn't want to do the work for its own sake.
Ultimately this is feeding the ego, the least material thing of all. And I can't actually fault people for that; in the end what else do we have? But even an egotist needs to be able to ask themselves, "am I in fact feeling what I want to feel, or have I missed myself?"
There are certainly those who want the ego rush of feeling like they've worked as hard as they possibly can and taken every chance to show off their skill. But we've fetishized them, and even if they are happy, it often won't achieve the same for us.
It really is materialist, as numbers in an account is a direct representation for the number of coins you have, which are spent fueling a life full of hedonistic pleasures and vices. The ego is attachment to pleasures and vices.
The alternative is what? “Working to live” is often just making more money so you can spend it hiking, traveling, and maximizing your dopamine. Maximizing your happy chemicals is also materialist.
Working a substantive job contributing positively to the work is among the most important and fulfilling things one can do with their life, alongside raising a family
As someone who had to 996 as a coder and as a manager, I can guarantee you the burnout is MUCH faster on the latter. A 996 schedule of zoom calls is straight up torture. I could feel myself getting dumber after a few months.
As a coder, you can accommodate downtimes on that schedule. You also see the result of your work (even code compiling is a dopamine hit). None of that exists if you’re meeting customers and investors - you’re playing the odds all day long and have to be 100% on all the time.
In my spare time I code my own projects, I draw, I talk and write about my ideas. So yes, I'm also "working" on stuff for 12 hours a day, but obviously the work I do for myself, based on decisions I made myself, and the talking and thinking, are not at all "work" in the same manner that the drudgery of an actual job is work. The work I do for money is not just time-consuming and tiring, it's hard and boring and most importantly, often meaningless to me.
A ceo trades time and peace for money, and that is arguably difficult in it's own ways. But that doesn't make it work in the same way that what you and I do is work. These people do not work a 100 hours a week. They live charmed lives that also happen to often be exhausting.
Are they making more dog shit decisions than average Joe? Magnitude of the decisions are bigger, of course.
Also what is the bad decision for CEO? To lay off 25% of stuff to boost quarterly profits, boost stock price is not a bad decision if you are a shareholder...
They’re removed from the realities of the working class. They have staff, live in a separate bubble from their workers with different social circles, different services, different mores and norms.
Executives make shitty decisions because they surround themselves with others who view wealth as a leaderboard to be climbed and flaunted, and have no fucking clue how difficult things are for the people doing the actual work creating products/services/value to the company. For those who claim to relate to the plight of the worker, their frame of mind is stuck in that precise moment just before they became fabulously wealthy, when they were likely busting ass - hence the “hard work pays off”/bootstrap mythos they peddle.
The few executives that do understand these plights, don’t make such shitty decisions, and are either roundly mocked for their lack of growth by those whose wealth was built atop the literal corpses of their workers, or occasionally featured in human interest pieces as an executive that’s strangely generous.
maybe i've spent too much time trying to make computers operate efficiently, but it strikes me that if a process a) takes more time than should be necessary and b) produces sub-optimal results, we should maybe pursue other processes.
Both of these claims are empty. Necessary according to whom? Sub-optimal against which metrics? All industrial processes are inefficient in some way because you're always dealing with engineering trade-offs. Staying in the computer domain: show me a system with optimal latency and I will show you an underutilized system; show me a system optimized for high-throughput and I will show you a system with erratic latency behaviour.
Fair point in general. With regard to 996 specifically, though, I think most of us recognize that we're talking about a system that is both less resilient to stress and fails to achieve higher throughput than the status quo alternative.
My first thought was 9 hour days, 9 days in a row, then 6 days off. At first it sounds nice, but I know out of those 9 hours there would be 4-5 truly great hours and the rest would be meh.
This concept of 996 or 007 it may be acceptable to Young people without kids and family obligations for as long as their bodies allow it (without enough sleep, descent food or exercise).
For others with families (spouse, kids, activities for kids, hanging out with friends, spending time with your spouse and friends outside of work) it may not even be an option and may not be able to support it.
Life is like a coin. There are two sides of a coin. Flipping it, it will always land in one side. As a person with a family you have to pick the side that matters otherwise, you are gambling with it. Gambling doesn't always go your way - the cost is higher when it comes to picking work over family.
As a parent myself, I am constantly struggling with picking the right choice. Long hours may pay well, but those long hours also have a negative impact on your family. If you ask, your family rather spend time with you than have a new shiny toy or a big house and a fast car.
"Burning out on twelve-hour days, six days a week, has no prize at the end. It’s unsustainable, it shouldn’t be the standard and it sure as hell should not be seen as a positive sign of a company."
This
I've worked long hours back in the 2000's. I went home at 4:00AM no one asked me to but because I read somewhere that a certain CEO worked 20hrs a day.
My boss noticed and told me that there was nothing she could offer me for the extra hours.
I still continued to do it only to learn much later what the author posted in the article (see quote).
Working long hours is not a badge of honor, what you produce (in software atleast) is what matters.
I tell new employees that I will not praise them for working extra hours because I don't want them to. I do not have hard data, but anecdotally, when I see teams adopt this mentality productivity seems to increase. My guess is that it's because they try tidy up the loose ends/ideas that annoy folk into jumping back onto the work laptop later in the evening.
I've always explained it like this: I would prefer that you work reasonable hours and no more. Just make sure that you're giving your best during those hours. Focus on solving problems, and avoid distractions like social media.
Most good engineers are happy with this arrangement.
I've found I just loan time from tomorrow's morning if I stay up late working on something. If you're in a good flow, it could be worth it. Other than that, you're likely to be underwater on the loan.
Borrowing productivity from the future is how I feel about my career as a whole. I spent 30 years working stressful 70-80 hour weeks, only to burn out completely in my late 40s. From high achiever to practically zero executive function. Like my ability to get into a flow state blew a fuse and now I can't get there. Meanwhile all my peers who kept a healthy work-life balance in their 20s and 30s are still doing great.
Performative hours are, fundamentally, a symptom of a lack of trust. A lack of trust in others but also a lack of trust in yourself.
Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be intrinsically motivated or to work in the most effective way for them. If you assume people are inherently unmotivated and lazy, well, trackable hours and artificial pressure seem like the obvious consequence.
But it's also a sign of not trusting yourself. Being judged on outcomes—never fully under your control—is scary. Being judged on anything fuzzy or arguable—taste, experience, skill, insight—is scary. If you're the sort of person who is content to "grind", the best way to win competitions is to turn them into grinding competitions. You can't be confident that you are more skilled, more intelligent or have better taste than others, but you can always just "grind" that extra hour. For a certain personality, time spent is by far the easiest metric to control.
If you grow up constantly being praised for how "hard" (read "long") you work, constantly out-competing people by doing more rather than better, the inherent value of "hard" work over everything becomes fundamentally ingrained in your personal story. And, unfortunately, our culture tends to put those people into positions of power, so this tendency gets reinforced and propagated.
Taking a step back, doing something good with less effort ought to be more impressive than doing it with more effort. That's what real potential looks like.
More importantly, even if working more hours purely increased your effectiveness and productivity—and we absolutely know that it doesn't—it would still be a weak form of leverage. Maybe you can work 2× the hours, but you can never work 10x. On the other hand, with taste and experience, you can absolutely come up with a 10× better design, or a 10× better understanding of what you're doing, and, unlike long hours, those 10× advantages compound.
If you trusted your own taste and creativity to give you the leverage you need, you wouldn't work ridiculous hours because you'd know it's counterproductive.
But when you don't, long hours are an easy, socially accepted fallback.
I've found that when I work this kind of long hours for an extended period, I get far too attached to what I'm building and have a difficult time accepting that I need to change anything. Likely this happens because I've sacrificed so much to build up to the current state, and changing it would mean that I wasted time working that could have been spent with loved ones, hobbies, or just enjoying quiet.
When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.
I have a similar experience. I was a devoted PhD student working long hours taking on a lot of responsibility. It burned me out, hurting my productivity. I have mixed feelings about it; I love the friends I made and the things I learned, but I don’t think I should have had to suffer what I suffered. Simultaneously I’m somewhat glad I experienced it then, because now I work in tech and I’ll _never_ work outside of business hours (I’ll hack on personal projects I consider fun if I feel like it). And I’m more productive than my colleagues that do. There’s something mysterious about the contemporary PhD, not all good and not all bad.
As someone graduating from undergrad soon, and a intense and passionate person in CS, all of these reasons are seriously making me reconsider the idea of doing a PhD.
I've done the 36-hour straight work grinds, and working from 10 pm to 6 am for multiple days a week. However, I'm tired of doing that, and I've experienced enough burnout already. I'm also not okay with doing highly skilled work for more than 40 hours a week for pay that is almost demeaning—in the range of 35-45k a year. I'm more okay with it at a startup because at least the pay isn't THAT bad at more established ones with multiple rounds of funding. Just like the author, I have people in my life I'd rather devote time to because they bring be happiness. I'd like to have the savings to do practical and important things, such as do on vacation (which I find immensely good for my mental health), buy things for my other hobbies, and buy a house and have enough money to raise kids.
At least in Switzerland, I've heard your coworkers look down on your for NOT taking breaks and leaving at 5. The stipends are a bit nicer. Maybe it's worth it there. Maybe it's worth it anyway because the lack of CS jobs now will translate to requiring a PhD in the future. Maybe I should go through the extended hazing ritual known as a PhD because a startup's work won't be as technically rewarding as a PhD (the only person I know who wanted to do a PhD is now at a startup).
I still don't think the way we want people to work like this is okay. Sometimes I am a 996, but I sure don't want to be one when I need an extrinsic voice screaming into my ear to keep going because I'm not allowed to take a break.
In Europe there's extensive legislation on how long you are allowed to work per day/week and how you have to be compensated in free time if your workday exceeds 10 hours/day (which is the legal max. per day) for an extended period of time (24 weeks max??? Not sure on this one). Even longer work days or periods have to be legally sanctioned and approved in advance and are severely limited. It's not perfect but it certainly beats these (American?) ideas of 996.
There are several European countries offering PhD programs for Non-Europeans and I bet there will be more soon, seeing as the US is somewhat problematic with science currently.
Worth a conderation, maybe? "The most important step a man can take is always the next one." :))
I didn't show up on the first Saturday when I started my Ph.D. program. Next Monday, a professor from _another_ department stopped by my desk to tell me that assistant professors and Ph.D. students are expected to be there at least six days a week. Then he gave examples of a few professors who were there even on Sundays despite being tenured.
Tbh, I was so poorly paid that going to the university on Saturdays wasn't so bad as they had better air conditioning and heating compared to my apartment!
The market seems bad right now. Companies are offshoring everything they can and squeezing both sides.
At my company, we only hire in India now and the executives are intentionally causing "attrition" in the US by running people into the ground with demands that amount to 996 style work.
- In grad school, I averaged 4 hours of sleep (6/7 days per week) and about 8 hours on sunday for about 5 months straight.
- In my first startup, I worked 9am to 11pm (had to walk back from the office) for about 12 months.
- During my second startup gig, my son was born and also I had an 8 hour time difference between local time and the primary timezone of the office. I woke up at 4 am and generally went to bed at 10pm most days. Waking up randomly at night to deal with newborn through toddler moments for about 4 years.
My experience with all of this:
Pros:
- Really fun to grind at times and euphoric when something works.
- Build really strong relationships with people in the trenches.
Cons (I felt like I was working but in retrospect I wasn't really productive):
- Pseudo-working - I ended up spinning plates of unnecessary pseudo-work that didn't move the needle.
- Time Dilation (biggest factor) - 9pm to 12am feels like 30 minutes. That's because my brain was slowing down. The more sleep deprivation, the more this happens during the day.
- Physical Burnout - My body felt tired with a constant low level of pain and my energy levels low. Also, stress eating made me fat.
- Mental Burnout - My mind constantly looked for distractions. Even when trying to focus, I couldn't focus
- Tactical Stupidity - I didn't find clever ways to avoid or fix problems. I just focused on the next thing. I didn't have bandwidth to reason effectively as I normally would.
Overall:
It's definitely useful to crunch and a great way to be mission oriented, but crunch cannot be constant. Sometimes you need to eat a pile of shit, but you shouldn't smear shit out and take it one lick at a time.
Furthermore, when you've attained a degree of understanding, you should be able to find better ways to leverage your time. The brain and body needs downtime to be creative--the best solutions are creative.
Finally in the world of agents, we have near infinite leverage. As a community should be engaged in deeper thought, rather than trying to grind towards a finish line that constantly moves.
I read somewhere (not remember though) that in the 2000s, the working culture in Japan was crazy. It was even crazier than the 996. In reality, most just did things inefficiently, i.e, writing a short email would take 20 minutes. So, with all those inefficiencies added up, pouring 14 hours away day didn't seem to contribute much productivity anyway.
not only are you missing out on what makes life great and worth living w/ this arrangement, but from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, working that many hours your productivity plummets (unless you're on stimulants), and it's just straight up more effective to work fewer hours...
china has the second highest home ownership rate and fifth highest owner occupancy (where the owner actually lives in the house) in the world, i don't think this is a very good example...
I put in exactly 37 work hours pr. week. If I for some reason work more one day, I make sure to take time off the next day.
I have "experimented" with working more but I found it unconstructive. Chances of stress is much higher and with stress comes doing stupid things that I afterwards will regret.
I believe this holds for both working for myself and someone else.
I don’t get why people think 996 is even optimal for productivity in the medium or long term. If I work hard past 8pm I can’t sleep - my brain is still whirring. That results in worse sleep -> less memory creation & skill consolidation -> lower productivity.
In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.
You aren't going to spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week working in your garden. When you get hot and tired, you'll stop. I think that is the more relevant difference in this particular topic.
Growing up on a small farm, I can assure you that people do work 12 hour days for multiple days on end in their fields. You can’t always stop even when you’re tired; farm animals break out, rain will destroy cut hay, etc.
It’s a hard job, and not one that tends to pay well.
I've noticed the same here in Europe. Founders are really pushing the "Everyone should be doing 996 minimum", arguing that anything else is simply laziness, and that it is impossible to build a billion dollar company any other way.
But, of course, like many here have noted...there's billion dollar difference in incentives between a founder, and even the early members. For a "rank and file" engineer, you're sacrificing your life to make someone else filthy rich. And if lucky, you'll be left with a payday that's not too different from a regular industry job...
Small business owners work 997 and you don't see them incessantly posting about it. That's the catch, though. They own the business. Founders can subject themselves to 996 all they want but it's a failure of management to expect that from employees for less than 1% equity.
I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
I worked for 2 years in a co-working space full of founders next to ETH Zurich. The most consistent worker? The cleaning lady. Every morning at 6 am, she did not miss a single day.
I grew up in a small village in Germany. 500 people, 5000 cows. Only farmers and a cheese factory. In the factory, we worked on Christmas, Easter, and New Year's Eve every morning at 5 am. Farmers don't take days off because cows don't take days off.
Maybe it's not the most healthy way of life. I don't think it physically requires us to take time.
These times really do feel like those once-in-a-century redefinitions of work and labor, similar to how we got Child Labor Laws and 40-hour work weeks from the labor movement early last century. Intrinsically, more people are realizing that the former social contract was long ago fed into a shredder, and that the lack of a formal contract will have consequences. Technology broke down the 40-hour work week by enabling more work to be done both outside the office and after traditional working hours, drastically increasing productivity and profit while wages stagnated for decades in the face of skyrocketing costs. Now we’re racing ahead towards a breaking point between Capital cheering shit like 996 and AI job-replacement, while more humans can’t afford rent, or food, let alone education or healthcare on their burrito taxi wages.
Something will eventually have to give, if we aren’t proactive in addressing the crises before us. Last time, it took two World Wars, the military bombing miners, law enforcement assassinating union organizers, and companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns before the political class finally realized things must change or all hell would break loose; I only hope we come to our senses far, far sooner this time around.
We probably need to rethink how companies are structured - there are (many) companies with revenues greater than most countries but are (in theory) dictatorships with no official ability to change course if the one guy who owns the shares does not want to.
Who is the ‘demos’ in a company? Who gets a vote ? Will voting really slow things down?
> here are (many) companies with revenues greater than most countries
IS that true? What do you define as the revenue of a country? Tax revenues? That is just the government. GDP/GNP/GNI? That comparison for that should be profit, and only a handful of really big companies (Saudi Aramco, Apple, that sort of size) have a profit as large as the GDP of mid-size middle income countries (e.g. Sri Lanka) or small rich countries (e.g. Luxembourg). There is a long tail of small or poor countries so most countries by number, but most people live in a country with a GDP that is an order of magnitude or two greater than any company's profit.
Why would GDP be the proxy for a country's profit? If I pay someone to build a house and another person to tear that house down, both activities contribute to GDP while producing nothing of tangible value.
As long as the companies in question aren't monopolies on violence, it's a complete non-issue. So with that in mind, why would any sane person want to impose such an inefficient mechanism to allocate resources and make decisions within a company or corporation?
The only good thing about democracy in the context of a state, after all, is that every other alternative is worse. But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.
Violence is not always physical. The likes of Meta have subjected the world to unfathomable violence, but we give them a pass because we can't see the scars with our eyes.
Huh? Violence is defined as the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. If you mean "harm", please use that word instead of wrongly using another.
The guy who whispers in the king’s ear also has an effective monopoly on violence.
What we’ve learned over the last half century is that extreme wealth disparities lead to extreme power disparities. Coercion doesn’t just emanate from the state.
You should educate yourself about corporate violence both inside and outside the US - the use of intimidation and murder for strike breaking, the role the Pinkerton agency, the original meaning of "banana republic."
It's tragic - but not accidental - there's no mention of any of this in schools or any public memory of it.
violence is defined specifically as the use of physical force, and I expect the other commentator you're replying to specifically chose that word for a reason.
No, it isn't. Every single definition of violence includes forms other than just physical.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation
Theres a whole swath of positive regulatory structure that would both improve the company and its employees, but capitalism is stuck in the delusion that self interest is the only yardstick we need to concern ourselves with.
Why? Because being poor isnt a structural problem, but a moral or ethical or laziness.
Its fascinating watching business culture basically align with prosperity gospel in that if you can grift it, it _must_ be good/just/right.
>companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns
I recognize the historical references in the other clauses of this sentence, but I wasn't aware of companies stockpiling chemical weapons for use against workers. I'm not doubting - just curious to learn more about the dark history here.
I have absolutely zero faith that the current political ruling class will “come to their senses”.
All you have to do is observe their current behavior and you will come to the same conclusion.
When billionaires show you who they are, believe them the first time.
They have not lived through a depression and neither have they lived through any major world wars. They will be curious to see how bad it can get and they believe they will remain untouched from it.
The current billionaires seem yo know they're headed to apocalypse since theyre building evil lairs. They know history.
The problem is: power is an addiction and like all addictions, some can manage to cope without and others will a absolutely follow a destructive pattern of behavior
I think people read too much into this sort of thing. When you have so much money, spending some preparing for a 1/1000000 chance of doom makes total sense, even if you believe we're actually heading for utopia.
> The current billionaires seem yo know they're headed to apocalypse since theyre building evil lairs.
It will be apocalypse for us, but a glorious new age of feudalism for them. Why else would they be building castles and describing ideal societies of feudal oaths.
Every single person in the country, regardless of political affiliation should know them as most dangerous domestic enemy.
To educate people you just need the internet (communication infrastructure). We can also house and feed everyone if we wanted to. The concept of work has been overblown to the point where it’s everything. I can’t even say war will solve it because war puts everyone to work, which is no different than the status quo.
Things are not in place for people to spiritually feel what is actually a good life and world.
It may take a generation of people, who think technology and science will allow them to have many lifetimes over and over, to meet their timely end. We will only reevaluate as we see the most well endowed generation (everyone alive today) return to dust in a timely manner, that there was no magical human power that could have saved any of us, and we ought to have just focused on a better world that we’re proud of leaving behind.
Living life like it’s a roguelike with infinite levels makes it the most unfulfilling thing ever. The world our generation will leave behind is our product, and a quality product is everything, so much so that you’d be proud to leave it in someone’s hand at the end (in fact, you’d want to). The women’s movement that left us a type of America with those fixes (labors rights, human rights) was such a thing to leave behind, they should fear nothing in death.
> To educate people you just need the internet (communication infrastructure).
This is laughably reductive. Certainly the Internet can help people get educated and pop some comfort bubbles, but it's not automatic. Many (most?) humans need personal attention from others to learn. Even fewer place a value on what they're taught, much less learning itself. A significant number of people must have supervision and some proding to become functioning, literate, and informed adults.
All that said, I'd agree with most of your other points.
It also took Russia going to shit to an extent that got everybody else scared—and that Russia still hasn’t really recovered from, because repeatedly cutting the elite out of your society (however unfairly it’s gotten there) really fucks that society up.
On the contrary, most of that elite has been rotting in the ground for nigh on a century. The elite I’m speaking of is the one that existed pre-1917 (with some offshoots and cultural descendants surviving until the 1960s). They weren’t saints by any means (in ways that sometimes rhyme quite well with slavers in the US, including the chronology), and I’m no monarchist, but it’s telling what part of e.g. meaningful science, or even good secondary education can trace its ancestry to people with pre-October-Revolution education (spoiler: all of it).
(To be clear, a university professor in pre-Socialist Russia is very well off compared to most, and except for the for a lucky few the October Revolution treated them accordingly.)
When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.
We don’t need “the elite” - they don’t actually “create jobs”, and the “engine of the economy” is just a convenient vehicle for the rich (and private equity) to ruin the middle class further - it was never about “efficient markets”.
If anything what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is that we need better systems.
There is some benefit from having a pool of people with enough funds to take investment risks that the rank and file can't. They can outmaneuver any planned economy. The problem in the US is that those people have engineered themselves a disproportionate wealth disparity that doesn't generate a collective benefit.
That used to be “industrial policy” - it doesn’t need to be individuals at all. In fact it shouldn’t be - they’re concerned with returns, not jobs and certainly not with any technology that requires a longer timespan to complete.
The Biden administration had excellent industrial policy. Trump had the government steal a 10% share of Intel.
Watching people realize he’s just a criminal loser has been heartening.
That's a novel take on diversity, but I think your window is too small. The US was full of similar anti-immigrant sentiment a century ago, directed at southern and eastern European new arrivals. Today no one is calling for Poles and Italians to be deported. The "melting pot" can work, if no one is actively trying to kick it over.
Considering our success so far, it’s obvious it’s succeeding. You’d have to ignore your eyes and ears to think a multiracial secular democratic country can succeed.
What’s amazing is that racists seem to be trying to screw it up on purpose, then to claim it doesn’t work. “Starve the beast” but for social cohesion. They’re always surprised when they get bitten by the monster they created.
The rich never had “noblesse oblige” - we used to shoot at the factory owner when they didn’t pay us.
I’m not sure what to do with such a limited understanding of history and such an obvious blind spot as this, but then I remember: you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
The other thing is that different dimensions of the economy and other societal aspect have different lagging effects so you cannot simply assume causation or correlation between things during the same time frame.
There is a big difference between tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (completely legal). Many of the tax shelters and loopholes utilized by the rich when top marginal rates exceeded 50% were completely legit.
Yeah, sure, helicopters is all you need to catch millions of sophisticated tax evaders using semi-legal loopholes developed and implemented by professional accountants and lawyers.
The Laffer Curve is frequently cited by the same people who refuse to see the failure of conservative-style economic policy over the last 40 years, for some reason.
It’s clear all that “don’t tax the rich, they create jobs!” Is just trash. Noise. We have 40 years of data, it doesn’t work.
But still, someone ignores all that to tell me the Laffer Curve, every time. What’s also amazing is that they don’t really understand it themselves. Wild.
So we have 40 years of data that clearly shows that advocating for reasonable tax rates for the wealthy "doesn't work"? I world love to see the detailed analysis that proves that!
Even the most staunch conservative wants the rich to pay their "fair share" of taxes. The only legitimate debate is about what constitutes 'fair'. The flat tax advocates will at least give you a real number (10%, 15%, or even 20%). Progressives will never give you a number. Why?
You're all answering from a very privileged standpoint. I started my career in tech from a small town in Argentina. When broadband was prevalent around the world (2012) I was still working with a dial up connection on a $200 computer.
I grew up seeing what poverty and lack of opportunities does to people, and I was determined to break away from that.
I got a job at a startup by sheer luck, and it completely changed my life. Heck, I was not even doing 996, I was getting up at 7AM and going to bed at midnight EVERY DAY including Sundays.
When I was not squashing tickets at a 2X rate than my European coworkers, I was learning new things, trying out new projects, writing blog posts for the company, doing customer support. I didn't care.
So yes, I agree now (from a privileged position) that 996 might be unhealthy in the long run. But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference. And yes, ideally the world would be fair and everybody should need only 40hs/week to make a living, butt that's a fairy tale.
If you're a young ambitious above-average person, and you're going to listen to people claiming this is "bad", please also compare your to their privileges: race, geographic position, net worth of your family, etc...
There is no circumstances when it is good. Especially if it is pushed by employer/manager. If you want to work 996 or 7 days per week, or without annual vacations - it's your choice but no way anyone should be pushed to work that way.
Vacation and choice is a luxury the majority of the world does not have, you are making his point.
The mentality they are saying is the mentality that has given you the luxury of vacation and choice. The west did not rise to its place without an incredible amount of suffering.
I had a coworker (Phd Stanford) go and tell a bunch of poorer neighborhood highschoolers "you don't need a phd to be sucessful" while partially true it's painful to watch those sitting in the sweat and blood of their forefathers discuss how it's actually morally wrong to work as they did.
Thank god for H1B because foreigners are the only ones who actually seem to understand this anymore.
USA has a "nobel class" it's almost identical to the british empires class structure. Thr upper class of the british empire directly thought working hard was a negative hence the "gentlemen" did almost nothing.
Your job in life is progress not to subsist on your parents and grandparents work.
Hard disagree. What does privilege have to do with this? Why do you need to work in those conditions because you're poorer? I'm all up for making a huge effort to get out of a shitty situation, but giving it away to a company makes no sense.
I'm also from South America, I don't think promoting people to kill themselves working for someone else is the way out
What does this even mean? You literally say that you were working harder than your coworkers. Was your job under threat or something? This just sounds like an unhealthy case of imposter syndrome.
> But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference.
Sure, they'll make a difference for the founders/CEOs of these companies, who will walk away completely minted while their employees might pull enough out to get a house. IF the venture doesn't die before exit.
OP wanted to distance themselves as far from a bad economic environment as they could.
For people early in their careers, working hard is the best way to grow their future earnings and opportunities. They have too few skills, connections, and experience to differentiate otherwise.
Focusing only on the asymmetry between those with and without meaningful equity misses the point.
Not everyone is lucky enough to get equity from day one. The rest of us have (at most) a few critical points in our careers to do well enough such that we get a shot at meaningful equity at some point in the future.
For those from underprivileged backgrounds, they’re lucky to get even one chance in their careers for meaningful growth.
> If you're a young ambitious above-average person, and you're going to listen to people claiming this is "bad", please also compare your to their privileges: race, geographic position, net worth of your family, etc...
I grew up dirt poor from a family of fishermen that were bankrupt before I even left highschool. 996 is bad, companies are taking advantage of people and it needs to be stomped out like a fire waiting to burn.
I don't understand what people spend their time at work on. I have a very successful career, top .01% income for my age bracket, and never worked more than 40 hours at one job in my life.
I worked for a 996 founder in a faced paced startup recently - after busting my ass for 5 months he fired me for not delivering fast enough despite creating an entire platform from scratch
Now I’m was old enough to realize the risk- but given this job market which absolutely sucks for developers but I see young twenty something’s getting influenced by stupid catchphrases like 996
If you are working 9-9 x 6 to build a $10 billion company, why not double your head count and halve the hours? If you build that mega unicorn, there will be plenty of money to share and still have more than you will ever need.
Or do the 996 thing and try not to think too much about your Alzheimer’s and heart disease filled future. Maybe leave a big gift to the hospital that takes care of you before you die at way too young of an age.
I know you’re showing the absurdity of the rest, but:
> why not double your head count and halve the hours?
Because of friction: Not only you need much more HR to hire double the workforce, but people require double the attention, and then a subgroup will invent a sidequest etc.
In most of IT, large famous software were often built by 30 people. That’s valid for Netscape/Firefox, Internet Explorer, Jira, etc.
The best software, like Git, Javascript or Linux, were initially written by 1 person.
I'm currently running 10,2,7 because I'm on fire and need to get the things in my head out into the world, but the idea that I would expect anyone I was working with to pull that kind of weight is just insanity. I sit down and the day flies by as I build foundational software, but that's my passion, my quest. I would only expect that sort of intensity from a collaborator asking for a 50/50 split.
no, I go till 2 am pretty much daily. Not a general endorsement or a statement of how hard I can grind, it's actually pretty easy because what I'm doing is very fulfilling right now.
On a side note, there are orgs where everything is done so poorly due to meetings - with no results nor impact. In such cases it is 8 hours of meetings and 4 hours of actual work
I like to be able to product plug and thought lead in AI related discussions, and sometimes my agent swarm is fully occupied and I have time to grab a cup of coffee and see what's going on.
I also don't agree that any employee should have to work as much as the founders.
But one point that needs to be made: You don't need to sacrifice your health to run a startup. You can get your 8 hours of sleep and exercise every day and still run your startup.
This notion that you have to get 3 hours of sleep and ruin your health is simply a choice - don't do it.
This obsession with the time put-in (either way) is quite silly to be honest. It's a notion inherited from the blue-collar industrial factory labor. If you're working on really hard problems there's no way you're putting in 12 hour stretches. Your diet takes a hit, your sanity takes a hit and so does everything else.
Japan tried this non-sense for a while (colleagues told they used to stay on till 11am !) only to completely fail at all three software revolutions (web/smartphone/ai). China obv. has had much better success, but I don't think this is sustainable. The central-banks in these countries operate in the war-economy mode which can heat things up a lot and work very well, but I think social-burnout effects are quite real.
“I think founders need to create incentive mechanisms and the right atmosphere - where people want to work hard because they believe this is the best way to spend their time. It should feel like contributing to a mission that can’t be matched by other things.”
- Gregor Zunic [1]
“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
I have only truly worked this level of intensity at special moments in my career where I felt connected to the mission and people. We were building something very cool. And we all felt immense joy in the craft.
Never at any time did anyone tell us “work X many hours”
If people actually want hard working employees, maybe the answer should be culture first? Hire great people that love working together, on a cool problem, and they’ll do what’s needed? Trust them.
Hiring for 996 says to me you don’t care about innovation or excellence. It says you suck at hiring great talent. And it signals you, as a leader, may not have a healthy relationship to work or leadership. You want control, not excellence.
The biggest problem with this is outsized gains for the company compared to the employee. You sacrifice time with loved ones, wellbeing, mental health… to churn out extra hours for some Series A firm that won’t think twice about showing you the door in a down round.
I’ve seen founders work round the clock again and again. That kind of makes sense.
But Stebbings… I’m not going to put 996 in for any firm in your portfolio. And anybody who does is a mug.
This 996 bullshit is a skill issue. Need extra hours at school to finish your work? That’s a shame, all the clever kids are at home already (working on their side hustles that are 10x more likely to pay off).
It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from China: a place where ‘face’ and hours-behind-the-desk culture are extremely prominent.
People should be able to show up, put a shift in and go the fuck home. Sometimes there are reasons to work a little longer…
But expecting this kind of behaviour is objectively shitty leadership.
I've never understood the risk trade-off for early stage employees (Employees ~4 through ~10-20).
At this stage equity packages are often <0.5% over 4 years. Founders on the other hand may have more like 30% equity at this stage.
But the odds of success are still quite low - <3% is generous.
In venture funded companies I think it's wrong to say that at <10 employees, founders are 60x more responsible for company outcomes (or taking on 60x more risk), even accounting for what they did to start the company.
That being said - I get working hard if you're appropriately rewarded for it. Just less so if it's primarily on behalf of someone else.
There is a reason the bay is filled with foreign workers. The investers are well aware they are offering a bad deal. They want (not need) to exploit people with as few options as possibe.
I belive religous texts are mostly a coded way of rerfering to this type of person aka demons and to stay away from their offers..
> I’ve pulled many all-nighters, and I’ve enjoyed them. I still do. But they’re enjoyable in the right context, for the right reasons, and when that is a completely personal choice, not the basis of company culture.
Back in 1999 in SF, at the peak of dotcom boom, a few startups located down South from the Market street would shutter down their entrances after around dinner time. All people still inside, working over night. I had two of my friends (actually colleagues - we were from a consulting firm) working at those places. It became a norm around that place and youngsters loved that kind of all-nighters.
The new year eve of millennium Dec 31, 1999 - we went to Fishermans's wharf, roamed around and then went back to work at 1 am. No Y2K issues.
Young people tend to enjoy the grind more because they 1) don’t have a social life yet, 2) don’t know what “productive” looks like, so they confuse grinding with progress
Speaking as someone who has worked in a role which legitimately requires weeks of intense work (running large deals, where you're a Dune-style "mentat" about every aspect of a relationship)... these are absolutely not sustainable and the quality of your work starts to fall apart after a certain point....
It's biologically impossible to generate good long term results form 996 or 007.
I did and still do sometimes a lot of 60-70 hour weeks, for months. But being in the service industry means you get paid in 15 min increments and the after-business-hour rate is much higher, usually 1.5-2X. So if you do the math it’s actually pretty good money and you will find very little people complaining about it. I never worked in product-first businesses and don’t know how the compensation model is, but there is no way I would work an extra hour that isn’t paid. That should be the norm.
Anyone who thinks they can just "out work" the competition cannot be serious about innovation. Sure, you have to be willing to work hard sometimes, but its much more important to work smart, meaning, knowing where to go and how to get there efficiently and effectively. The latter can't happen if you are too busy to get a good nights sleep. Good ideas don't happen when your brain works on fumes.
On the topic of working hours, flexitime is highly addicting and I cannot imagine anything that's better for a software developer. Clock in, have meetings, write code, commit, clock out. Overtime? Just leave early without asking your boss. It just makes sense. Plus, the negotiated working hours per week / working days / mandatory hours can be set to whatever value that makes sense.
Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.
99* and 00* are what I do during hackathons, not work. I write some of the worst, god-awful code I've ever seen during hackathons, because I need to get the idea working. I(and the company) can't afford to merely "get the idea working" in production.
I think Carl Newport had in his book "Deep Work" that Number of Hours or Looking Busy was the measure of being productive in the Industrial Age but doesn't suit the knowledge worker(us/developers).
Companies that promote the "996" culture (working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) are a major red flag for any employee. This model might only be justifiable for a founder with a huge equity stake, never for an average employee without extraordinary compensation. Furthermore, these extended hours don't usually translate into greater real productivity.
This debate is part of a critical redefinition of work. Technology has increased productivity, but wages have stagnated, breaking the social contract. As in the past with labor laws, urgent change is needed to avoid a crisis, prioritizing a quality life and a legacy to be proud of, not senseless exploitation.
A lot of Chinese companies do 996 or 007 but people tend to fake it after a certain timestamp, just to stay there for the sake of staying there. You can’t really tell whether they are productive.
I found out that it was a very limited wavier in Chinese law that permitted a few companies to do 996 (or 9am to 9pm 6 days a week, or 72 hour workweeks).
Now, I'm seeing US companies demand that here. Like, hell no. My body and health isn't worth what you're paying, and the answer 996'ers aren't paying double, or even 1.5x the position.
Saner parts of the world are discussing 37.5h/weeks, and even going to 4 day workweeks.
I mean, hell, if I'm expected to work gross overtime, I expect overtime pay. Guess like I should get into electrician union.
The most interesting point in this post, which resonates with me, is to those of us who work a lot, 996 sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous because to work a lot, you have to fit in the gaps around your life. I have done about 60hrs/week for the last 15 years. My scheduled work is barely 10-4 five days a week, with a lunch break, and with a break three days a week for the gym. To get the hours in I wake up at 5:30 most days and start work, unless a kid needs me, or I'm sick, or one of a dozen other things comes up. I won't take your call at that time, I won't respond to texts, and I'm not going to promise to be up then, because long hours require a lot of flexibility. You don't have to be espousing the four-day workweek or a part-time lifestyle to roll your eyes at the 996. If I can't long-term schedule 60hrs/week, there's no universe where someone's scheduling 72hrs/week. It's just performative nonsense.
I'm sure the people in China who claim to work 996 and those who demand it all know that the truth of hard work is complicated. I'm certain they all work damned hard, and the results are there for the world to see with the amazing success their country is having at absolutely everything. The nature of hard work doesn't fit some silly schedule.
In some Chinese tech companies, 996 isn't the magical pro-capitalist grind it sounds like as they will still have a two hour lunch break, and then also stop for dinner. So ironically, a 996 culture in the USA would be worse than one in Asia. At this point we're just shadowboxing.
Most people are productive working 5 or 6 days a week than 6. It's something that most people intrinsically understand. Those that don't are almost exclusively terminally online, chasing status.
not only does a founder capture more upside, they also pay less of a cost. autonomy prevents burnout even under very intense working conditions.
plus the nature of a founder's day to day work is very different. 12 hours a day of management, pitches, meetings, and snap decisions is doable for a long time if you can endure the pain.
12 hours a day of complex technical work under sleep deprivation is just not possible, after a few weeks of this your cognitive function will decline to the point you can't do the job right.
Think of all of those young women in China that do those hours looking through a magnifier or microscope to build iPhones and the other export stuff. Don't work it, don't buy it.
I think it’s hilarious that CCP companies tout 996. Wasn’t the whole point of communism to avoid slave labor? Let me tell you there’s at least two thousand years of enterprise history to demonstrate how people sucker others to do work for effectively free.
Startup, n. A social group characterized by excessive devotion to a charismatic authoritarian leader, a strong shared vision, and a distinct identity with unique language and symbols. Exerts strong control over its members' lives, often using psychological manipulation to create dedication, compliance, and isolation from external influences.
...it's strange that one of my favorite things about working at a sleepaway summer camp was the fact we were more-or-less always working. During the hours in the middle of the day when I wasn't directly responsible for my 16 kids, I was usually planning for what to do once they got back—sometimes by myself, but often with other adults. We all lived together, of course.
The job felt immersive and all-encompassing. My colleagues and I had a singular mission to make the kids' experience as spectacular as possible. It's hard for me to imagine another job replicating that, but maybe it could be done?
I think the problem is larger, which is that individual workers don't feel empowered to launch a firm of their own. If I am often coding at 11 pm, it's certainly not for any employer.
The idea of putting in the hours for yourself makes sense, something you'll own upto and like doing it, not because you have to.
Expecting someone else with far lesser incentives is not even sustainable. I remember putting in a lot of hours at my previous company, i enjoyed doing it and i was learning at my first job, there are weeks where i put in those hours but those are for myself and what i'm building and it's insanity to expect that even to myself.
The metric is the output, independent of time you put in; alot of startups need those hours at times it's important to get things done but setting it as a culture and take pride is so naive of a thought.
i love high performing individuals delivering more output, than subpar individuals working delivering much lesser value and not just working for sake of it.
Cal Newports Slow Productivity has a lot to say about this topic.
Creativity comes in bursts and can’t be scheduled. Happiness and health move with the seasons. Treating humans as divisible units of 1 hour blocks of factory farmed ROI will never yield amazing results.
It’s sad to see the more technology and automation we invent the more we become slaves to the cult of pseudo-productivity, virtue signalling hours at work in place of meaningful output or results.
996 or worse is what got us the labour movement in the first place. In a well regulated industry the practice is illegal or carries explicit expectations of overtime, time off, or both.
For evil-aligned founders it's important to realize that exploiting workers is one of the best trod paths to success. If you can get away with it without causing a revolt you're almost certainly getting more for your money. So being up front with 996 is absolutely in your interests. Being hard-core, 10x, cracked (pick your generation's euphemism) is just good marketing. Be prepared to cut anyone who burns out, try to get people without any ties or those who can't afford to quit. Maybe even create a cult of personality around yourself.
China's 996 or 007 work schedule is created by desperation. The root problem here is that almost all good industries in China are already cake-spliced by the powerful and privileged, leaving very little for the private sector to compete. As result, every tested and true way to reach profitability is a combat in the bloody sea, which in turn caused the hellish schedule.
So, if you see a SF start up founders started praising 996 schedule, keep a watchful eye, make sure those founders are not in similar desperation.
Also, Elon Musk loved China schedule, I don't really see Twitter improved much since.
My view on this is very different from most commenters. I love work, and early in my career really thrived in a "996" job. I wrote more about it here as a response to this post, "In defense of 996": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152608
The first comment on my post was "fuck off". I'm not trying to push my working style on anyone else, I simply like to work hard. What's wrong with that?
You're welcome to work hard, and take the 996 positions if they please you. America largely adheres to at-will employment, the more overtime you clock is the less I have to deal with.
After a certain point though, you're laundering the idea of mistreatment through your own identity. For example, maybe 1 in a million Chinese textile workers really does feel like stitching together Disney branded tee shirts is their life's calling. That doesn't mean that everyone else should subsist below the poverty line because they won't step up to meet that person's 996 dedication. Many people will scorn your eagerness to work, especially if you're not producing anything revolutionary or novel with your effort.
It's all about what you have at the end of the day. If you put in 10 years at companies that underpaid you, mistreated you and never gave you significant equity, you were simply taken advantage-of and refuse to admit it. If you really are a 10x engineer then yeah, I'd argue you wasted your time and haphazardly threw away your talent for a zero-net lifestyle.
> And that all-nighter? It comes with a fucked up and unproductive morning the day after.
Yea I don't think I've ever pulled an all-nighter that was "worth it" outside of school. School is temporary and you're probably only pulling all-nighters your last year.
But work is different. You are working for the majority of your life. If you set your standard of life to prioritize work over your mental AND physical health, you're not going to make it past retirement (if you haven't already burnt out).
thanks for asking! so:
4 day work week model (look up Iceland for an example of this)
And yes, 4 hours/day in the morning, intent here is just for most mentally demanding work to take place then
Overall, the above is to serve as a core time structure/focus principle
(so to be clear, am NOT claiming ALL types/levels of work can be fitted into just 16h/wk -- tho ~30h/wk is worth striving for, imo)
the idea is to optimize for quality, and grind as needed in the later part of the work day.
996 when working on your own business: normal, expected, and in most cases even required.
996 as an employee: screw that. It might be "worth it" if you command a massive, exec-level salary, but for the overwhelming majority of people it's just foolish.
We already have the research to show that 996 is only sustainable in spurts of a few weeks at most, and it comes with downtime of a few weeks. It’s stupid unless you want an army of zombies.
I am curious -- What the average allotted amount of paid time off is at places that implement the 996 system? I truly do not know, but I would wager it's probably not great either, relatively speaking.
I also question how much work is actually being completed in such an environment. I have never worked in nor been to Japan, but I do recall reading/hearing about how rough the work culture is over there.
However, I have read/heard that people aren't nose-down in work the entire time. It's not uncommon for people to be in the office for long periods while not actually working.
Rather, it's more about the image -- don't leave before your boss, the later you leave after your boss the better you look, etc..
So, I wonder if the Chinese 996 systems somewhat mirrors what I have read about Japan?
This is basically code for only wanting to hire young people with little or no commitments outside of work. As a bonus they usually undervalue themselves.
I think it's fine for kids who want to do that. You should try to get yourself into a situation around other motivated kids who want to do something great together as a tight knit focused team at that age; it's fun and you'll make lifelong friends. But by 30 you'll start to understand that work is just a tiny part of life and not really what matters at all. It will naturally shake itself out by then as simply no one will accept it in this country as a widespread policy.
The standard answer from owners: You work on something you're really passionate about, and are willing to sacrifice your own time for "the mission", "changing the world", or whatever they frame it is.
Some founders really do hype up their B2B SAAS product as the the Apollo program, and so naturally any engineer will work around the clock to put man on the moon.
I was overemployed from 2021 to 2024. I worked two full-time start-up jobs (well, a W2 job and a full-time contract position that was for all intents and purposes a full-time W2 job, just that it paid me without the deductions and such). One was an early stage start-up and the other was a growing startup that eventually got acquired.
During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever.
I interviewed at a company that hid the fact that they wanted 996 until my first day there. It was 6pm my time, I was done for the day, eating dinner, and I got a call from the east coast team to review a PR. PR got merged and he asked, "what are you working on for the rest of the night?" and I was blunt. "I'm done for the night. Bye." sent my resignation in that same night.
I'm convinced that no one can ever be productive for 8 hours a day, let alone 12 hours a day. And indeed, I certainly wasn't productive for 8 hours a day when working two jobs. But I got stuff done.
At what point do we as a society agree that putting more hours doesn't necessarily create more results? We are in an era of increased economic output, but it's not trickling down. People aren't being paid more, they're being asked to work more. It just seems like the bar just keeps arbitrarily getting higher and higher, for the same financial benefit.
In my idealized society, we'd have universal basic income. That way no one would HAVE to work. When people work because they WANT to, they get to be more creative. I believe work output would increase. To say nothing of the non-economic outputs that would result (arts, music, etc).
Yes, I know the system wouldn't be perfect, and blah blah blah socialism, but a flawed great system would be better than our current flawed shitty system.
I have never worked for a company. I have always worked for the government, the taxpayers, quixotically according to a lot of people on the internet, even, dare I say, the citizenry. Most people think these are cush jobs.
I spent decades worked way more than 996, on ships, ashore, in medical school, in residency, on clinical staff while doing entirely uncompensated research. Now I'm a subspecialist physician living in the Valley. I have never worked this little and enjoyed such a high standard of living. One of my seniors said "You don't have to work 2.5 jobs anymore. Just work 1.25 jobs". I work with teams across the spectrum of businesses to figure out how to build the business lines and I see the challenges small companies have. I really do. Not least of which is how the big companies have stacked the deck against new entrants.
Now that I do have some free time I spend it helping my wife build her business, I'm essentially her cofounder. Been incorporated for 8 years now. We think about motivating employees, paying them fairly, the breath-taking amount of money consumed by SaaS, rent, health insurance, travel costs and how that makes it hard to pay employees more. We think about motivating customers and charging them fairly. We see the mind-reeling amounts the big companies charge and then give customer discounts that effectively curb the competition. I see how they get their employees to work harder.
There are two fundamental rules in business:
1) If you're not making money, you're losing money.
2) Don't run out of money.
We watch the end-of-month profit margin going up and down like a rollercoaster. Some months, yeah, "This is great". Some months "Oh, oh, we cannot keep doing this".
We had one employee who really took this whole "I don't have to work ... hard" to heart. She would charge an hour for filling out her timesheet. She consumed her annual sick leave and accumulated PTO in her first 6 weeks. She would bail on scheduled work. Customers loved her but she was literally a net cost to the company money. How? Fixed costs. Overhead is real. Had to let her go. Honestly wasn't a hard conversation with her (she actually never returned some equipment, flat out stole from the company). What was hard was figuring out how to cover those customers and explaining to them why their favorite face of the company was gone.
You want to live a happy, ethical life? Live within your means. But that also entails having the means needed. And everybody else gets a vote. If you live in the US: the whole world wants your quality of life. Even if it's just 10% of the rest of the world, that's still double the entire US population, who are working 996.
I hate that culture--what is it for? So some VC can get their return? If it's truly mission-driven, yes. And I've done it for the mission. But I'm not going to do it just so the "company can grow" and someone can get their 10x return, or the CEO or founders can get their big paycheck. Once VCs get involved, there is no mission other than to increase the return.
Also, if you want to work 996, you'd better not have a family -- if you do, you're neglecting them whether or not you think you can "juggle things" just fine.
The thing about 996 that people don’t like to say out loud: it’s just slavery in startup-scented wrapping paper. No whips, no overseer with a shotgun - but the logic is the same. If you don’t belong to the owning class, your “choice” is simply which master you want to burn yourself out for.
People defend it by saying “well, you can always leave.” True - in the same way a sharecropper could always leave one plantation for another. The ladders are pulled higher and higher, so the fantasy of becoming your own master is almost gone. Once capital realises you have no escape, it’s not even 996 anymore, it’s 007. And if you want to eat, you’ll comply.
Of course people will say: “But it’s just about intensity and output, not hours!” Exactly - and that’s the trap. That framing makes you think you’re optimising for craft, while what you’re actually optimising is obedience. You’ll argue about hours vs output forever, but the real divide is class: founder vs employee, owner vs owned.
If you’re a founder working 996 on your own company, that’s your gamble, your risk, your upside. Go for it. But glorifying 996 as a model for employees is essentially advocating wage slavery with a hip new logo.
If you don’t want to grind, don’t pick a career where only the toughest survive—like startups. In China, programmers get massages. You could be giving the massages.
I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.
Being a founder is a completely different situation which the article is explicitly not talking about.
Although, frankly, even as a founder, 100-hour 7-day weeks aren’t right for the vast majority of people. Clearly it worked for you, which is great, but 99% of people do not have that level of energy, and furthermore are mentally unable to withstand the sacrifices such a schedule imposes on other aspects of life.
A note of caution: everything is relative, and details are important.
If you love what you do (artist, self-employed, etc.) a 996 culture can be considered a good thing as a certain amount of "good" stress allows us to feel self-actualized.
As is a 996 culture that provides for work-life balance. For example, working from home with flex time for 12 hours where you get to take long breaks whenever you feel like it to run, walk the dog, eat, get coffee, etc., is quite enjoyable as well. Who cares if you're still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?
Added note: I find it very interesting that this was immediately downvoted. I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
If you want to work 996 and that is what makes you feel self-actualized - by all means, go for it, nobody is stopping you. May even allow you to get ahead of the pack (or maybe the quality of your work will suffer in your overworked state - big gamble!).
For me, the big problem in your post is the "996 culture". That means the expectation is that everyone is pushing forward with a similar intensity. Now, perhaps you were talking specifically about individual efforts given your examples of artist and self-employed, but when I think about culture, I think about groups of people, and in that context 996 is problematic.
It only provides work-life balance if there is not much of a "life" to balance, where taking a break once in a while is fulfilling enough. Maaaaaybe this can work in your early 20s, but it basically removes anyone with kids, hobbies, outside interests and responsibilities, and really, anyone with life experience out of the equation. It is a highly exploitative culture, sold under the guise of camaraderie, when anyone who has gone through one or more hype cycles can tell that the majority of these startups will fold with nothing to show for them other than overworked, cynical individuals and another level of normalization of exploitative practices.
Thanks for the reply — I really appreciate how I missed the distinction between individual choice and systemic expectation. I was speaking more to personal situations (like artists or self-employed folks), but I see how referencing “996 culture” more broadly brings in serious issues of exploitation and exclusion. Your points about how this affects people at different life stages and the long-term costs gives me more to think about.
> I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
Because it overlooks the dynamics of power distribution.
When there’s a big discrepancy in power, the needs of one party feel justified, and the needs of the other feel like a whim.
Flexibility favors the employee, if and only if it is added on top of explicit office hours. Otherwise, it’s just vagueness that benefits whoever makes the decision of how you should fill them (i.e. your boss).
- People simply disagree with you, especially this line: “Who cares if you’re still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?”
That might work for you but I imagine it left a sour note for some because emailing involves entangling other people into your personal hustle. This can perpetuate “work for show” (especially if you have any power or influence). If you want to silently code into the night and save all the evidence of this for the next morning, that’s one thing. Visible evidence of constant work can be very stressful and draining to others, however.
- HN leans left, weekend HN even more so. This whole thing can feel like “shit you do because we live in a ruthless society that only cares about money”. I don’t agree with the modern left on many things, but I’m definitely coming around to this one. It was - though perhaps in a slightly different context - the original Leftist-owned meaning of “woke”. It’s the idea that you suddenly wake up to the shitty sewer water you’ve been swimming in all your life and look around astonished at everyone else, who all seem to think it’s a perfectly clean and clear place to swim. I suspect some of your downvotes are because of this.
So, in short: you’re entitled to your opinion but it’s phrased as a bit of a lightning rod for those whose values deeply conflict with your own.
These are sage points that make sense to me - I can see how it might have come across as tone-deaf or misaligned with deeper values some people hold. Likewise, I've also noticed the same regarding left-leaning here on HN (and when it comes to tech, Apple-leaning too). I'm a generally left-leaning person myself, but my flexible 996 job (of which I have complete control over) affords me a view on it that others won't appreciate. Thanks for sharing!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.
An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.
That's not just false but very often false.
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?
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:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/172406264
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45105207
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
- BrowserUse - Founded 2024
- Greptile - Founded 2023
The third quote is from a VC who has never founded a startup himself and has a clear interest in pushing founders to trade work-life balance for his own quick returns.
So none of these people worked on anything longer than 2 years. I wonder what will happen if we check back in 5–10 years. Will they still be doing and promoting 996, or will they be burned out and have changed their minds? Make your bets.
Technically, they are also writing their own CDP implementation now.
Why work for less if you can work for more, with a better work-life balance?
(There were exceptions, particularly the product folks working on early AdWords partnerships. But even in ads most of the engineers kept to more regular hours. I certainly did.)
It's also easy to forget that Google established product-market fit in an uncompetitive market immediately, then found a cash geyser business model only about six months later (or rather copied it from Inktomi). They didn't need to work crazy hours because web search was viewed as a dead end problem that didn't make money, so nobody was chasing their tail. Google's early culture of strict secrecy was a direct consequence of this strange birth: if anyone had found out earlier how much demand existed for AdWords they'd have faced much harsher competition much faster. But Google swore everyone to absolute secrecy, and so the first time the industry discovered how valuable search is was in 2004 on the day of the Google IPO. By then Google had invested so much in R&D that it was impossible to catch up.
Very few companies can be compared to early Google, unfortunately.
I worked there as a SWE for over decade before I left last year. I never once felt pressured to work long hours or extra days. I do recall several times when management folks emphasized that if you're working long hours, it's a sign that something went wrong in our planning, and we should look into it. The few times I stayed late for dinner, the office was mostly empty.
I understand that others may have had a different experience, but for me Google was way healthier than any previous company I have worked at over my decades-long career, including the two companies that I started myself.
I’ve noticed people who promote these extreme work hours seem to spend a lot of time posting on (and I assume reading) social media. Perhaps they feel 12 hours is reasonable when they dedicate 4 hours to brainrot (ahem, or “building a personal brand”)
But it is the reality the collective chose. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better.
In a sense this isn't even materialist: you are chasing numbers in an account for their own sake. A materialist wants things, and might sacrifice everything else to get them, but doesn't want to do the work for its own sake.
Ultimately this is feeding the ego, the least material thing of all. And I can't actually fault people for that; in the end what else do we have? But even an egotist needs to be able to ask themselves, "am I in fact feeling what I want to feel, or have I missed myself?"
There are certainly those who want the ego rush of feeling like they've worked as hard as they possibly can and taken every chance to show off their skill. But we've fetishized them, and even if they are happy, it often won't achieve the same for us.
Working a substantive job contributing positively to the work is among the most important and fulfilling things one can do with their life, alongside raising a family
996 for a business owner or top exec at a big company? It’s the norm. And the risk-reward makes sense to them.
It's bad anyway. These people burnout and start making dumb moves to bail out sooner.
Actual craft tasks like writing code tho? Definitely a recipe for burnout and shittier output, yep.
As a coder, you can accommodate downtimes on that schedule. You also see the result of your work (even code compiling is a dopamine hit). None of that exists if you’re meeting customers and investors - you’re playing the odds all day long and have to be 100% on all the time.
A ceo trades time and peace for money, and that is arguably difficult in it's own ways. But that doesn't make it work in the same way that what you and I do is work. These people do not work a 100 hours a week. They live charmed lives that also happen to often be exhausting.
Also what is the bad decision for CEO? To lay off 25% of stuff to boost quarterly profits, boost stock price is not a bad decision if you are a shareholder...
Executives make shitty decisions because they surround themselves with others who view wealth as a leaderboard to be climbed and flaunted, and have no fucking clue how difficult things are for the people doing the actual work creating products/services/value to the company. For those who claim to relate to the plight of the worker, their frame of mind is stuck in that precise moment just before they became fabulously wealthy, when they were likely busting ass - hence the “hard work pays off”/bootstrap mythos they peddle.
The few executives that do understand these plights, don’t make such shitty decisions, and are either roundly mocked for their lack of growth by those whose wealth was built atop the literal corpses of their workers, or occasionally featured in human interest pieces as an executive that’s strangely generous.
and stop paying these idiots 7+ figures.
b) produces sub-optimal results
Both of these claims are empty. Necessary according to whom? Sub-optimal against which metrics? All industrial processes are inefficient in some way because you're always dealing with engineering trade-offs. Staying in the computer domain: show me a system with optimal latency and I will show you an underutilized system; show me a system optimized for high-throughput and I will show you a system with erratic latency behaviour.
you don't just stop paying the king.
to quote my namesake: "abuse of power comes as no surprise"
Cruelty in business existed for hundreds of years before there even was an America.
the trouble is, for the amount of work these people claim they are doing, i'm not seeing actual things being shipped.
For others with families (spouse, kids, activities for kids, hanging out with friends, spending time with your spouse and friends outside of work) it may not even be an option and may not be able to support it.
Life is like a coin. There are two sides of a coin. Flipping it, it will always land in one side. As a person with a family you have to pick the side that matters otherwise, you are gambling with it. Gambling doesn't always go your way - the cost is higher when it comes to picking work over family.
As a parent myself, I am constantly struggling with picking the right choice. Long hours may pay well, but those long hours also have a negative impact on your family. If you ask, your family rather spend time with you than have a new shiny toy or a big house and a fast car.
This
I've worked long hours back in the 2000's. I went home at 4:00AM no one asked me to but because I read somewhere that a certain CEO worked 20hrs a day.
My boss noticed and told me that there was nothing she could offer me for the extra hours.
I still continued to do it only to learn much later what the author posted in the article (see quote).
Working long hours is not a badge of honor, what you produce (in software atleast) is what matters.
Most good engineers are happy with this arrangement.
Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be intrinsically motivated or to work in the most effective way for them. If you assume people are inherently unmotivated and lazy, well, trackable hours and artificial pressure seem like the obvious consequence.
But it's also a sign of not trusting yourself. Being judged on outcomes—never fully under your control—is scary. Being judged on anything fuzzy or arguable—taste, experience, skill, insight—is scary. If you're the sort of person who is content to "grind", the best way to win competitions is to turn them into grinding competitions. You can't be confident that you are more skilled, more intelligent or have better taste than others, but you can always just "grind" that extra hour. For a certain personality, time spent is by far the easiest metric to control.
If you grow up constantly being praised for how "hard" (read "long") you work, constantly out-competing people by doing more rather than better, the inherent value of "hard" work over everything becomes fundamentally ingrained in your personal story. And, unfortunately, our culture tends to put those people into positions of power, so this tendency gets reinforced and propagated.
Taking a step back, doing something good with less effort ought to be more impressive than doing it with more effort. That's what real potential looks like.
More importantly, even if working more hours purely increased your effectiveness and productivity—and we absolutely know that it doesn't—it would still be a weak form of leverage. Maybe you can work 2× the hours, but you can never work 10x. On the other hand, with taste and experience, you can absolutely come up with a 10× better design, or a 10× better understanding of what you're doing, and, unlike long hours, those 10× advantages compound.
If you trusted your own taste and creativity to give you the leverage you need, you wouldn't work ridiculous hours because you'd know it's counterproductive.
But when you don't, long hours are an easy, socially accepted fallback.
When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.
This was never literally practiced.
But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career.
But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out.
I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.
I've done the 36-hour straight work grinds, and working from 10 pm to 6 am for multiple days a week. However, I'm tired of doing that, and I've experienced enough burnout already. I'm also not okay with doing highly skilled work for more than 40 hours a week for pay that is almost demeaning—in the range of 35-45k a year. I'm more okay with it at a startup because at least the pay isn't THAT bad at more established ones with multiple rounds of funding. Just like the author, I have people in my life I'd rather devote time to because they bring be happiness. I'd like to have the savings to do practical and important things, such as do on vacation (which I find immensely good for my mental health), buy things for my other hobbies, and buy a house and have enough money to raise kids.
At least in Switzerland, I've heard your coworkers look down on your for NOT taking breaks and leaving at 5. The stipends are a bit nicer. Maybe it's worth it there. Maybe it's worth it anyway because the lack of CS jobs now will translate to requiring a PhD in the future. Maybe I should go through the extended hazing ritual known as a PhD because a startup's work won't be as technically rewarding as a PhD (the only person I know who wanted to do a PhD is now at a startup).
I still don't think the way we want people to work like this is okay. Sometimes I am a 996, but I sure don't want to be one when I need an extrinsic voice screaming into my ear to keep going because I'm not allowed to take a break.
There are several European countries offering PhD programs for Non-Europeans and I bet there will be more soon, seeing as the US is somewhat problematic with science currently.
Worth a conderation, maybe? "The most important step a man can take is always the next one." :))
Tbh, I was so poorly paid that going to the university on Saturdays wasn't so bad as they had better air conditioning and heating compared to my apartment!
It is still bad, though. The lab should impose maximum hours, because it does nobody any good if you get out of it burned out.
At my company, we only hire in India now and the executives are intentionally causing "attrition" in the US by running people into the ground with demands that amount to 996 style work.
- In grad school, I averaged 4 hours of sleep (6/7 days per week) and about 8 hours on sunday for about 5 months straight.
- In my first startup, I worked 9am to 11pm (had to walk back from the office) for about 12 months.
- During my second startup gig, my son was born and also I had an 8 hour time difference between local time and the primary timezone of the office. I woke up at 4 am and generally went to bed at 10pm most days. Waking up randomly at night to deal with newborn through toddler moments for about 4 years.
My experience with all of this:
Pros:
- Really fun to grind at times and euphoric when something works.
- Build really strong relationships with people in the trenches.
Cons (I felt like I was working but in retrospect I wasn't really productive):
- Pseudo-working - I ended up spinning plates of unnecessary pseudo-work that didn't move the needle.
- Time Dilation (biggest factor) - 9pm to 12am feels like 30 minutes. That's because my brain was slowing down. The more sleep deprivation, the more this happens during the day.
- Physical Burnout - My body felt tired with a constant low level of pain and my energy levels low. Also, stress eating made me fat.
- Mental Burnout - My mind constantly looked for distractions. Even when trying to focus, I couldn't focus
- Tactical Stupidity - I didn't find clever ways to avoid or fix problems. I just focused on the next thing. I didn't have bandwidth to reason effectively as I normally would.
Overall:
It's definitely useful to crunch and a great way to be mission oriented, but crunch cannot be constant. Sometimes you need to eat a pile of shit, but you shouldn't smear shit out and take it one lick at a time.
Furthermore, when you've attained a degree of understanding, you should be able to find better ways to leverage your time. The brain and body needs downtime to be creative--the best solutions are creative.
Finally in the world of agents, we have near infinite leverage. As a community should be engaged in deeper thought, rather than trying to grind towards a finish line that constantly moves.
I have "experimented" with working more but I found it unconstructive. Chances of stress is much higher and with stress comes doing stupid things that I afterwards will regret.
I believe this holds for both working for myself and someone else.
In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.
If I spend my Saturday toiling for wages digging with my hands, sweating for hours, just please some land owner I feel exploited.
It is not the work or the hours that is the core problem.
It’s a hard job, and not one that tends to pay well.
No? This is basically the philosophy of the "last man"
Many great things require overcoming the weakness of the flesh. From the moment you understand the weakness of your flesh it should disgust you.
Work being bad is simply a slave mentality. It is because the slave does not get any return on their effort; only sustenance.
But, of course, like many here have noted...there's billion dollar difference in incentives between a founder, and even the early members. For a "rank and file" engineer, you're sacrificing your life to make someone else filthy rich. And if lucky, you'll be left with a payday that's not too different from a regular industry job...
I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.
I grew up in a small village in Germany. 500 people, 5000 cows. Only farmers and a cheese factory. In the factory, we worked on Christmas, Easter, and New Year's Eve every morning at 5 am. Farmers don't take days off because cows don't take days off.
Maybe it's not the most healthy way of life. I don't think it physically requires us to take time.
Something will eventually have to give, if we aren’t proactive in addressing the crises before us. Last time, it took two World Wars, the military bombing miners, law enforcement assassinating union organizers, and companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns before the political class finally realized things must change or all hell would break loose; I only hope we come to our senses far, far sooner this time around.
Who is the ‘demos’ in a company? Who gets a vote ? Will voting really slow things down?
IS that true? What do you define as the revenue of a country? Tax revenues? That is just the government. GDP/GNP/GNI? That comparison for that should be profit, and only a handful of really big companies (Saudi Aramco, Apple, that sort of size) have a profit as large as the GDP of mid-size middle income countries (e.g. Sri Lanka) or small rich countries (e.g. Luxembourg). There is a long tail of small or poor countries so most countries by number, but most people live in a country with a GDP that is an order of magnitude or two greater than any company's profit.
Econ is a crock.
The only good thing about democracy in the context of a state, after all, is that every other alternative is worse. But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.
What we’ve learned over the last half century is that extreme wealth disparities lead to extreme power disparities. Coercion doesn’t just emanate from the state.
It's tragic - but not accidental - there's no mention of any of this in schools or any public memory of it.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation
Why? Because being poor isnt a structural problem, but a moral or ethical or laziness.
Its fascinating watching business culture basically align with prosperity gospel in that if you can grift it, it _must_ be good/just/right.
>companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns
I recognize the historical references in the other clauses of this sentence, but I wasn't aware of companies stockpiling chemical weapons for use against workers. I'm not doubting - just curious to learn more about the dark history here.
Thanks!
All you have to do is observe their current behavior and you will come to the same conclusion.
When billionaires show you who they are, believe them the first time.
They have not lived through a depression and neither have they lived through any major world wars. They will be curious to see how bad it can get and they believe they will remain untouched from it.
The problem is: power is an addiction and like all addictions, some can manage to cope without and others will a absolutely follow a destructive pattern of behavior
It will be apocalypse for us, but a glorious new age of feudalism for them. Why else would they be building castles and describing ideal societies of feudal oaths.
Every single person in the country, regardless of political affiliation should know them as most dangerous domestic enemy.
Things are not in place for people to spiritually feel what is actually a good life and world.
It may take a generation of people, who think technology and science will allow them to have many lifetimes over and over, to meet their timely end. We will only reevaluate as we see the most well endowed generation (everyone alive today) return to dust in a timely manner, that there was no magical human power that could have saved any of us, and we ought to have just focused on a better world that we’re proud of leaving behind.
Living life like it’s a roguelike with infinite levels makes it the most unfulfilling thing ever. The world our generation will leave behind is our product, and a quality product is everything, so much so that you’d be proud to leave it in someone’s hand at the end (in fact, you’d want to). The women’s movement that left us a type of America with those fixes (labors rights, human rights) was such a thing to leave behind, they should fear nothing in death.
This is laughably reductive. Certainly the Internet can help people get educated and pop some comfort bubbles, but it's not automatic. Many (most?) humans need personal attention from others to learn. Even fewer place a value on what they're taught, much less learning itself. A significant number of people must have supervision and some proding to become functioning, literate, and informed adults.
All that said, I'd agree with most of your other points.
(To be clear, a university professor in pre-Socialist Russia is very well off compared to most, and except for the for a lucky few the October Revolution treated them accordingly.)
When America was strongest, we had a large and increasing middle class, and the top marginal tax rate was above 70% - it was in the 90s.
We don’t need “the elite” - they don’t actually “create jobs”, and the “engine of the economy” is just a convenient vehicle for the rich (and private equity) to ruin the middle class further - it was never about “efficient markets”.
If anything what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is that we need better systems.
The Biden administration had excellent industrial policy. Trump had the government steal a 10% share of Intel.
Watching people realize he’s just a criminal loser has been heartening.
What’s amazing is that racists seem to be trying to screw it up on purpose, then to claim it doesn’t work. “Starve the beast” but for social cohesion. They’re always surprised when they get bitten by the monster they created.
The rich never had “noblesse oblige” - we used to shoot at the factory owner when they didn’t pay us.
I’m not sure what to do with such a limited understanding of history and such an obvious blind spot as this, but then I remember: you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
I think you got this wrong. According to my sources the highest marginal income tax rate was 39.6%.
It was during the 50s, 60s, and 70s that it never dipped below 70%.
Source: https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco...
The other thing is that different dimensions of the economy and other societal aspect have different lagging effects so you cannot simply assume causation or correlation between things during the same time frame.
Tax shelters were common in those days with the rich paying accountants and tax attorneys to find ways of avoiding those astronomical rates.
I don’t think “some people didn’t abide the rules” is reason not to make sensible laws.
Read about Laffer Curve for a start.
Your comment lost all credibility right here
It’s clear all that “don’t tax the rich, they create jobs!” Is just trash. Noise. We have 40 years of data, it doesn’t work.
But still, someone ignores all that to tell me the Laffer Curve, every time. What’s also amazing is that they don’t really understand it themselves. Wild.
Even the most staunch conservative wants the rich to pay their "fair share" of taxes. The only legitimate debate is about what constitutes 'fair'. The flat tax advocates will at least give you a real number (10%, 15%, or even 20%). Progressives will never give you a number. Why?
I grew up seeing what poverty and lack of opportunities does to people, and I was determined to break away from that.
I got a job at a startup by sheer luck, and it completely changed my life. Heck, I was not even doing 996, I was getting up at 7AM and going to bed at midnight EVERY DAY including Sundays.
When I was not squashing tickets at a 2X rate than my European coworkers, I was learning new things, trying out new projects, writing blog posts for the company, doing customer support. I didn't care.
So yes, I agree now (from a privileged position) that 996 might be unhealthy in the long run. But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference. And yes, ideally the world would be fair and everybody should need only 40hs/week to make a living, butt that's a fairy tale.
If you're a young ambitious above-average person, and you're going to listen to people claiming this is "bad", please also compare your to their privileges: race, geographic position, net worth of your family, etc...
There is no circumstances when it is good. Especially if it is pushed by employer/manager. If you want to work 996 or 7 days per week, or without annual vacations - it's your choice but no way anyone should be pushed to work that way.
The mentality they are saying is the mentality that has given you the luxury of vacation and choice. The west did not rise to its place without an incredible amount of suffering.
I'm not taking about trip to Maldives for a vacation. Just a paid rest from work.
I had a coworker (Phd Stanford) go and tell a bunch of poorer neighborhood highschoolers "you don't need a phd to be sucessful" while partially true it's painful to watch those sitting in the sweat and blood of their forefathers discuss how it's actually morally wrong to work as they did.
Thank god for H1B because foreigners are the only ones who actually seem to understand this anymore.
USA has a "nobel class" it's almost identical to the british empires class structure. Thr upper class of the british empire directly thought working hard was a negative hence the "gentlemen" did almost nothing.
Your job in life is progress not to subsist on your parents and grandparents work.
I'm also from South America, I don't think promoting people to kill themselves working for someone else is the way out
> But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference.
Sure, they'll make a difference for the founders/CEOs of these companies, who will walk away completely minted while their employees might pull enough out to get a house. IF the venture doesn't die before exit.
For people early in their careers, working hard is the best way to grow their future earnings and opportunities. They have too few skills, connections, and experience to differentiate otherwise.
Focusing only on the asymmetry between those with and without meaningful equity misses the point.
Not everyone is lucky enough to get equity from day one. The rest of us have (at most) a few critical points in our careers to do well enough such that we get a shot at meaningful equity at some point in the future.
For those from underprivileged backgrounds, they’re lucky to get even one chance in their careers for meaningful growth.
I grew up dirt poor from a family of fishermen that were bankrupt before I even left highschool. 996 is bad, companies are taking advantage of people and it needs to be stomped out like a fire waiting to burn.
Now I’m was old enough to realize the risk- but given this job market which absolutely sucks for developers but I see young twenty something’s getting influenced by stupid catchphrases like 996
Or do the 996 thing and try not to think too much about your Alzheimer’s and heart disease filled future. Maybe leave a big gift to the hospital that takes care of you before you die at way too young of an age.
Dr. Fred Brooks would like to have a word with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
> why not double your head count and halve the hours?
Because of friction: Not only you need much more HR to hire double the workforce, but people require double the attention, and then a subgroup will invent a sidequest etc.
In most of IT, large famous software were often built by 30 people. That’s valid for Netscape/Firefox, Internet Explorer, Jira, etc.
The best software, like Git, Javascript or Linux, were initially written by 1 person.
On a side note, there are orgs where everything is done so poorly due to meetings - with no results nor impact. In such cases it is 8 hours of meetings and 4 hours of actual work
But one point that needs to be made: You don't need to sacrifice your health to run a startup. You can get your 8 hours of sleep and exercise every day and still run your startup.
This notion that you have to get 3 hours of sleep and ruin your health is simply a choice - don't do it.
Japan tried this non-sense for a while (colleagues told they used to stay on till 11am !) only to completely fail at all three software revolutions (web/smartphone/ai). China obv. has had much better success, but I don't think this is sustainable. The central-banks in these countries operate in the war-economy mode which can heat things up a lot and work very well, but I think social-burnout effects are quite real.
- Gregor Zunic [1]
“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
-apocryphally attributed to Napoleon
1. https://x.com/gregpr07/status/1964392101682303438
Never at any time did anyone tell us “work X many hours”
If people actually want hard working employees, maybe the answer should be culture first? Hire great people that love working together, on a cool problem, and they’ll do what’s needed? Trust them.
Hiring for 996 says to me you don’t care about innovation or excellence. It says you suck at hiring great talent. And it signals you, as a leader, may not have a healthy relationship to work or leadership. You want control, not excellence.
I’ve seen founders work round the clock again and again. That kind of makes sense.
But Stebbings… I’m not going to put 996 in for any firm in your portfolio. And anybody who does is a mug.
This 996 bullshit is a skill issue. Need extra hours at school to finish your work? That’s a shame, all the clever kids are at home already (working on their side hustles that are 10x more likely to pay off).
It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from China: a place where ‘face’ and hours-behind-the-desk culture are extremely prominent.
People should be able to show up, put a shift in and go the fuck home. Sometimes there are reasons to work a little longer…
But expecting this kind of behaviour is objectively shitty leadership.
At this stage equity packages are often <0.5% over 4 years. Founders on the other hand may have more like 30% equity at this stage.
But the odds of success are still quite low - <3% is generous.
In venture funded companies I think it's wrong to say that at <10 employees, founders are 60x more responsible for company outcomes (or taking on 60x more risk), even accounting for what they did to start the company.
That being said - I get working hard if you're appropriately rewarded for it. Just less so if it's primarily on behalf of someone else.
I belive religous texts are mostly a coded way of rerfering to this type of person aka demons and to stay away from their offers..
> I’ve pulled many all-nighters, and I’ve enjoyed them. I still do. But they’re enjoyable in the right context, for the right reasons, and when that is a completely personal choice, not the basis of company culture.
The new year eve of millennium Dec 31, 1999 - we went to Fishermans's wharf, roamed around and then went back to work at 1 am. No Y2K issues.
It's biologically impossible to generate good long term results form 996 or 007.
Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.
> When someone promotes a 996 work culture, we should push back
And like the author says, it just doesn’t make sense either.
This debate is part of a critical redefinition of work. Technology has increased productivity, but wages have stagnated, breaking the social contract. As in the past with labor laws, urgent change is needed to avoid a crisis, prioritizing a quality life and a legacy to be proud of, not senseless exploitation.
At the moment I work 9-5, a few meetings per day, so maybe 5-6 hours focused work, and I’m mentally exhausted by the end.
Now, I'm seeing US companies demand that here. Like, hell no. My body and health isn't worth what you're paying, and the answer 996'ers aren't paying double, or even 1.5x the position.
Saner parts of the world are discussing 37.5h/weeks, and even going to 4 day workweeks.
I mean, hell, if I'm expected to work gross overtime, I expect overtime pay. Guess like I should get into electrician union.
It was a US robotics company that worked closely with Chinese robotics. Bragging about 996.
I'm suspecting the HN admins removed it cause it looked really bad. And we know that founders here have special capabilities.
Doesn't specifically say 996 but 6-days a week in-office.
I'm sure the people in China who claim to work 996 and those who demand it all know that the truth of hard work is complicated. I'm certain they all work damned hard, and the results are there for the world to see with the amazing success their country is having at absolutely everything. The nature of hard work doesn't fit some silly schedule.
Though poor management is pervasive, there are small pockets of sanity out there, in my experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
plus the nature of a founder's day to day work is very different. 12 hours a day of management, pitches, meetings, and snap decisions is doable for a long time if you can endure the pain.
12 hours a day of complex technical work under sleep deprivation is just not possible, after a few weeks of this your cognitive function will decline to the point you can't do the job right.
This sounds like the new generation's equivalent of 1980s bosses exhorting people to "give 110%"
Work 30 hours a week, but make em count.
Working a 996, but you're playing Pokemon on the clock isn't doing much.
"You Should Run Your Startup Like a Cult", by Peter Thiel (https://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/) (https://archive.is/h7iZl) (2014)
The job felt immersive and all-encompassing. My colleagues and I had a singular mission to make the kids' experience as spectacular as possible. It's hard for me to imagine another job replicating that, but maybe it could be done?
Expecting someone else with far lesser incentives is not even sustainable. I remember putting in a lot of hours at my previous company, i enjoyed doing it and i was learning at my first job, there are weeks where i put in those hours but those are for myself and what i'm building and it's insanity to expect that even to myself.
The metric is the output, independent of time you put in; alot of startups need those hours at times it's important to get things done but setting it as a culture and take pride is so naive of a thought.
i love high performing individuals delivering more output, than subpar individuals working delivering much lesser value and not just working for sake of it.
Creativity comes in bursts and can’t be scheduled. Happiness and health move with the seasons. Treating humans as divisible units of 1 hour blocks of factory farmed ROI will never yield amazing results.
It’s sad to see the more technology and automation we invent the more we become slaves to the cult of pseudo-productivity, virtue signalling hours at work in place of meaningful output or results.
For evil-aligned founders it's important to realize that exploiting workers is one of the best trod paths to success. If you can get away with it without causing a revolt you're almost certainly getting more for your money. So being up front with 996 is absolutely in your interests. Being hard-core, 10x, cracked (pick your generation's euphemism) is just good marketing. Be prepared to cut anyone who burns out, try to get people without any ties or those who can't afford to quit. Maybe even create a cult of personality around yourself.
So, if you see a SF start up founders started praising 996 schedule, keep a watchful eye, make sure those founders are not in similar desperation.
Also, Elon Musk loved China schedule, I don't really see Twitter improved much since.
The first comment on my post was "fuck off". I'm not trying to push my working style on anyone else, I simply like to work hard. What's wrong with that?
After a certain point though, you're laundering the idea of mistreatment through your own identity. For example, maybe 1 in a million Chinese textile workers really does feel like stitching together Disney branded tee shirts is their life's calling. That doesn't mean that everyone else should subsist below the poverty line because they won't step up to meet that person's 996 dedication. Many people will scorn your eagerness to work, especially if you're not producing anything revolutionary or novel with your effort.
It's all about what you have at the end of the day. If you put in 10 years at companies that underpaid you, mistreated you and never gave you significant equity, you were simply taken advantage-of and refuse to admit it. If you really are a 10x engineer then yeah, I'd argue you wasted your time and haphazardly threw away your talent for a zero-net lifestyle.
Yea I don't think I've ever pulled an all-nighter that was "worth it" outside of school. School is temporary and you're probably only pulling all-nighters your last year.
But work is different. You are working for the majority of your life. If you set your standard of life to prioritize work over your mental AND physical health, you're not going to make it past retirement (if you haven't already burnt out).
And yes, 4 hours/day in the morning, intent here is just for most mentally demanding work to take place then
Overall, the above is to serve as a core time structure/focus principle (so to be clear, am NOT claiming ALL types/levels of work can be fitted into just 16h/wk -- tho ~30h/wk is worth striving for, imo)
the idea is to optimize for quality, and grind as needed in the later part of the work day.
996 as an employee: screw that. It might be "worth it" if you command a massive, exec-level salary, but for the overwhelming majority of people it's just foolish.
I also question how much work is actually being completed in such an environment. I have never worked in nor been to Japan, but I do recall reading/hearing about how rough the work culture is over there.
However, I have read/heard that people aren't nose-down in work the entire time. It's not uncommon for people to be in the office for long periods while not actually working.
Rather, it's more about the image -- don't leave before your boss, the later you leave after your boss the better you look, etc..
So, I wonder if the Chinese 996 systems somewhat mirrors what I have read about Japan?
What if you like that culture? Should you still push back?
I'm curious if this is a calculated move by startups to preserve equity and get some people going crazy pushing your product forward rapidly.
Some founders really do hype up their B2B SAAS product as the the Apollo program, and so naturally any engineer will work around the clock to put man on the moon.
If you work 996 without either:
It sincerely appears to me that you are throwing your life away. If you're in this boat, I hope you have a long-term plan.... or need to provide for dependents and have few other options?
During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever.
I interviewed at a company that hid the fact that they wanted 996 until my first day there. It was 6pm my time, I was done for the day, eating dinner, and I got a call from the east coast team to review a PR. PR got merged and he asked, "what are you working on for the rest of the night?" and I was blunt. "I'm done for the night. Bye." sent my resignation in that same night.
I'm convinced that no one can ever be productive for 8 hours a day, let alone 12 hours a day. And indeed, I certainly wasn't productive for 8 hours a day when working two jobs. But I got stuff done.
At what point do we as a society agree that putting more hours doesn't necessarily create more results? We are in an era of increased economic output, but it's not trickling down. People aren't being paid more, they're being asked to work more. It just seems like the bar just keeps arbitrarily getting higher and higher, for the same financial benefit.
In my idealized society, we'd have universal basic income. That way no one would HAVE to work. When people work because they WANT to, they get to be more creative. I believe work output would increase. To say nothing of the non-economic outputs that would result (arts, music, etc).
Yes, I know the system wouldn't be perfect, and blah blah blah socialism, but a flawed great system would be better than our current flawed shitty system.
I spent decades worked way more than 996, on ships, ashore, in medical school, in residency, on clinical staff while doing entirely uncompensated research. Now I'm a subspecialist physician living in the Valley. I have never worked this little and enjoyed such a high standard of living. One of my seniors said "You don't have to work 2.5 jobs anymore. Just work 1.25 jobs". I work with teams across the spectrum of businesses to figure out how to build the business lines and I see the challenges small companies have. I really do. Not least of which is how the big companies have stacked the deck against new entrants.
Now that I do have some free time I spend it helping my wife build her business, I'm essentially her cofounder. Been incorporated for 8 years now. We think about motivating employees, paying them fairly, the breath-taking amount of money consumed by SaaS, rent, health insurance, travel costs and how that makes it hard to pay employees more. We think about motivating customers and charging them fairly. We see the mind-reeling amounts the big companies charge and then give customer discounts that effectively curb the competition. I see how they get their employees to work harder.
There are two fundamental rules in business:
1) If you're not making money, you're losing money.
2) Don't run out of money.
We watch the end-of-month profit margin going up and down like a rollercoaster. Some months, yeah, "This is great". Some months "Oh, oh, we cannot keep doing this".
We had one employee who really took this whole "I don't have to work ... hard" to heart. She would charge an hour for filling out her timesheet. She consumed her annual sick leave and accumulated PTO in her first 6 weeks. She would bail on scheduled work. Customers loved her but she was literally a net cost to the company money. How? Fixed costs. Overhead is real. Had to let her go. Honestly wasn't a hard conversation with her (she actually never returned some equipment, flat out stole from the company). What was hard was figuring out how to cover those customers and explaining to them why their favorite face of the company was gone.
You want to live a happy, ethical life? Live within your means. But that also entails having the means needed. And everybody else gets a vote. If you live in the US: the whole world wants your quality of life. Even if it's just 10% of the rest of the world, that's still double the entire US population, who are working 996.
These startups want the best right?
Oh wait, I have my own company where I am the founder doing this for myself when it requires it.
If I had employees I wouldn't want them doing 996 work culture, but if you want to hire ME to do that, that is the price, minimum.
Or it is another way of saying "fuck off".
Also, if you want to work 996, you'd better not have a family -- if you do, you're neglecting them whether or not you think you can "juggle things" just fine.
People defend it by saying “well, you can always leave.” True - in the same way a sharecropper could always leave one plantation for another. The ladders are pulled higher and higher, so the fantasy of becoming your own master is almost gone. Once capital realises you have no escape, it’s not even 996 anymore, it’s 007. And if you want to eat, you’ll comply.
Of course people will say: “But it’s just about intensity and output, not hours!” Exactly - and that’s the trap. That framing makes you think you’re optimising for craft, while what you’re actually optimising is obedience. You’ll argue about hours vs output forever, but the real divide is class: founder vs employee, owner vs owned.
If you’re a founder working 996 on your own company, that’s your gamble, your risk, your upside. Go for it. But glorifying 996 as a model for employees is essentially advocating wage slavery with a hip new logo.
I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.
Although, frankly, even as a founder, 100-hour 7-day weeks aren’t right for the vast majority of people. Clearly it worked for you, which is great, but 99% of people do not have that level of energy, and furthermore are mentally unable to withstand the sacrifices such a schedule imposes on other aspects of life.
If you love what you do (artist, self-employed, etc.) a 996 culture can be considered a good thing as a certain amount of "good" stress allows us to feel self-actualized.
As is a 996 culture that provides for work-life balance. For example, working from home with flex time for 12 hours where you get to take long breaks whenever you feel like it to run, walk the dog, eat, get coffee, etc., is quite enjoyable as well. Who cares if you're still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?
Added note: I find it very interesting that this was immediately downvoted. I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.
For me, the big problem in your post is the "996 culture". That means the expectation is that everyone is pushing forward with a similar intensity. Now, perhaps you were talking specifically about individual efforts given your examples of artist and self-employed, but when I think about culture, I think about groups of people, and in that context 996 is problematic.
It only provides work-life balance if there is not much of a "life" to balance, where taking a break once in a while is fulfilling enough. Maaaaaybe this can work in your early 20s, but it basically removes anyone with kids, hobbies, outside interests and responsibilities, and really, anyone with life experience out of the equation. It is a highly exploitative culture, sold under the guise of camaraderie, when anyone who has gone through one or more hype cycles can tell that the majority of these startups will fold with nothing to show for them other than overworked, cynical individuals and another level of normalization of exploitative practices.
Because it overlooks the dynamics of power distribution.
When there’s a big discrepancy in power, the needs of one party feel justified, and the needs of the other feel like a whim.
Flexibility favors the employee, if and only if it is added on top of explicit office hours. Otherwise, it’s just vagueness that benefits whoever makes the decision of how you should fill them (i.e. your boss).
- People simply disagree with you, especially this line: “Who cares if you’re still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?”
That might work for you but I imagine it left a sour note for some because emailing involves entangling other people into your personal hustle. This can perpetuate “work for show” (especially if you have any power or influence). If you want to silently code into the night and save all the evidence of this for the next morning, that’s one thing. Visible evidence of constant work can be very stressful and draining to others, however.
- HN leans left, weekend HN even more so. This whole thing can feel like “shit you do because we live in a ruthless society that only cares about money”. I don’t agree with the modern left on many things, but I’m definitely coming around to this one. It was - though perhaps in a slightly different context - the original Leftist-owned meaning of “woke”. It’s the idea that you suddenly wake up to the shitty sewer water you’ve been swimming in all your life and look around astonished at everyone else, who all seem to think it’s a perfectly clean and clear place to swim. I suspect some of your downvotes are because of this.
So, in short: you’re entitled to your opinion but it’s phrased as a bit of a lightning rod for those whose values deeply conflict with your own.