996 culture can pound sand. lame.
But it is the reality the collective chose. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”)
If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed?
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.
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.
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.
Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.
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.
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.
to quote my namesake: "abuse of power comes as no surprise"
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.
The transparency makes it that much easier to avoid them.
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).
If you work 996 without either:
a. The opportunity to make millions of dollars
b. Ownership of the means of production
c. No other more dignified employment opportunities
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Cruelty in business existed for hundreds of years before there even was an America.
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.
Actual craft tasks like writing code tho? Definitely a recipe for burnout and shittier output, yep.
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!
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.
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.
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.
Who is the ‘demos’ in a company? Who gets a vote ? Will voting really slow things down?
- 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.
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.
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
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 also never understood how it differed from the popular “death march” project management style popularized by companies like Epic and Microsoft.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.
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.
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.
the trouble is, for the amount of work these people claim they are doing, i'm not seeing actual things being shipped.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tax shelters were common in those days with the rich paying accountants and tax attorneys to find ways of avoiding those astronomical rates.
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 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.
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.
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.
I don’t think “some people didn’t abide the rules” is reason not to make sensible laws.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Work being bad is simply a slave mentality. It is because the slave does not get any return on their effort; only sustenance.
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 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.
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?
>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!
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?
Dr. Fred Brooks would like to have a word with you:
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".
(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.)
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.
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.
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’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.
> 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.
"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)
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.
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.
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?
Read about Laffer Curve for a start.
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.
Work 30 hours a week, but make em count.
Working a 996, but you're playing Pokemon on the clock isn't doing much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
(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.)
does that work? how do you convince investors to give you money if you don't have a network/didn't go to stanford?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Citation needed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
Most good engineers are happy with this arrangement.
> 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.
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.
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'.
Though poor management is pervasive, there are small pockets of sanity out there, in my experience.
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?
Depending on the specifics, for that level of comp. I would consider it even having 2 kids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 belive religous texts are mostly a coded way of rerfering to this type of person aka demons and to stay away from their offers..
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.")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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...
It's tragic - but not accidental - there's no mention of any of this in schools or any public memory of it.
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.
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
It's biologically impossible to generate good long term results form 996 or 007.
s/smart/stupid/g
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.
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 think he should have remembered your name, but he hadn't forgotten you. Who knows why he forgot your name.
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.
- Gregor Zunic [1]
“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”
-apocryphally attributed to Napoleon
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.
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.
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).
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.
But 72 hour weeks for a shitty AI wrapper for the same salary that someone working 40h weeks? Pass.
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
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.
I'm also from South America, I don't think promoting people to kill themselves working for someone else is the way out
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?
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.
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:
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.
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?
- 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.
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.
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.
Doesn't specifically say 996 but 6-days a week in-office.
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.
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 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’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.
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.
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.
It’s a hard job, and not one that tends to pay well.
Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.
> if I was the founder with a huge equity stake
This kind of equity is batshit insane to me. These very early employees are much closer to co-founder than to a typical employee. I wouldn't demand to split the founder's equity with me but 3% seems pretty low to their 50% considering they're asking that I essentially be a founder but with <1yr delay. Unless I completely misunderstand startups, there's a lot that matters far more than the first year. At this low of a rate it generally makes more sense to go work for big tech where you'd get (near) guaranteed profits and much greater work life balances.
TBH, the low equity to founding employees makes me almost think there is a conspiracy to disincentivize people to work for them. I mean you see these 0.5-2% numbers seem crazy. It's got to be a real "unicorn" company for you to make more money than you would at the big tech. I imagine it's got to end up with a lot of bad feelings too. I mean let's say that 3% gets diluted to about 1% while founder has 50% and gets diluted to 20%. Is their value 20x more than mine? Don't get me wrong, if we got to a real unicorn and did like a $10bn IPO I'd be happy with my $100m, but I can imagine a lot of people feeling ripped off seeing the person they worked neck and neck with become a billionaire.
I agree, 996 is insane. Like the author said, pulling an all nighter just results in the next day being unproductive. I think of it like going to the gym, but with your brain. You can't become a body builder by just lifting weights every single day and pushing yourself to the limit every day. That only results in injury. It can be worth it for a short period of time, but I think we've also created this weird situation where no one sees that it is not worth it for anyone but the founder. IMO, if you want a successful startup, one of the key aspects is that your founding members need to be as dedicated as you. And I just don't think you're going to get that kind of investment if you're pricing yourself as 20-50x more valuable than them. It just seems doubly bad and I can't figure out why we've normalized such situations.
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.
[1] "If you're rich, you're more lucky than smart."
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I fully stand by that most people are not educated in school.
Another way of putting is, the number TWO is greater than ZERO, but I’d prefer if we not compare ZERO to anything.
This is quite a bold claim. So I guess girls in Afghanistan are just as educated as those in Norway?
Wow, this is a cartoon level villain. You're working too hard making us look bad! Didn't know there were people that actually thought like this.
Perversion of egalitarianism. Reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator as not to allow for any differences in people. Basically remove free will. Truly dystopian stuff.
Only young people can support this schedule, how a company like that is expecting senior and experienced people to stay?
I don’t know about “everyone” but my sample size of n=50+ isn’t that small as far as anecdata goes. Have you worked 996 or are you just hypothesizing? If not, why don’t you work at a 996 company if you like it so much and then report back?
I don’t care how much you like your work, there’s a healthy way to do it and there’s an unhealthy way to do it. 996 is unhealthy.
This has not been the case these days, to be honest. While a pedigree helps, the playing field for investment has been much more level than, say, a few decades ago. Harder, sure, but exponentially more so, definitely not.
You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.
We have a difference of understanding of what "startup" and "failure" mean. I'm not just saying "most startups don't have an exit event" - I'm saying "most startups make negligible money (either through revenue or investment), so the founders are taking a loss the whole time they're working".
If that's not correct, then a) I need to update my mental model of the whole situation, and b) thank you for bringing it to my attention!
I've not had much choice in life as to what kind of work I can get. I was not born with rich parents and could only afford a non prestigious Uni. I absolutely hate that this kind of exploitation is common (in USA).
Its nice that some people like you have a spoiled life and can dump on the less fortunate though.
I assure you that banks do not have huge luxury lounges with expensive drinks(like 1k+ bottle)and such for the employees of rich people. True rich people have lots of time and they do occasionally drop in to make face appearance and "Show face" as I've heard it described. As well as the very rich bank c-suite that would regularly drop into the department. Though they had their own private area on the top three floors. (which I also scavenged from lol)
That said due to my helping them I often got to see private info about the people that came to visit specifically to exactly how much money they had with us(and they would always say umm you are really not supposed to see this ok?). Anyway my point is I've probably met more verified rich people than most people so for what my opinions are worth thats how I got them. Even a couple of billionaires whom's name would not show up on any list because its private wealth.
IMHO your view demonstrates the human bias to attribute simple and easy causes to complex phenomena.
> But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do
I think we can all agree that there's more to this problem than hours. Now the question is if it is just money. Probably not considering that list, but hey, that money doesn't hurt either.
No one is arguing that hours aren't needed. People are arguing that output is not linearly correlated to number of hours worked. Personally, I think it tends to look more S-curved. Imprecise because sometimes 30 minutes of work can be very useful and sometimes it can be even detrimental. But it can take some time to get into the zone and be very productive. At the same time, too much and you are less effective.
The only situations where more working hours directly equates to more output is when you have a very clear widget machine. We've already automated a lot of tasks because of this, but hey there are still hard problems like fruit picking. Though I think it isn't hard to understand how the human becomes less productive as they get tired... I'm not sure why you think that isn't true about coding. I'm really not sure why you think that is true when it comes to doing research. Some of the most famous scientists in history famously worked <6hrs per day because frankly in a research job you're working most hours in the day even when you're doing something else.
tldr: I think you vastly oversimplified the problem.
Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky
With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.