996 as an employee, especially for companies that don’t offer fast growing stocks, is a super bad deal.
996 for a business owner or top exec at a big company? It’s the norm. And the risk-reward makes sense to them.
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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.
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.
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.
Cruelty in business existed for hundreds of years before there even was an America.
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.
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...