996

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.

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.

It's been popping up in the who's hiring thread, embarrassingly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45105207

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.

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.

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

> and take all the upside

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.

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.

First: regular employees are already taking the risk of being jobless some time in the future when joining startups.

Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.

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.

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.

> Most startups fail.

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?

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.

>> Most startups fail.

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?

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.

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.

That one's [flagged] [dead] at least, fortunately.

College doesn’t train you for this, you just suck at time management and planning.

And can we include on-call in the list as well?

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.

> forced to accept things

Don't be a scab

> When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company.

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.

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.

performative hours ≠ excitement

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

> just a little bit smarter and found your own startup

does that work? how do you convince investors to give you money if you don't have a network/didn't go to stanford?

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.

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.

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

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.

Counterpoint: is that because to become a CEO one most first obtain money to fund themselves and others?

An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.

That's the fun part: If you find investors, then they're taking the actual risk while you pay yourself a nice salary.

>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.

Funny, because updating a config file is about the most dangerous thing you can do. #1 prod killer.

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.

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.

tl;dr: it's just ageism in disguise. Anyone in their 30s need not apply.

If you were genuinely excited and cared about your startup, you'd do the right thing for it and get some sleep.

Not all startups are venture-backed.

It’s impossible for anyone not in their 20s or who has kids or just a healthy balanced life.

> 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.

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.

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.

So yeah: no thanks.

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'.

How is 996 illegal for legally exempt employees in the US who meet requirements to be marked as such?

Hint: it’s not.

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.

Or nobody could take the upside.

Imagine if ownership of a company was divided according to the amount and skill level of work.

Do you think there are 0 people in the world who are excited about long hours at 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.

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?

A co-op or a partnership? But how will the non-productive class make money from it?

From what I’ve heard the startups nowadays are only interested in people who already have a resume.

> If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles

s/smart/stupid/g

Doing something hard or challenging has nothing to do with working 72hrs a week

Yep as the corporate job is super stable nowadays. /s

I speculate that most people here, have come under the receiving end of what "At Will" contact.

I don't even have kids and I wouldn't do it for any amount of money.

I have my own (and only) life and I don't value money above that.

I genuinely love my job and am excited about it and I still wouldn't do it for anywhere close to 996 hours

Nobody ever said they were genuinely excited and cared about their startup, they said they cared about 996.

Awesome! Then you should avoid someplace that works 996 like the plague.

Do you think there are 0 people in the world who are excited about long hours at work?

On-call is different because it’s usually paid. Lots of businesses outside of tech do on-call and it’s not controversial at all.

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.

No, but should we normalize it and put it as a job requirement? Those who want to do it are free to do so at any company.

Plenty of people in this thread did say exactly that.

> building a company that inspires

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

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.

> Those who want to do it are free to do so at any company.

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 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?

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.

most of those aren't startups, they're lifestyle businesses. (no shade to ppl who want to do that)

> This seems like a straw man

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.

But you replied to me? Was that in error?

> this division is at the core of inequality

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.

No, there's a sucker born every minute after all.

> 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.

> Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.

That's not just false but very often false.

Now the question is how to get the message out and change how it works.

Because this can't be that hard to understand even for the average person.

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.

Don't even both(er) with the 934's, they won't hear it.

> It’s a toxic, mostly unrewarding effort

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.

If you were a football fan would you think that a baseball fan is a sucker?

Or do you just like making insulting judgements when it comes to work?

> If you find investors

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.

> by providing a non-essential service like salesmen...

Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.

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.

  > if I was the founder with a huge equity stake

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.

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

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.

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.

> 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.

> "convinced they got to their position by "hustling" (and not their background, privilege, etc)"

[1] "If you're rich, you're more lucky than smart."

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i...

Well sed

> Isn’t 996 paid more than 955?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

You didn't understand what I wrote.

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.

Do you think this is some revolutionary insight you've stumbled upon? Most people already know this, and yet the system is still the way it is.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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 is exponentially more difficult when you don't have the backing of some ostentatious pedigree.

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.

In civilizations, people used to primarily be farmers but as food production increased, this gave rise to the specialization or division of labor. In the nature of an evolutionary competition of companies, those that specialize into builders and sellers will do better than builders that try to do both, therefore the former paradigm will win out.

> Yet at the same time it's not talked about at all.

You might be missing a whole paradigm that was written about in the 19th century and implemented in the 20th century, to deleterious effects.

There's nothing particularly unhealthy about being a baseball fan, the same cannot be said of working 996s.

Any gain from working "20% more" time or whatever we put the limit at is in my opinion easily offset by employee attrition at these no life workplaces.

> pulling a salary from someone else's bank account for a couple years

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!

> regular employees are already taking the risk of being jobless some time in the future when joining startups.

Never said they weren't. But they're taking _less_ risk because they are at least taking a salary the whole time.

> paying yourself a salary

From what?

It’s weird to believe that US and China are ahead of Europe simply because they work harder. If anything I’d be more inclined to believe they are ahead despite these unhealthy work cultures. Not to mention that US vs. China is not comparable in much any metric. The real reason is the work (and life!) mentality of US where individualism and materialism triumphs, which combined with the dollar hegemony, gives rise to its tech industry. For China it’s posbably the people advantage, combined with a highly focused and determined state massively supporting key areas of technology domestically. Both are unified language, single countries whereas Europe has communication and political barriers internally. And so on…

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

Okay, by your logic we should also see: Mexico, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Israel to be ahead because they all work more hours.

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.

Ah well we must just know different folks. Every startup I've been aware of in my personal life was a weekend project amongst people who kept their day job, until they could get into yc or something, and then get to a seed round. The only self funded quit your day job startup I know of in my personal life is the restaurant I opened and closed within a span of a year. Learned my lesson!

Its not so much that.

Without pedigree, you get a pitch if you have something real and are lucky

With pedigree, you can pitch science fiction and get funded.

Israel probably is “ahead” by most startup evaluation metrics, both in HW and SW.

Yeah, this is the big problem I see. There's some startups I see that in their pitches have some big red flag like needing to violate the laws of physics. Yet, I see these funded.

It is extremely rare that I've seen such grotesque errors and this not have founding members from the MIT/Standford-esque crowd. A notable example is Rabbit R1, who clearly pitched science fiction, but then again Jesse Lyu has connections to Y-Combinator. On a side note, I lost a lot of respect for several researchers when I saw them promoting or talking about how impressive the R1 was after the announcement. I don't expect the public to be able to tell what's Sci-Fi (though there were clear signs of demo faking), but researchers (being one myself) should have clearly known such claims required orders of magnitude more advanced tech than what was currently available.

I hope you realize that this just completes proof that there is no significant correlation?

Also, as a person who worked with a lot of Israeli engineers, from juniors to senior architects, I can only say haha, try catching any of them in office after 4pm, or at most 5pm :) . They surely don't work 996, they work the same hours like western EU, just start early and finish early.

Genuinely astonishing - and I mean that literally, not pejoratively. Thanks for this perspective. I do know myself to be very risk-averse and pessimistic, and undoing that mindset is a personal project at the moment. Thanks for these anecdata, it's helpful to be reminded that real people can and do succeed there.