996

In China, its birthplace, '996' always seen as practice of failed management. Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼). Although middle managers know their subordinates are inefficient, they still impose working hour KPI on their team, so they can demonstrate their own value to upper management.

China is not the birthplace of so called '996'. Long before tech scene in China, there are a lot of investment banks doing that in HK especially for junior analysts. Calling 996 a China thing is just orientlalism. Everything bad is Chinese, everything good is western.