Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule
Silicon Valley AI Startups Are Embracing China’s Controversial ‘996’ Work Schedule
Would you like to work nearly double the standard 40-hour week?
Maybe in the USA. It is 37.5h where I am.
known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week.
Fuck off.
So many studies say this will lead to far less productivity for anything remotely knowledge work, especially over a long period.
Meanwhile smarter companies are going to a 4 day work week. https://www.investopedia.com/four-daywork-week-study-success-11777896
Nothing to do with productivity. It's all about small dick energy CEOs wanting to validate and underline their self-perceived superior status. "How dare the little people work as little time as me?"
Yeah they're not going for productivity, they're an AI company. They just want the appearance of it to juice up their valuation or to stroke an executive's ego.
So many studies say this will lead to far less productivity for
anythingremotely knowledgework, especially over a long period.
How an MBA read this.
It honestly blows my mind how these "leaders" get paid billions of dollars to run their companies into the ground because they have no fucking clue how real humans operate.
known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week
Tl;dr
Any company that wants me to work a “996“ can fuck ALLLLLLLLLL the way off
As long as I get paid 2.5x my 40hr pay sure. Otherwise my fellow unionized tech bros are collectively saying "go fuck yourself"
If I was in my 20’s I’d have thought about that 2.5x offer. Now that I’m in my 40’s I can say i wouldn’t even do it for 5x. You can’t buy back missed time, no matter how much money you have.
Part of me says that I’d do it for 20x… but I’d just end up quitting in a few months, take my money and retire early.
After 6 months you'd have enough to retire to Vietnam. Another 6 and you'd have enough to pay yourself a low salary forever.
Another 6 and you'd fund a small house in a smaller town where you can retire, and another 6 and you'd be dead from stress.
I did it (we called it 6x12s) for about 2-3 years in my 30s. At the time it felt worth it; food, lodging, and transportation were all covered as well. I don’t really regret it most days but looking back years later I think it may have damaged friendships more than I’d realized until recently.
There’s no fucking way I’d do it now. Now I’m just one bad day away from rage quitting and retiring. Unfortunately I’m in a great position with a great boss and a reasonable work load and ample coverage and support and never been denied time off so that bad day isn’t likely to come anytime soon.
The founders can do all the 996 they want, but if they want to have their employees do the same, they should offer a fair share of the company at least.
Sorry, best we can do is offer a .00001% stake and pretend like it’s your ticket to early retirement.
That's ok, they can promise more with no intention of ever paying it because there's a special privileged 'preferred' stock that the bigger investors and executives get that's prioritized for sales and dividends before anyone else's.
You are not kidding. I have some experience with startup stock options and... it's not pretty.
Before anyone retorts with remarks about "phantom stock" and other similar offers, I want you to do some math.
Figure out what the 'strike price' of that stock is likely to be when it matures, and calculate what the payout will be. Then figure out capital gains tax and subtract that. Divide what's left over by the amount of unpaid overtime (hours in excess of 40 a week) you're going to put in for the maturation window. Lastly, compare these figures to other testimonials in your field, and also, look up typical yearly bonus figures for more mature companies. You're going to see that it's not a lot of cash for the extra time, that it's nowhere near your base pay rate, and more established companies are going to do a better job of compensating folks for less effort. You may even find that with a 996 grind-set, it might pay out less than taking a second job at retail.
I can also warn you that if the company sells instead of going IPO, you may get a much smaller payout than all that. I was in a situation where they threw the advertised strike price in the trash, and negotiated a sale of everyone's stock to the buying company for much, much less.
Say no to 72 hour work weeks. Working more hours does not increase quality of work or even quantity, but is does increase stress and suicide rates. Stop accepting it's OK to be ground into dust just so you can barely earn a living. Tell those CEO's to take their jobs and shove it, especially in Sililcon Valley. That place is no longer the pinnacle of technological innovation it was in the late 90's. It's been nothing but a guilded shithole bastion for technocrats.
Honestly even in the late 90s it was going down. I don't think DEC or Amiga or something else cool you can remember have anything to do with the Silicon Valley.
After the original Intel and other hardware things fame, it's a place that mostly collected parasites living off the dotcom bubble and then profanation and oligopolization of tech. The least important part - the companies making suddenly popular user applications and websites. Their main effect was negative - they reduced diversity, competition and redundancy in that.
In any case ... "AI startups".
I'm so morally prepared to dance when that bubble finally bursts. A lot of today's rattling of sabers depends on the promise of AI workers, AI drones, AI everything so that a crime would involve only a few real humans.
vomits in trashcan
That counts as your break. 🤨
Fuck right off.
That sounds like a good way to have your entire workforce quit on you...
It's a startup, the goal is to get people who work for vaporous promises of future wealth So you squeeze them as hard as you can imagine then the company collapse and you take their work and sell it to private equity aka "angels"
I thought "996" meant 9 hours on Monday, 9 hours on Tuesday, 6 hours on Wednesday, then a 4-day weekend.
That sounds pretty sweet.
I kept pushing my previous employer for a midnight-8pm Saturday, and a 4AM-midnight Sunday shift, but couldn't get them to approve it. 40 hours a week, 5-days off.
Couldn't get them to approve it.
I would work that many hours a week as long as I got paid +$1 million a year. Otherwise, it would just make more sense to start my own business.
If you're going to work that hard to make some rich guy richer, why wouldn't you do that for yourself?
I had that revelation 30 years ago, and I've been mostly self-employed since. Even in those times when I wasn't, I was still working for my own benefit, not anyone else's. Those jobs didn't last long. I can only work for myself. I'm a good boss, I get away with everything.
Will they be introducing company stores next?
why are they working so much, they don't do anything
Reminder: authority only exists because we let it.
Authority is the right word, nothing in this is about actual products or traditional economic value.
It's feudal (or crook) impression economy. That "AI" is liked by people who can afford to continuously waste money on it. Such schedules are liked by the same people. They are the "Silicon Valley elite" or whatever.
I've read once a description by Russia's ambassador to Persia during Qajars how this historically worked.
So - Qajar Persian court, they've received, say, 2 (I don't remember, maybe 6) modern (for that moment) Russian cannons as a gift. What do they do with the cannons? The cannons stay with the court and are shot for fun at an empty ground with no aim, while the whole court and the monarch moan "ja-a-a-n" with every shot.
It's the same. The oligopolization of tech has made these people so much money and connections with other such people who have money, that they don't care about results at all. It's all shared impressions of what they "already have". They don't have to "run to stay on the same place". They don't have to compete - they collectively own search, social media, what we use instead of pen and paper, everything.
Or a more traditional example (I might have gotten the years wrong, but I think the idea doesn't suffer) - a bunch of knights in XV-century tournament armor are not a very good army compared to cuirassed musketeers with a wagenburg and actual discipline, but the societies are built the way that those real soldiers are very rare, expensive and present only in select important areas during real honest-to-god war. While on their tournament the gentry may pretend it's still XII century and they are competing in useful things.
Actually saying that they want slave labor is considered bad public relations.
Our product will make all jobs obsolete. That's why we need to work our employees to death making it!
Yes, work yourself to death for the profits of the oligarchy, you morons. See what thanks you get.
A sense of pride and accomplishment, right?
Right..........?
Silicon Valley Workforces Embracing Controversial ‘Kill The Asshole CEOs’ Strategy
People are stupid, they have whole nature around them, but they are killing it to create computers and escape the planet.
That's sad.
What's really sad about it is that most of the shit they believe is complete sci-fi bullshit and they won't build a super-intelligence nor escape the planet no matter how much of their finite time they pump into these futile efforts.
I wouldn't do it for money... I'd do it for a SHITLOAD of money (and then collect unemployment once the bubble bursts, as a soft-retirement)
Culture revolution, 996, USA has imported so many good stuff from China. Next one should be removing president term limit I guess?
Give me a devent chunk of the company so I make proportional profits. Otherwise, no thanks.
Management is on 1034.
I gots to find me one of those jobs. My wife and I are in middle management and are more like 10-12 hour days, 5 to 6 days a week. I’m not a fan.
I avoided this issue by embracing the completely non-controversial "become a contractor" work schedule. When you're a temp they specifically want you NOT to work overtime without prior authorization - because they have to pay for it. And as a software dev I was always treated identically with employees, except for a few special things like some company meetings and offsite events - which I didn't want to attend anyway. And I got paid almost twice as much hourly than I would as an employee. Sure, I had to buy my own health insurance and didn't get paid time off, but when you double your salary those are non-issues. But what about job security? LOL what about layoffs? My job security was that there are always contract jobs everywhere.
Embracing? This is been the reality for many startups for a long time. Same with many game devs and animation studios too. Many technical jobs grind their staff despite being the most profitable industries. It is almost like the more money you make, the more you abuse your staff.
Capitalists going to capitalist
Yeah I start thinking about extreme property damage at 48 hours of work.
Good, keep those freaks away from the rest of us.
that probably goes along with that $20M zuck offered to AI professionals. Yeah, we'll pay you $20M a year, you'll be spent around 6mon into the job your productivity will be 60% so.. (taps calculator) we get f#ck all for a sh%t ton of money and destroy people... letsdoit!
I'm pretty sure half these articles are issued by the companies themselves just to get people outraged and talking about this, just so that they can test the waters and see how many people will defend it.
The Americans and their piss poor labor laws, They like working beyond the point of diminishing return.
I certainly hope these people aren’t driving themselves to work with this schedule. In addition I hope no one on it has a heart condition.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2004-143/pdfs/2004-143.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6617405/
The sweet spot for 12s is in having 4 days off per week. There isn’t time for anything in life on work days except work, sleep, commute. Thirdly, the first day off is a wash. Recovery. Like a nap that simply goes on all day. 12s are great but only with block scheduling and days off.
This schedule proposal sounds like something out of pre-OSHA, possibly intended to kill people. Live to work, not the other way around.
Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did.
Yeah, but he was working to achieve something for himself and not to make some parasite richer.
Reicht Wingers: Hey birthday rates in the US are plummeting!?!?
Tech Bros: Let’s make 20 and 30 somethings work 72 hours a week!
Reicht Wingers: Genius!
I’ll agree to it, but best I can do is 2 hours a day dawg
Oh, does that make Silicon Valley Already Existing Socialism now? Much heirarchy smashing, very worker's rights, wow
