1w ago

Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking

www.techradar.com Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy advocates 72-hour work weeks despite overwhelming evidence.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again called for longer working weeks has returned, this time with an emphasis on schedules like the 996-pattern used in parts of China.
Murthy's comments revive a debate which began in 2024, when he argued that Indian employees should work 70 hours a week.

177 comments

Oh fuck off, asshole... you need to be thrown in prison.
- He needs to take a long walk, on a short pier.
  
  Into the warm embrace of a hungry octopus...
- Needs to be shot into the sun. Return his atoms to the foundry

There is a large body of research out there regarding 12h shift work in healthcare. I’m only linking 1 article, a quick search will yield more, easily.
A TLDR on it: 12h shifts decrease performance. Stacking them decreases safety and performance, cumulatively. Car accidents pick up significantly on day 4.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4629843/
- It’s utter madness that healthcare professionals are allowed to work (in many countries) longer than truck drivers. It’s even more ridiculous that many countries have a medical doctor internship program that is designed by an absolute cocaine fiend assigning 30 hour days - and see nothing wrong with it.
  
  Capitalism protects the capital (goods, and equipment, on a truck), and values human lives at approx $3 million (based on financial cost for the company when a life is lost).
  The value of the truck and the contents of the trailer are frequently greater than the value of the driver for a given trip, and therefore justify more caution and care than any given patient in a doctor's office.
  
  It's almost like the collective bargaining of a union works.
  
  There’s less errors overall in having consistency in who healthcare reports off to between shifts. The 17% is balanced out by that (math wise). The errors in having 3 people reporting around an 8hr clock are significantly higher than with the 12hr clock.
  But a 4th shift? Staying over to 16hrs? The 36hr week, I feel, is the extent to which you can safely take the 12h shift.
  Additional madness is in that, in 26 states, the administrators of hospitals can hold shift workers over into double shifts. I don’t know about you, but I lose the capacity to read words around hour 18. Yet, this practice is engaged routinely in health care, without regard to sleep patterns. Maybe it is an 8h shift. Maybe that person spent day shift in school then went to work for an evening shift. Now is being held on their license to stay a night shift. And expected to drive home after more than 24hrs awake. Maybe their babysitter leaves at midnight. How good and safe is that patient care going to be?
  
  US: Truck driver crashing causes property damage, patients dieing causes the bed to open up for another paying customer.
  Rest of the world: Shortages due to cost of education along with not enough spots available for said education.
  
  probably the shortage problems, and unwillingness for the industry to alleviate the problem. and the pipeline from college to health professional is long and grueling. MD IS heavily gatekeeped by the license certification association.
- Am I missing the article link?
  
  Let’s try this one
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7695681/
  
  It's not showing on my client either, hopefully they edit their comment.
  
  Yes, I failed to paste the copy. After a 12 hour shift.
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4629843/
- Apparently it's about reducing shift changes, which is when most mistakes happen. You would have to hope that someone has done research into mistakes caused by fatigue vs. mistakes caused by shift changes.
  
  In the healthcare environment that is true. 12h shifts retain consistency between back and forth reporting, while with 8hr shifts things get lost or missed or misinterpreted in the handoff.
  My point is that 3 is the sweet spot, it’s the 4th and fifth shifts that become cumulatively bad and result in increased car accidents on the commute.
- Someone told me that the reason for 12 hour shifts is that most medical mistakes and accidents happen because of shift changes. Reducing the number of shift changes from 3 to 2 results in fewer mistakes, despite longer working hours.
  
  This is true. It also results in less intershift rancor. But it doesn’t change the difficulties of 4th and 5th shifts in the same week.
  I’m all for turning a 40hr/5day work week into a 36hr/3day work week. It works well in 24hr professions.
  What I’m not for is this 996 nonsense.
  
  Not really, a huge cocaine user came up with the system, and we use it since then because "it's as we always have done it!!"

“You worked really hard this year. 60 hour weeks. Impressive but you can do more. See that rolls Royce in the parking lot? If you work 80 hour weeks next year and everything works out, I’ll be able to buy a second one.”

He doesn't work that hard, so why the fuck should we?
- He probably thinks he works 80 hour weeks because he is including schmoozing with clients and company paid lunches and dinners as "work"
- "This is nothing. When I was young, I worked 80 hours a week", Murthy probably
  
  These are the little fuckwits that pretend waiting on a phone call back from someone is hard work. They have no concept of what real work is like; their "work" is just their ordinary greasy life made to benefit a shareholder in addition to themselves.
  Oh, you want me to go play golf with this guy using the company card and then go for dinner and drinks? Do some soft sales, just having regular conversation? Sure, I'll take that "work". Man, it's tough. Nobody works 80 hour weeks like me.
- He has his own private chef to make him food, he has maids to take care of his house(s), he has assistants to do all his errands, if he has kids he has nannies to take care of them. So in his backwards ass head he can easily "work" more than 70+ hours a week and doesn't understand why us lowly peons can't do the same.
- We pretend to work
  They pretend to pay us

Crunching does not work!
Instead, it reduces productivity to a fraction (often 10% of normal), countering any time added.
You want to improve your productivity, you make your workers happy. Make sure they can eat, have good healthcare, have adequate family life, etc.
We now have studies that counter the crunching myths and time theft myths.
- The cruelty is the point
  
  They’re not invincible. We’re not our ancestors. Look at this little dweeb. Is anyone really intimidated by him?
- Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
  They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
  
  In actuality, yes, their job is to maximize productivity for the dollar spent, hence maximizing profits, and the best way to do that for most job pools is by improving the QoL of the workforce.
  They likely do value control over productivity, but that's not the job of upper management. A lot of jobs (the bullshit jobs ) are to fulfill a personal need for an entourage, the illusion of business activity. That is a -- human -- trait.
  Our c-suite execs might believe it controlling the workforce is their job, though, if they're inadequately educated about the current state of the art. Hopefully, their AI replacements will be more current and won't be interfered with by the BoD or shareholders.
  
  They actually think it's more productive. They're so good at gaslighting, they even do it to themselves.
- If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.
  
  The bosses win if winning is continuing to manage the company poorly.
  The shareholders lose since cruel treatment reduces productivity and weakens profit margins. It depends on how seriously the business controllers want to actually do a capitalism and create a product and turn a profit.

Ok I'll do 70 hour weeks as long as it promises I am also a billionaire by retirement. So that'll be a salary of 21 million a year please.
- Exactly, I'll work my ass off for a year or two, but then I'm out
  
  You won’t be out when your rent is a million per month and groceries are 100k.
- By retirement?
  I’d expect majority shares in any company I worked that much for, AND a 7-figure salary.
  And retirement would be in 5 years.

Japan has a habit of doing this. The birth rate cratered, productivity is not that great and economic growth is famously low. Most workers do a form of performance theater, an actual "we pretend to work".
- So stupid. Wasting potential personal time for such theatrics.
  They should take inspiration from my coworkers, who don't even bother to pretend.
- A form of wage theft that's common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).
  I have a Japanese friend who told me that it's not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don't, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it's not a formal requirement, of course you don't get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What's worse is that you can't just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let's face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.
  It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

So 6 days of 12-hour shifts? Sounds like a pretty novel way to tank your economy because no one’ll have the time to spend money or raise a family.
- “Why aren’t the proles making babies? I specifically requested it!”
- Absolutely! The short sighted idiocy of this really points out the corporate thinking only about the next Q. This would get maybe a month before the economic crash
- Which they will then solve with mass immigration they can control easier.

can someone kidnap this motherfucker and make him work normal labor job for 80 hours a week, for a year, and see how much he likes this stupid fucking pants on head idea after that
- The pampered idiots that suggest these things would literally not survive a year of actual work at 40 hours let alone what they propose
  
  still solves the problem.
- That's the thing, looking at the company they don't work "normal labor" jobs. Infosys is into info tech, consulting, and outsourcing services and looking at their acquisition history I get the impression they buy up smaller companies and consolidate their work into their product. Basically they make websites and tools that your company buys for $100k to analyze and optimize workflow, but the site doesn't work well and they never fix it. After 2 years enough time has passed that the higher ups don't feel embarrassed retiring the software and buying something else. Also, rather than just coding themselves they code with AI or buy other companies that already wrote the code and put it into their own product.
  At the end of the day they aren't "working," they are being available. They are the shitty guy who is answering a work call on a Saturday while they are supposed to be watching their kid's ball game. They are the person who has to step out of the movie theater because they are getting an urgent work call at 10 pm on Friday. They are the person who flies back from their vacation two days early because the boss wants to ask about sales numbers. This is how Executive suite types say they work 16 hour days 7 days a week, they count every hour of the day as work because they are available, not because they were being productive that entire time.

- Looks very nicely built I would be pleased to have one of these in my home.
  
  Far too nice. No need for the blade to be so sharp and free of rust.
  
  or do it the old fasioned way in , like with scimitar.
- Personally I'd make an exception to my moral stance that work as punishment is slavery, and would prefer to keep him around forcing him to work 70 hours a week, in addition to doing all the other chores required so that he can live - in prison - for the rest of his life.
  Maybe we'll make it 84 hours a week just for good measure, can't be giving him a day off.
  Seems more poetic

He should work himself to death alone and leave us with a better world

Fuck that! We should be aiming for 21-28 hours being the normal length of the employed week for everyone everywhere, and it not being necessary to work any more than that unless you want to for yourself. We can't accelerate forever, we need to do less work hours and have good quality of life, otherwise what's even the point of technology?
- Technology is now used as a tool to perpetually force the working class to obey the ever increasing draconian rules. AI is one thing, highlighting that all it matters to them is a profit with no gratitude towards the workers.
  This is essentially legal slavery, fuelled by big corp and the governmental bootlickers.
- @oftenawake @throwslemy starting with 4 working days per week would be an massive improvement already
- Arguably we are already there. Depends how much you want to yourself. My house? No comrade, our house.
  Share a house and you can do very little work. You could take it pretty far too. Think of those capsule hotels, could fit loads of capsules in my current bedroom even if you want to have your own capsule - sharing can further increase population. Less than 20 hours of work a month for static fees (mortgage, tax) per person. Food is about 4 hours of work a month. Heating wont change, though you will use more hot water for washing, probably 2-5 hours of work for energy and water.
  All essentials covered, less than 30 hours of work a month required per person. Basing this on my expenses in the UK and minimum wage.

I do not understand his logic.
Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
Someone working 70 hours is a mindless drone. This is how you get 13" iPads accidentally sold for 15€ "because the computer said so" (happened in a big box retailer in my country, no human involved in the process objected the price until WEEKS after the sale, when accounting noticed it, and they had to beg customers "pwease return our €1000 iPads and we give you a €25 gift card as a token of gratitude" and everyone just laughed about that)
Especially for developers, for the same price is better to get two that can do tasks with full attention rather than a single one that after 12 hours of job is just mindlessly clicking on "accept" on whatever a LLM is spitting out or half assing solutions because don't have the right state of mind to think for a proper one.
- Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
  What he wants is to pay one person for 70hrs, the same as he'd pay one person for 35 hrs.
  
  AND he will massively underpay that worker for their 35 hours.
  
  And he wants person 2 to be desperate for person 1's job
- Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
  I mean it isn't, but the difference is like marginal, but you get added costs like more hardware,more HR needed ( after a certain number of people) It support for those people etc.
  But really it's penny pinching.
  
  That's the thing. They wont pay you more. Maybe some people would get the extra money, but all new employees would get the same salary for more hours.

"Infosys co-founder suggested slavery could be brought back with updated terms and conditions"
This is how this news should be titled

If you follow the standard 5 day business week, that is 70 hours worked for every 50 hours not worked. Account for 8 hours of sleep a night and you have 2 hours a day to commute to your job. Literally zero time for any other needs. And that's ONLY if you are generous enough to give everyone the weekend to recharge.
For a 7 day work week with no days off, allowing for 8 hours of sleep per day and 2 hours of commute time, that is 4 hours a day to do anything else. I also would assume that part of the day would still be considered off hours for lunch. As well. Call it 3 hours a day for anything not work related.
This man should be hanged for even suggesting this as a reasonable productivity schedule for any living being.
- No joke, I really do think in a just society he would be hanged.
- Yeah - there is no way that you are able to raise children or even go to the dentist checkup with such a work schedule. And if such a schedule was implemented, that would be the collapse of everything else. Cinemas, theatres, bars, events, sport clubs and so on.

MoFo wants 80 hour work week and pays 4,353 USD per year to Indian CS graduates.

The sooner we start eating these motherfuckers the faster things will improve.
Billionaire is a mental illness that isn't compatible with civil society,

Shit like this should be shown to people who argue against unionization.
Remember, the parasites will take everything they can, even if it means their eventual demise.
- The ultimate goal of capitalism is to have an infinite pool of workers, working infinite hours, for $0.
  
  Don't forget each worker also has to simultaniously spend $∞ on goods and services.
  
  And who will buy the results of their labour?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi
Overwork people until they die/kill themselves, great idea, what could go wrong. Really, I want to see homeboy do a month of whatever his lowest employee does with that schedule and THEN say he's still for it. Bet he'll be real fuckin' quiet.
- He would go back exactly to where he was. These people have no empathy

CEO: has lunch and answers a phone call. “I’m working!” Writes a proposal from a yacht “I’m working!” Goes golfing with industry buddies. “I’m working!” Paid tens of millions not including stock options. Spends time in the c-suite. Actually is working. Writes a letter about his cubicle slaves who are chained to their cubicle at work, their phone at home, unable to actually use PTO due to fear of negative performance reviews, working 50+ hours on the clock and uncounted hours off the clock “You need to work more!!” With their pay and benefits constantly under assault by managers.
- Like hell the CEO is writing a proposal himself on a yacht. That's what his secretary, Sugartits or Kathy or whatever, is for.
  
  He read the proposal. That's his work for the day. Claimed 18 hrs.
- I've never seen it written so concisely before. The truth hits that much harder because of it 🫠🥲

Put his ass out there in the field for 70 hrs and see if he keeps preaching it
- It's for thee not for me. He knows he will never have too.
- These people really think they’re invincible. It makes me laugh. There’s nothing special about them. I love how they think money makes them bulletproof or from an angry mob having their way with them.

We don't eat enough billionaires
- That's because they taste extremely bitter and putrid. I suggest we just eject them into space towards the sun, and make them pay for it.
  
  The amount of fuel required to launch them into the sun is more than is required to eject the from the solar system completely, it's not very efficient.
  Although putrid, they remain a valuable source of protein and nutrients. As a more carbon-efficient alternative, I suggest tying some waste stone around their feet and chucking them into the sea. Something in the depths will eat them.
  
  you gotta drain all the blood out of a carcass before you eat it

What a megalomaniac.
Yeah he's inspired by a system which country banned it and yet he still wants it?

I am not an advocate of slavery generally speaking but I do think that it is a just and righteous thing to enslave someone like this and to use them for backbreaking labour for 20 hours per day.
Like. Make it pointless too. Dig this hole. Fill that hole. Dig it again.
Feed them stuff you find in dumpsters. Beat them if their hole digging is going to slow. Test cosmetics on them. Sell them to be used for sex.
That seems right to me.
- Nah, just...make them work regular hours for a pay of an ordinary employee. They could take extra hours to earn more and demonstrate to everyone how to "work hard and earn big". This will be cruelest punishment they can get.
  Oh, and put them on a KPI and control their work productivity.
- weird revenge fetish
- You're using the word "slavery" rhetorically, more or less, but in the eyes of a Sociopathic Oligarch, we are already living on literal slave wages. They couldn't imagine living on the average annual income in this country, but they expect us to, and work harder on top of it.
  They would pay us nothing, like the olden days, but then they'd have to cover our food and housing, and that would cost them more. So they pay us just barely enough to keep us from revolting.
  We are already slaves.
  
  No I'm not.
  I mean we literally force people like this into irons and force them to work under threat of corporal punishment.
  There's what, maybe 10, 20,000 people like this the world over?
  It would be a one time thing. If they managed to have kids before they died from exhaustion or the unforeseen results of pharmaceutical experiments their children would be given good homes and loving adoptive parents, so we didn't risk reviving the institution of slavery. It would be a one time thing. Justice.

I don't understand why these assholes insist on people working more hours. What's the difference to them between 1 person working 70 hours a week or 2 people working a combined total of 70 hours if they're both paid the same hourly rate?
- if they're both paid the same hourly rate?
  That's the fun part: you only have to pay them for 40 hours!
- You just aren't thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.
  Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.
  
  Not only is it your job, you're legally required to, and your shareholders can sue you if you don't as per Ford v Dodge
- Benefits can be expensive, and they only pay you for the 40 hours because it's a salaried rather than hourly position. They just want free labor at the expense of the employees' sanity.
- Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
  A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.
  There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don't need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.
  The answer is always because it's cheaper for them somehow.
- Overworked peasants have neither the time nor the energy to revolt.

Saint Luigi preserve us.

Good luck finding talent, dickhead

Some billionaires are saying shorter work weeks be used of AI, some are saying longer.
If this just a way for us to be “grateful” for things to remain the same?
- It’ll be longer. AI will be there to accelerate the cadence, turning “knowledge workers” from artisans who have the relative luxury of solving problems autonomously at their workstations intro assembly-line labour who hurriedly sling prompts and patch up botshit.
  
  Rotshit, botshit, dirty old twot

How long until a CEO openly argues for slavery?
- It's called prison labor.
  
  I mean they fantasize about imprisoning the unemployed and the poor so basically they're half way there.

Revive a debate? Really? In that case, I’m reviving the debate for redistributing Murthy’s net wealth to all citizens as UBI.

Only if he works 120 hours per week and takes a 99% pay cut.
- No, still not.

Go fuck yourself, parasite. Signed, the world.

Iceland made theor 4 day workweek experiment permanent...because it was actually more productive.
They don't even want all the money, they just want us to suffer

And management will lead by example right?
...right?

These people may as well tattoo "slave owner" on their foreheads by now.

I'm sure these idiots have no concept of the future. They want to burn everyone out in months to years for the sake of boosting their profits in the here and now. Doesn't matter that if you treat your workers well (and pay them well) you often get greater productivity over a longer period.

Infosys is a shitty boss that would contract for 2 resources but only assign 1 to do the work. That's why he wants 80 hours per headcount.
This is why I'm somewhat happy that AI would render extinct companies like Infosys, Wipro, etc.
- Infosys is slimy enough they will find a way to survive

Another bag of shit that believes in China's 9-9-6 BS so he can float on a yacht. Stay in India loser!

70 hours a week? What? So we can just stare at our screens pretending to work for half that time, if not more?
Go to hell.

These are the people that own the GIF image format. Pronounced like Giraffe. Not known to many of you. This is the company that twice threatened to sue or sued multiple companies over the use of GIF. The first time was at the birth of the web and the last time was when their patent was expiring. Its the only thing the company has ever really done with a worldwide impact and they shit on it every chance they got.

You could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don't make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.
You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn't poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.

To be Frank guys this is the sick reality of Indian workers in India. The Labour and Workers are always exploited as much as Possible. Indian Labour Law is mostly in Favor of the Corporate Crooks, even its harder to start a WORKER UNION in Service based sectors like IT and Non coding Jobs. Normal working hours is 8 hrs but most Indian worker in such sectors their minimum working hour is 10hr (Personal experience), even the work environment it evolved into is one Most Sick and Selfish environment you could ever Imagine. Yes, sadly many Indians Lack Civic sense I don't object and we too are being discriminated in a stereotypical way for that. But I must say that many Indians who leave for On-site is not just for higher payroll but for better Work environment and to embrace their basic Work-Life Balance which is a JOKE in India.
~ Random Comrade

And yes, he's ragebaiting.
Don't even know if I'm giving him too much credit here; maybe he is literally dumb enough to advocate for modern slavery.

Talk about telling on yourself having no idea how to run a business.

Hmm time for the real Indian Revolution for fuck sake. These parasites gotta go.
- Yeah I think if this guy is serious it's about time to dawn the black and go hunting
  
  Oh boy it's hunting season

So what I'm hearing from that headline alone is that he's a psychopath who doesn't work more than 5 hours a week, and what little """work""" he does consists of getting drunk at lunch and moaning to other CEOs about how lazy his workers are.

Yeah, go fuck yourself guy

It's not just saturday morning cartoon villain evil.
It's also incredibly fucking stupid.
Anything that you get better outcomes from by making people work longer, like assembly lines, can be done better by robots anyway, and of course you as capital owner don't have to live life after your dominant hand gets crushed and amputated.
Anything that isn't pure rote work, you get better results when people are not overworked and spending thirty hours a week sticking fucking pencils in your acoustic ceiling because nobody's fucking brain works that long and hard.
- Also automation is getting better and better all the damn time. The only reason why we haven't hit 30 hour workweek is due to declining unions and and exploitation politics.

People like this need to be named and shamed.

I learned that China had basically made this shit illegal years ago, but work hours in China are still insane. I am willing to bet that they will still have incredible growth and prosperity even if those workhours are strictly enforced.
People like this dipshit need to be stripped of all possessions and wealth and immured alive.
- Yes they are illegal but companies will use workarounds to get people to put in more time. it's a fake law basically
  
  I guess even in authoritarian police states where the government will disappear or execute you for any opposition businesses still get away with being assholes.

LOL that fuck has like 10 years to live at most.

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