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996

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: 996

#41

Post by stavros »

Aurornis wrote: post #33
stavros wrote: post #11

I don't understand this expectation that employees work more, and stigma if you go home on time, yet we don't have a corresponding stigma for when the amount of money that reaches my account is "only" what we agreed my salary would be.

Companies that try to demand extreme hours with average pay have very high turnover. As employees realize they’re getting a bad deal and that they can find a better ratio of pay to hours worked at other companies, they leave.

Sure, but why does this rhetoric both persist, and only go one way? You never hear anything about an expectation from employers to pay more than what was agreed.

If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed?

Re: 996

#42

Post by Aurornis »

grantdong wrote: post #18

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.

> Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼).

The CEO of one of my employers was smitten with his new China office because they bragged about operating 996.

To everyone else, it was obvious that they weren’t working more. They were just at the office a lot, or coming and going frequently.

When they’d send a video from the office (product demos) barely anyone was at their seats, contrary to their claims of always working.

Their output was definitely not higher than anyone else.

However, they always responded quickly on Slack, day or night, weekend or not. The CEO thought this was the most amazing thing and indicated that they were always working.

Re: 996

#43

Post by picafrost »

I tell new employees that I will not praise them for working extra hours because I don't want them to. I do not have hard data, but anecdotally, when I see teams adopt this mentality productivity seems to increase. My guess is that it's because they try tidy up the loose ends/ideas that annoy folk into jumping back onto the work laptop later in the evening.

Re: 996

#44

Post by binsquare »

I've been part of startups, big corps and have recently started my own startup.

I've also heard from executives and management discuss how they work longer hours (from 1:1s as a dev myself). Now as a founder, many of my peers discuss working 24/7 or close to it. Most don't - but there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor.

The reality is that the "work" is very different for these different groups of people. Executives and management work by delegating and chatting people up. Founders can vary between executive duties or building or many various other founder duties. But (L3-5) engineering at corp is basically expected to code nonstop or to work oncall.

Working 996 as an executive is not comparable to 996 as an engineer.

Re: 996

#45

Post by chasebank »

For those like me who didn’t know what 996 was: it stands for working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

Re: 996

#47

Post by alexnewman »

If you don’t want to grind, don’t pick a career where only the toughest survive—like startups. In China, programmers get massages. You could be giving the massages.

I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.

Re: 996

#49

Post by unmole »

grantdong wrote: post #18

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.

I used to work for Huawei where 996 or worse wasn't uncommon. While middle management definitely pushed for extended working hours, I didn't get the impression that anyone viewed it as failed management. If anything, upper management knew exactly what was happening and was encouraging it.

Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.

Re: 996

#50

Post by thenanyu »

Anyone who talks about 996 as a flex clearly has too much time on their hands. Why aren’t you busy working?
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