Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

996

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 561 posts

Re: 996

#51

Post by regentbowerbird »

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.

What happens when the companies band together to compress wages? Like what happened with the high-tech employee antitrust litigation.

Individual employees are far more numerous (therefore harder to coordinate) and have way shallower pockets than companies, so the negotiation power is always going to be lopsided.

Re: 996

#52

Post by petermcneeley »

If I spend my Saturday in the summer sun planting trees all day in my yard I feel liberated.

If I spend my Saturday toiling for wages digging with my hands, sweating for hours, just please some land owner I feel exploited.

It is not the work or the hours that is the core problem.

Re: 996

#53

Post by mananaysiempre »

stego-tech wrote: post #9

These times really do feel like those once-in-a-century redefinitions of work and labor, similar to how we got Child Labor Laws and 40-hour work weeks from the labor movement early last century. Intrinsically, more people are realizing that the former social contract was long ago fed into a shredder, and that the lack of a formal contract will have consequences. Technology broke down the 40-hour work week by enabling…

It also took Russia going to shit to an extent that got everybody else scared—and that Russia still hasn’t really recovered from, because repeatedly cutting the elite out of your society (however unfairly it’s gotten there) really fucks that society up.

Re: 996

#55

Post by jennyholzer »

Kapura wrote: post #7
didip wrote: post #3

996 as an employee, especially for companies that don’t offer fast growing stocks, is a super bad deal. 996 for a business owner or top exec at a big company? It’s the norm. And the risk-reward makes sense to them.

[flagged]

cruelty is fetishized in American (and particularly in corporate/executive) culture

to quote my namesake: "abuse of power comes as no surprise"

Re: 996

#56

Post by tremon »

Kapura wrote: post #22
stego-tech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re removed from the realities of the working class. They have staff, live in a separate bubble from their workers with different social circles, different services, different mores and norms. Executives make shitty decisions because they surround themselves with others who view wealth as a leaderboard to be climbed and flaunted, and have no fucking clue how difficult things are for the people doing the actual wo…

maybe i've spent too much time trying to make computers operate efficiently, but it strikes me that if a process a) takes more time than should be necessary and b) produces sub-optimal results, we should maybe pursue other processes. and stop paying these idiots 7+ figures.

a) takes more time than should be necessary

b) produces sub-optimal results

Both of these claims are empty. Necessary according to whom? Sub-optimal against which metrics? All industrial processes are inefficient in some way because you're always dealing with engineering trade-offs. Staying in the computer domain: show me a system with optimal latency and I will show you an underutilized system; show me a system optimized for high-throughput and I will show you a system with erratic latency behaviour.

Re: 996

#57

Post by maldonad0 »

jfengel wrote: post #25
maldonad0 wrote: post #4

A materialist culture inevitably leads to this. It is the logical conclusion of a society that atomized the wholeness of life without realizing that the sum of its parts is less than the whole. But it is the reality the collective chose. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better.

It is where the slippery slope leads but a lot of materialist cultures manage to find a midpoint and stick there. In a sense this isn't even materialist: you are chasing numbers in an account for their own sake. A materialist wants things, and might sacrifice everything else to get them, but doesn't want to do the work for its own sake. Ultimately this is feeding the ego, the least material thing of all. And I can't…

It really is materialist, as numbers in an account is a direct representation for the number of coins you have, which are spent fueling a life full of hedonistic pleasures and vices. The ego is attachment to pleasures and vices.

Re: 996

#58

Post by svieira »

hidelooktropic wrote: post #39

Do those of us not cool enough to know already get to find out what 996 means?

9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week. It's a "how long do we work" shorthand, like 955 (9 AM to 5 PM 5 days a week) or 864 (8 AM to 6 PM 4 days a week).

Re: 996

#59

Post by jeremyjh »

binsquare wrote: post #44

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 diffe…

Very true, even true below the executive level. I can be utterly exhausted from lack of sleep and still have productive conversations and keep my team unblocked and productive, but when I try to develop software in that state its a complete shit show, making lots of stupid errors that I waste hours debugging, etc.

Re: 996

#60

Post by uonr »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #26
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.

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.

At least the recent popularity of the 996 originated in China, and I believe most Chinese people would agree with that. Besides, even if it started in Hong Kong, saying it originated in China is still technically correct.
Post reply on HN