151–160 of 561 posts
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.
When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company. The only time I’d actually consider crazy schedules was if I was the founder with a huge equity stake and a once in a lifetime opportunity that would benefit from a short period of 996. For average employees? Absolutely not. If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extrao…
Having worked at several startups, I’ll say that 996 is a lie. The best startups were ones that worked HARD for 8 to 10 hours, 5 days per week. What I always found at companies “working” 996 (or something close) was that mostly everyone was hanging out in the break room playing foosball or video games (or watching someone else do it). Sure, they were “in the office,” but the productivity of those hours beyond 8 was r…
If someone who actually like this kind of thing freely enters into it, well, best of luck to you. I think the shouting "996" thing is just stirring up attention.
I found out that it was a very limited wavier in Chinese law that permitted a few companies to do 996 (or 9am to 9pm 6 days a week, or 72 hour workweeks). Now, I'm seeing US companies demand that here. Like, hell no. My body and health isn't worth what you're paying, and the answer 996'ers aren't paying double, or even 1.5x the position. Saner parts of the world are discussing 37.5h/weeks, and even going to 4 day wor…
I spent decades worked way more than 996, on ships, ashore, in medical school, in residency, on clinical staff while doing entirely uncompensated research. Now I'm a subspecialist physician living in the Valley. I have never worked this little and enjoyed such a high standard of living. One of my seniors said "You don't have to work 2.5 jobs anymore. Just work 1.25 jobs". I work with teams across the spectrum of businesses to figure out how to build the business lines and I see the challenges small companies have. I really do. Not least of which is how the big companies have stacked the deck against new entrants.
Now that I do have some free time I spend it helping my wife build her business, I'm essentially her cofounder. Been incorporated for 8 years now. We think about motivating employees, paying them fairly, the breath-taking amount of money consumed by SaaS, rent, health insurance, travel costs and how that makes it hard to pay employees more. We think about motivating customers and charging them fairly. We see the mind-reeling amounts the big companies charge and then give customer discounts that effectively curb the competition. I see how they get their employees to work harder.
There are two fundamental rules in business:
1) If you're not making money, you're losing money.
2) Don't run out of money.
We watch the end-of-month profit margin going up and down like a rollercoaster. Some months, yeah, "This is great". Some months "Oh, oh, we cannot keep doing this".
We had one employee who really took this whole "I don't have to work ... hard" to heart. She would charge an hour for filling out her timesheet. She consumed her annual sick leave and accumulated PTO in her first 6 weeks. She would bail on scheduled work. Customers loved her but she was literally a net cost to the company money. How? Fixed costs. Overhead is real. Had to let her go. Honestly wasn't a hard conversation with her (she actually never returned some equipment, flat out stole from the company). What was hard was figuring out how to cover those customers and explaining to them why their favorite face of the company was gone.
You want to live a happy, ethical life? Live within your means. But that also entails having the means needed. And everybody else gets a vote. If you live in the US: the whole world wants your quality of life. Even if it's just 10% of the rest of the world, that's still double the entire US population, who are working 996.
Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.
When I was getting my Ph.D., my advisor jokingly told me that his lab has three 8 hour shifts per day, and I could pick two to work. This was never literally practiced. But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career. But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out. I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.
It is still bad, though. The lab should impose maximum hours, because it does nobody any good if you get out of it burned out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually kind of like when companies are upfront about 996 expectations. The transparency makes it that much easier to avoid them.
The more upfront they are, the more normalized it gets which encourages other companies to do the same.
Plenty of employers do not operate with this expectation. In the US, I’d replace “plenty” with “most”.
Plenty of employers recognize an opportunity to differentiate themselves to candidates by publicly not being 996’ers.
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.
What the heck? And why is everyone even discussing this? What kind of nightmare.
the trouble is, for the amount of work these people claim they are doing, i'm not seeing actual things being shipped.
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…
I have absolutely zero faith that the current political ruling class will “come to their senses”. All you have to do is observe their current behavior and you will come to the same conclusion. When billionaires show you who they are, believe them the first time. They have not lived through a depression and neither have they lived through any major world wars. They will be curious to see how bad it can get and they be…