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Re: 996

#271

Post by paulcole »

Aurornis wrote: post #23

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…

> When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company.

Or a helpful signal to join that company if it’s something you’re excited about.

It’s crazy to me that people are so arrogant to say that somebody else is “wrong” for being excited about something.

Re: 996

#272

Post by paulcole »

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.

If they tell you 996 up front then going home on time is 9PM right?

Re: 996

#273

Post by MagMueller »

I worked for 2 years in a co-working space full of founders next to ETH Zurich. The most consistent worker? The cleaning lady. Every morning at 6 am, she did not miss a single day.

I grew up in a small village in Germany. 500 people, 5000 cows. Only farmers and a cheese factory. In the factory, we worked on Christmas, Easter, and New Year's Eve every morning at 5 am. Farmers don't take days off because cows don't take days off.

Maybe it's not the most healthy way of life. I don't think it physically requires us to take time.

Re: 996

#274

Post by zdc1 »

crawshaw wrote: post #27

The most interesting point in this post, which resonates with me, is to those of us who work a lot, 996 sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous because to work a lot, you have to fit in the gaps around your life. I have done about 60hrs/week for the last 15 years. My scheduled work is barely 10-4 five days a week, with a lunch break, and with a break three days a week for the gym. To get the hours in I wake up at 5:3…

In some Chinese tech companies, 996 isn't the magical pro-capitalist grind it sounds like as they will still have a two hour lunch break, and then also stop for dinner. So ironically, a 996 culture in the USA would be worse than one in Asia. At this point we're just shadowboxing.

Re: 996

#275

Post by hamdingers »

hedora wrote: post #145

All the engineers that I’ve worked with that were doing 12 hour x 6 days ended up being drags on the rest of the team. Their 2am fever dream garbage would hit prod, and then it’d take a full time support person to apologize to customers while two full time engineers wasted a week refactoring production into something that worked. Anyway, I’ve noticed I can only work 6 hours if I write code myself, but can easily hit…

I tried 10-4 for 6 months at a company that had a mix of people working 4 and 5 days, it made me less productive and more burnt out as a senior engineer.

I have ~5 hours of productive creative energy per sleep, others may be different but that's me. Ideally I give 4 hours to the job, spend 4 hours reviewing/meeting/etc. and have 1 for myself. If I push myself beyond that, I start doing substandard work, so 10-4 meant I either did fewer hours of productive work per week, stole my personal creative hours, or delivered substandard work. I did all three depending on the week, but in any case my productivity overall suffered, that appeared in my peer reviews, and the stress slowly built up until I went back to working 5 days.

Re: 996

#276

Post by stavros »

paulcole wrote: post #272
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.

If they tell you 996 up front then going home on time is 9PM right?

Yes it is, it's fine if the deal I'm making is 996, then I can judge whether I'm getting paid enough. What I don't like is "you may have to put in the extra hour here and there" and it's 996.

Re: 996

#277

Post by herval »

r_lee wrote: post #167
Aurornis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

It's sad how a lot of things in life now are all about optics. And it's shocking that it works for leadership/management so well

Life is always about optics. Medieval kings wore a piece of gold over their heads for optics.

I guess more people are just starting to realize this because many powerful people are actually dropping some of the well-accepted optics (particularly in tech, where people felt they were treated better than the average employee for a long time)

Re: 996

#278

Post by annoyingcyclist »

Aurornis wrote: post #23

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…

A founder who commits to 996 is as a side effect building a brand of "grit", "hustle", etc with their investors. That gives them options, regardless of whether 996 is actually useful for productivity and regardless of who is actually working harder as a result of 996: a golden jetpack into an executive role elsewhere when the company is sold for scrap, fundraising terms that give them liquidity not available to employees, a VC job, etc. They're also insulated from 996 to a degree that employees aren't. No one is going to count hours or badge swipes for the CTO/CEO of the company, and no one's going to tell them they can't leave the office early to spend time with their family. Even if they do work those hours, their job is different enough from normal employees to provide some protection from burnout.

As a rank and file employee, you get none of that. The investors don't even know who you are. The outcome for you if the company fails is that you're looking for another job while fighting burnout from longer hours and from working somewhere that doesn't respect you enough as a professional to let you manage your own time (which tends to come with other things that encourage burnout). All that to juice an "hours worked" KPI that research tells us is a questionable thing to focus on. You can do better.

Re: 996

#279

Post by kriops »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #122
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…

We probably need to rethink how companies are structured - there are (many) companies with revenues greater than most countries but are (in theory) dictatorships with no official ability to change course if the one guy who owns the shares does not want to. Who is the ‘demos’ in a company? Who gets a vote ? Will voting really slow things down?

As long as the companies in question aren't monopolies on violence, it's a complete non-issue. So with that in mind, why would any sane person want to impose such an inefficient mechanism to allocate resources and make decisions within a company or corporation?

The only good thing about democracy in the context of a state, after all, is that every other alternative is worse. But that is strictly because of the fundamentally violent nature of the concept of a state, which does not apply to companies or corporations.

Re: 996

#280

Post by tikhonj »

paulcole wrote: post #271
Aurornis wrote: post #23

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…

> When founders put 996 in their job descriptions or Tweet about their 996 culture it’s a helpful signal to avoid that company. Or a helpful signal to join that company if it’s something you’re excited about. It’s crazy to me that people are so arrogant to say that somebody else is “wrong” for being excited about something.

performative hours ≠ excitement

if folks were actually excited and motivated, you wouldn't need forced hours, you'd just trust people to work in the best way for them

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