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Re: 996

#301

Post by jvanderbot »

whstl wrote: post #193
scubbo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and take all the upside And all of the risk. Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.

First: regular employees are already taking the risk of being jobless some time in the future when joining startups. Second: there is no CEO in tech taking a smaller salary than their employees.

Counterpoint: is that because to become a CEO one most first obtain money to fund themselves and others?

An employee has the opposite arrangement, they find a job to receive money. A CEO finds money to have a job.

Re: 996

#302

Post by ForOldHack »

graemep wrote: post #281
rsynnott wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of these VC types, ah, not the smartest, to put it mildly. See their twitters (or, well, their investments; remember WeWork?)

A lot of their investments are made on the basis of what they can sell it for before it all falls apart. So in that context theatre in general makes sense. Not sure why long working hours would be - its not something people fund managers about with regard to an IPO, for example, so it probably does not hugely raise exit values.

You should see the code they crank out. All rated in characters per second/lines of code. And now with AI? Super crap. Ultra processed sterilized caca del Toro.

Re: 996

#303

Post by santiagobasulto »

You're all answering from a very privileged standpoint. I started my career in tech from a small town in Argentina. When broadband was prevalent around the world (2012) I was still working with a dial up connection on a $200 computer.

I grew up seeing what poverty and lack of opportunities does to people, and I was determined to break away from that.

I got a job at a startup by sheer luck, and it completely changed my life. Heck, I was not even doing 996, I was getting up at 7AM and going to bed at midnight EVERY DAY including Sundays.

When I was not squashing tickets at a 2X rate than my European coworkers, I was learning new things, trying out new projects, writing blog posts for the company, doing customer support. I didn't care.

So yes, I agree now (from a privileged position) that 996 might be unhealthy in the long run. But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference. And yes, ideally the world would be fair and everybody should need only 40hs/week to make a living, butt that's a fairy tale.

If you're a young ambitious above-average person, and you're going to listen to people claiming this is "bad", please also compare your to their privileges: race, geographic position, net worth of your family, etc...

Re: 996

#304

Post by ohdeargodno »

kriops wrote: post #279
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fundam…

[flagged]

Re: 996

#305

Post by _0ffh »

scubbo wrote: post #185
robterrell wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're smart enough to get hired for one of these roles, and you're willing to work 996, be just a little bit smarter and found your own startup and take all the upside.

> and take all the upside And all of the risk. Encouraging anyone to start their own company is deeply irresponsible. Most startups fail. If you're needing encouragement to do it - if you're not already fully deluded that you're the special snowflake unique genius who will succeed where all others have failed - you shouldn't be doing it.

That's the fun part: If you find investors, then they're taking the actual risk while you pay yourself a nice salary.

Re: 996

#306

Post by lif »

furyofantares wrote: post #120
lif wrote: post #83

7-11-4 for focused productivity

Is this a 16 hour workweek or a 64 hour workweek?

thanks for asking! so: 4 day work week model (look up Iceland for an example of this)

And yes, 4 hours/day in the morning, intent here is just for most mentally demanding work to take place then

Overall, the above is to serve as a core time structure/focus principle (so to be clear, am NOT claiming ALL types/levels of work can be fitted into just 16h/wk -- tho ~30h/wk is worth striving for, imo)

the idea is to optimize for quality, and grind as needed in the later part of the work day.

Re: 996

#307

Post by bko »

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…

>If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extraordinary compensation.

That's a naive approach. If you're in a place where people are fanatically devoted to the mission, it's a benefit in it of itself.

First you'll learn a lot. Residency is often grueling in terms of hours. The payout is much later as you learn more.

Also you're surrounded by very smart hard working people. Every high achiever I know hates working with low achievers or people who are lazy, incompetent or don't care. This is selection. So you learn a lot, in a very intense way, you'll learn a lot from smart people in a very short period of time.

But the most important thing I learned is that there is a huge universe of knowledge you can't learn from books or derive logically. You would learn more doing 996 following around a high performer over a short period of time than you would from years of school.

Some people like doing hard things. People do Ironmans and marathons, they train months for them and what do they get in return? Some endurance and strength that will dissipate within months of the end.

Finally it depends on your stage in life. If you're coming out of college, I would definitely recommend doing the most challenging thing you can find in your area of interest. If you have a family and kids, maybe pull back a bit.

Re: 996

#308

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

georgeburdell wrote: post #293
NaomiLehman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what kind of job, except for some very, very fringe cases like a NASA active mission or an atomic threat, would require a person to pull all-nighters. And how is that productive in the long-term? It's not exactly easy to hire talent.

I have not pulled an all nighter proper (the worst was going to sleep at 6 and waking up at 7:30), but working late into the night is usually distraction free. During work hours, I feel obligated to quickly respond to coworker's emails and help requests, so most of my own work is worthless during that time unless it’s the equivalent of updating a config file

Funny, because updating a config file is about the most dangerous thing you can do. #1 prod killer.

Re: 996

#309

Post by tinktank »

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…

You've hit the nail on the head. If you own the company, feel free to do your 996 bullshit. If you want me to work that hard, give me an equity stake that makes it so.

Re: 996

#310

Post by tikhonj »

Performative hours are, fundamentally, a symptom of a lack of trust. A lack of trust in others but also a lack of trust in yourself.

Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be intrinsically motivated or to work in the most effective way for them. If you assume people are inherently unmotivated and lazy, well, trackable hours and artificial pressure seem like the obvious consequence.

But it's also a sign of not trusting yourself. Being judged on outcomes—never fully under your control—is scary. Being judged on anything fuzzy or arguable—taste, experience, skill, insight—is scary. If you're the sort of person who is content to "grind", the best way to win competitions is to turn them into grinding competitions. You can't be confident that you are more skilled, more intelligent or have better taste than others, but you can always just "grind" that extra hour. For a certain personality, time spent is by far the easiest metric to control.

If you grow up constantly being praised for how "hard" (read "long") you work, constantly out-competing people by doing more rather than better, the inherent value of "hard" work over everything becomes fundamentally ingrained in your personal story. And, unfortunately, our culture tends to put those people into positions of power, so this tendency gets reinforced and propagated.

Taking a step back, doing something good with less effort ought to be more impressive than doing it with more effort. That's what real potential looks like.

More importantly, even if working more hours purely increased your effectiveness and productivity—and we absolutely know that it doesn't—it would still be a weak form of leverage. Maybe you can work 2× the hours, but you can never work 10x. On the other hand, with taste and experience, you can absolutely come up with a 10× better design, or a 10× better understanding of what you're doing, and, unlike long hours, those 10× advantages compound.

If you trusted your own taste and creativity to give you the leverage you need, you wouldn't work ridiculous hours because you'd know it's counterproductive.

But when you don't, long hours are an easy, socially accepted fallback.

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