Just want to point out this felt like the absolute perfect length for a blog post. Very inline with what was being communicated.
996
341–350 of 561 posts
Re: 996
#342Anyone who thinks they can just "out work" the competition cannot be serious about innovation. Sure, you have to be willing to work hard sometimes, but its much more important to work smart, meaning, knowing where to go and how to get there efficiently and effectively. The latter can't happen if you are too busy to get a good nights sleep. Good ideas don't happen when your brain works on fumes.
Re: 996
#343I don't understand what people spend their time at work on. I have a very successful career, top .01% income for my age bracket, and never worked more than 40 hours at one job in my life.
Trying hard to get a startup off the ground because you'll get shares, and you think you can make it work.
Re: 996
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Are you actually agreeing to specific hours? For example, in a contract, as an hourly worker, or with some formal arrangement with the company? If so, then yes you should only work those hours. However, if you’re a typical full-time employee in most countries you don’t have agreed upon hours. > If I'm an employee with miniscule equity, why would I put in any more time and effort than what was agreed? Again, if someth…
>> a typical full-time employee in most countries you don’t have agreed upon hours
In most countries there are labor laws which specify fulltime working week as 35-42.5 hours.
Any time more than that should be logged in as overtime and compensated properly.
Re: 996
#345I 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.
I've always explained it like this: I would prefer that you work reasonable hours and no more. Just make sure that you're giving your best during those hours. Focus on solving problems, and avoid distractions like social media.
Most good engineers are happy with this arrangement.
Re: 996
#346You'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 m…
What does this even mean? You literally say that you were working harder than your coworkers. Was your job under threat or something? This just sounds like an unhealthy case of imposter syndrome.
> 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.
Sure, they'll make a difference for the founders/CEOs of these companies, who will walk away completely minted while their employees might pull enough out to get a house. IF the venture doesn't die before exit.
Re: 996
#347A lot of Chinese companies do 996 or 007 but people tend to fake it after a certain timestamp, just to stay there for the sake of staying there. You can’t really tell whether they are productive.
Re: 996
#348When 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…
I think even if someone offered me couple million a year I still wouldn't do it. My kids will only be kids once - all of the money in the world is completely worthless if you miss out on your family. I appreciate some people here don't feel this way but to me that's not a trade off I would ever make. Especially since as software engineers we are privileged enough to usually command both high salaries and the ability…
The reality is also that nobody (aside from Mark "I Want To Buy a State of the Art AI Research Lab" Zuckerberg) is even offering millions in cold hard cash.
Instead, they're offering something worse: the _chance_ to cash out equity that _might_ be worth that at _some_ point in the future.
Versus spending time with my kid right now. Or any of the hundreds of other more enjoyable things I can do with my time.
They're dangling a lottery ticket in front of us. I've seen the end of that movie several times myself now; enough to know the odds are long.
So yeah: no thanks.
Re: 996
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
SF or not, that is 5x the US median wage. There's people in the US that would suit up in gladiator garb and fight to death in an arena for that pay.
They would do that but they wouldn’t be arsed to sit down 8 hours a day reading compsci literature.
Spending 8+ hours a day training to avoid death is a pretty good motivator. Mental requirements lower but not gone, physical requirements much, much higher.
Re: 996
#350I think Carl Newport had in his book "Deep Work" that Number of Hours or Looking Busy was the measure of being productive in the Industrial Age but doesn't suit the knowledge worker(us/developers).