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Re: 996

#501

Post by scott_w »

Kwpolska wrote: post #444
scott_w wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-call is different because it’s usually paid. Lots of businesses outside of tech do on-call and it’s not controversial at all.

Isn’t 996 paid more than 955? Software engineers on-call is not a great practice, especially if you’re not in a life-critical industry (and most engineers aren’t), even though it’s been normalized.

> Isn’t 996 paid more than 955?

Not necessarily.

On-call is not the same either, there’s pay for being available then there’s pay for being called, so they’re not comparable at all.

> especially if you’re not in a life-critical industry

Most on-call isn’t in life critical industries. My dad had to drive to Leicester through the night with a generator in the bed of a pickup so the Walkers factory there could get back to making crisps. I’m sure Britain would have survived a slight reduction in supply of salt and vinegar crisps, so again, your idea that on-call should only exist for critical industries is an idea that seems to only exist in the heads of a relatively small number of software engineers. And I’ve no idea how you came to this conclusion.

Re: 996

#502

Post by _0ffh »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #483
_0ffh wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If you find investors It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you. I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever. It doesn't make sense to follow hype…

> It doesn't make sense to follow hype into adventures with odds of success lower than gambling.

Don't get me wrong, I agree. I'm just pointing out that for those who do manage to get funding (however fickle and/or unfair the process may be) all the natural risks of true entrepreneurship are moot.

Re: 996

#503

Post by frm88 »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #119
j_bum wrote: post #5

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.

As someone graduating from undergrad soon, and a intense and passionate person in CS, all of these reasons are seriously making me reconsider the idea of doing a PhD. I've done the 36-hour straight work grinds, and working from 10 pm to 6 am for multiple days a week. However, I'm tired of doing that, and I've experienced enough burnout already. I'm also not okay with doing highly skilled work for more than 40 hours a…

In Europe there's extensive legislation on how long you are allowed to work per day/week and how you have to be compensated in free time if your workday exceeds 10 hours/day (which is the legal max. per day) for an extended period of time (24 weeks max??? Not sure on this one). Even longer work days or periods have to be legally sanctioned and approved in advance and are severely limited. It's not perfect but it certainly beats these (American?) ideas of 996.

There are several European countries offering PhD programs for Non-Europeans and I bet there will be more soon, seeing as the US is somewhat problematic with science currently.

Worth a conderation, maybe? "The most important step a man can take is always the next one." :))

Re: 996

#504

Post by graemep »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #436
graemep wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is closest to value added something most companies do not disclose but is closely related to profit but is NOTHING like revenue.

no, if you trade a dollar back and forth 1000 times with a friend, you are adding $1000 to the GDP.

If you pay someone a dollar, that is because they supplied you with something worth a dollar - i.e. a dollar's worth of value added to the economy.

Re: 996

#505

Post by graemep »

citizenpaul wrote: post #289
graemep wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 996 is just theater for investors. Investors who have not heard of the research into productivity that says long hours have no significant benefit for skilled work? Who have not heard of diminishing returns? Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?

>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves? The majority of rich people do not work for their money. They inherit or "soft inherit" the money. They do investment stuff because it makes them feel big and powerful and important. You can tell by their speech patterns. Meet some rich people in real life and pay attention to just how slow their patterns of speech and movement are on average. M…

That is true, but the majority of rich people pay other people to manage their investments. They might manage the family business or similar but there are who industries and careers built around managing rich people's money (private banking, family offices, etc.).

I have met quite a lot of rich people in real life and I do not recognise your description. It is true hustle is for plebs, because hustle is born of desperation, but rich people act much the same as non-hustling plebs.

Re: 996

#506

Post by zarzavat »

bko wrote: post #352
zarzavat wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr: it's just ageism in disguise. Anyone in their 30s need not apply.

Yeah, you're right. I think every job should be available to every person regardless of the things required from the job, personal circumstance, skillset or anything else. If some job requires more than strictly 9-5 and cannot be done by a paraplegic, visually impaired, neurodivergent individual, the job should just cease to exist, lest we be called some kind of 'ist'.

It's an office job. There is no requirement. Working extreme hours is a betrayal of your fellow workers with families who are put in the impossible position of having to choose between competing against such people or spending time with their family.

It's also a betrayal of your future self, because maybe you don't have a partner or a family now, but later if you do you will be in the same position as your coworkers. Workers' rights are for everybody, even if they're not for everybody right now.

Re: 996

#507

Post by utrack »

La-Douceur wrote: post #443
utrack wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lot of people know, but the 996 in Alibaba included 2 hour long lunch and sleep break, as well as 1 hour for a dinner at 6 pm.

I worked for ByteDance in Singapore. People would show up for work between 10 and 11am, lunch would start around 11:45am or 12, then people would nap until 2pm at their desk. A good, focused engineer could produce the same output as these engineers while only working in the morning

Exactly - I felt like the real work happened only 11-12 and 15-18, and maaaybe some meetings 19-20. Everything else was a fluff.

Re: 996

#508

Post by qcnguy »

godelski wrote: post #493
annoyingcyclist wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emplo…

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit.

Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claims that makes them not an AI startup.

But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do, mostly through taking fewer holidays rather than working Saturdays. And the Chinese have caught up to the cutting edge of AI very fast, despite facing trade sanctions, Great Firewalls and other obstacles. It is reasonable to infer that they did this by working really, really hard.

I was once told by a US executive that the rule of thumb is people in America (vs "Americans") work ~20% more than people in Europe. Skill level is the same, but Europeans both get more vacation time, have more national holidays, and are harder to fire for low performance. It adds up to a big difference, especially compounded over time. If 996 adds another 20% for China over America, then the Chinese will take the lead. They might burn out a lot of devs along the way (in fact they will), but maybe not as many as you think - after all America has not suffered mass burnout from having 15 days of vacation a year instead of 25 - and success will continue to accrue.

This is a painful truth. I myself work part time and get European vacations. It is pleasant. Yet I know it cannot last. Europe has become a vassal continent, in which Trump dictates terms and the EU accepts them without negotiation, because of the decisions its society has made; one of the biggest being to take life easy.

Re: 996

#509

Post by qcnguy »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #483
_0ffh wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If you find investors It's a big if. Few can get funding especially without connections. In that case, the odds are heavily against you. I'm not sure what is being argued here - if you have connections, can get the money and the opportunity is clear, go for it. However, you should be clear with the above before you put your assets at risk - a job, property, savings or whatever. It doesn't make sense to follow hype…

Er, we're posting this on a website run by a VC firm that routinely gives out investments to huge numbers of tiny teams from around the world. Literally anyone can apply. And we're supposedly in an AI bubble caused by investors ploughing hundreds of millions into any company with .ai in the name. It can't be true that getting investment is hard and requires connections.

Re: 996

#510

Post by qcnguy »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #234

One thing I appreciated at early Google (2001) was how folks mostly worked normal hours. Roughly 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Maybe a bit longer if you wanted to stay for the free dinner. Maybe you checked email at home in the evening or had a week of being on call. But in general the company did just fine on a humane schedule. (There were exceptions, particularly the product folks working on early AdWords partnershi…

Early Google varied a lot. There were a lot of fires in those days that required long hours by engineers. Jeff Dean received a little statue IIRC for taking part in the "index wars", where due to a pervasive lack of checkpointing in the indexing pipeline they had been unable to push a new index to prod for months. And Lucas Pereira regularly had to ship new indexes to the east coast by loading them into his car then driving across the USA.

It's also easy to forget that Google established product-market fit in an uncompetitive market immediately, then found a cash geyser business model only about six months later (or rather copied it from Inktomi). They didn't need to work crazy hours because web search was viewed as a dead end problem that didn't make money, so nobody was chasing their tail. Google's early culture of strict secrecy was a direct consequence of this strange birth: if anyone had found out earlier how much demand existed for AdWords they'd have faced much harsher competition much faster. But Google swore everyone to absolute secrecy, and so the first time the industry discovered how valuable search is was in 2004 on the day of the Google IPO. By then Google had invested so much in R&D that it was impossible to catch up.

Very few companies can be compared to early Google, unfortunately.

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