This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did.
Yeah, but he was working to achieve something for himself and not to make some parasite richer.
Oh, does that make Silicon Valley Already Existing Socialism now? Much heirarchy smashing, very worker's rights, wow
I thought "996" meant 9 hours on Monday, 9 hours on Tuesday, 6 hours on Wednesday, then a 4-day weekend.
That sounds pretty sweet.
I kept pushing my previous employer for a midnight-8pm Saturday, and a 4AM-midnight Sunday shift, but couldn't get them to approve it. 40 hours a week, 5-days off.
Couldn't get them to approve it.
The Americans and their piss poor labor laws, They like working beyond the point of diminishing return.
Embracing? This is been the reality for many startups for a long time. Same with many game devs and animation studios too. Many technical jobs grind their staff despite being the most profitable industries. It is almost like the more money you make, the more you abuse your staff.
I’ll agree to it, but best I can do is 2 hours a day dawg
Say no to 72 hour work weeks. Working more hours does not increase quality of work or even quantity, but is does increase stress and suicide rates. Stop accepting it's OK to be ground into dust just so you can barely earn a living. Tell those CEO's to take their jobs and shove it, especially in Sililcon Valley. That place is no longer the pinnacle of technological innovation it was in the late 90's. It's been nothing but a guilded shithole bastion for technocrats.
Honestly even in the late 90s it was going down. I don't think DEC or Amiga or something else cool you can remember have anything to do with the Silicon Valley.
After the original Intel and other hardware things fame, it's a place that mostly collected parasites living off the dotcom bubble and then profanation and oligopolization of tech. The least important part - the companies making suddenly popular user applications and websites. Their main effect was negative - they reduced diversity, competition and redundancy in that.
In any case ... "AI startups".
I'm so morally prepared to dance when that bubble finally bursts. A lot of today's rattling of sabers depends on the promise of AI workers, AI drones, AI everything so that a crime would involve only a few real humans.
I avoided this issue by embracing the completely non-controversial "become a contractor" work schedule. When you're a temp they specifically want you NOT to work overtime without prior authorization - because they have to pay for it. And as a software dev I was always treated identically with employees, except for a few special things like some company meetings and offsite events - which I didn't want to attend anyway. And I got paid almost twice as much hourly than I would as an employee. Sure, I had to buy my own health insurance and didn't get paid time off, but when you double your salary those are non-issues. But what about job security? LOL what about layoffs? My job security was that there are always contract jobs everywhere.
Good, keep those freaks away from the rest of us.
People are stupid, they have whole nature around them, but they are killing it to create computers and escape the planet.
That's sad.
why are they working so much, they don't do anything
Silicon Valley Workforces Embracing Controversial ‘Kill The Asshole CEOs’ Strategy
The founders can do all the 996 they want, but if they want to have their employees do the same, they should offer a fair share of the company at least.
Sorry, best we can do is offer a .00001% stake and pretend like it’s your ticket to early retirement.
You are not kidding. I have some experience with startup stock options and... it's not pretty.
Before anyone retorts with remarks about "phantom stock" and other similar offers, I want you to do some math.
Figure out what the 'strike price' of that stock is likely to be when it matures, and calculate what the payout will be. Then figure out capital gains tax and subtract that. Divide what's left over by the amount of unpaid overtime (hours in excess of 40 a week) you're going to put in for the maturation window. Lastly, compare these figures to other testimonials in your field, and also, look up typical yearly bonus figures for more mature companies. You're going to see that it's not a lot of cash for the extra time, that it's nowhere near your base pay rate, and more established companies are going to do a better job of compensating folks for less effort. You may even find that with a 996 grind-set, it might pay out less than taking a second job at retail.
I can also warn you that if the company sells instead of going IPO, you may get a much smaller payout than all that. I was in a situation where they threw the advertised strike price in the trash, and negotiated a sale of everyone's stock to the buying company for much, much less.
That's ok, they can promise more with no intention of ever paying it because there's a special privileged 'preferred' stock that the bigger investors and executives get that's prioritized for sales and dividends before anyone else's.
known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week
Tl;dr
I'd consider it for:
But it's going to have to be the kind of job I would put in those kinds of hours for free, and get paid at least triple what is reasonably expected.
I would not.
yeah, i don't think a job exists where i could sustain that for any period of time before my inevitable mental and physical collapse.
Maybe it’s age talking but I’m at the point where my goal is the job that pays me the most for the least amount of time spent working.
I’m much happier working my “845” (8am-4pm 5 days a week, ideally less) and then being done so I can spend as much time enjoying my life.
fuck that
So many studies say this will lead to far less productivity for anything remotely knowledge work, especially over a long period.
Meanwhile smarter companies are going to a 4 day work week. https://www.investopedia.com/four-daywork-week-study-success-11777896
It honestly blows my mind how these "leaders" get paid billions of dollars to run their companies into the ground because they have no fucking clue how real humans operate.
Nothing to do with productivity. It's all about small dick energy CEOs wanting to validate and underline their self-perceived superior status. "How dare the little people work as little time as me?"
Yeah they're not going for productivity, they're an AI company. They just want the appearance of it to juice up their valuation or to stroke an executive's ego.
Would you like to work nearly double the standard 40-hour week?
Maybe in the USA. It is 37.5h where I am.
known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week.
Fuck off.
Any company that wants me to work a “996“ can fuck ALLLLLLLLLL the way off
That sounds like a good way to have your entire workforce quit on you...
It's a startup, the goal is to get people who work for vaporous promises of future wealth So you squeeze them as hard as you can imagine then the company collapse and you take their work and sell it to private equity aka "angels"
