I'm beginning to suspect that the 996 schedule (and its equivalents in other cultures) aren't actually about productivity; they're about devotion. Devotion isn't something a CEO can explicitly ask for, but a 996 schedule is, so that becomes the expectation even if it actually has a neutral-to-negative impact on productivity.
Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were not his "brothers".
The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line... and I have no idea why. I don't buy the explanation that all of this is just "dumb". Something is up with this.
The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.
But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.
So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.
Keep in mind these are all salaried workers. From an economics point of view, companies don't need to get anywhere near a linear increase in productivity from those extra work hours. They just need to not get negative gains from burnout or apathy.
All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.
Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.
I don't think that these 12 hour days are full of productivity. My partner spent some time in the summer as a researcher at a key lab in Shanghai. She observed that researchers put in long hours (if the boss was around) but often spent time on their phones and repeated experiments mindlessly.
Kai-Fu Lee discusses this culture in the Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next. He suggests that many of the workers will be the only ones in their family who have high paid office jobs. The rest work in factories, farms and other manual labor. Thus, they see an opportunity to be successful and lift their family out of poverty.
> The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line.
That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.
Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani / Theranos / Bad Blood. Blind devotion to "the mission." "We're saving lives!" or "We're changing the world!" is pretty easy to sniff out as cultish posturing, IMHO. I blame it on the cult of personality, personally.
It’s interesting to compare the Bloomberg article with this one from the South China Morning Post, titled “Alibaba founder Jack Ma says companies forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’”. Two articles reporting on the same statements and drawing completely different conclusions. It’s getting harder to find the truth.
It will be easier to understand if you've followed the movement.
Most of those companies are not forcing their employees to work 996 on paper. But if you don't, then first, your team leader will give you some hint to ask you to stay longer. If you still don't, you will be fired for any number of reasons (KPI is too low for example).
Because of that, the company actually don't need to force it's employees. It just keep giving them tasks which cannot be finished without work 996, plus some peer pressures (One of it is "Boss's still here, you can't leave").
Jack Ma's "forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’" statement is basically the same thing: You need to fight for your own future. On the surface, it's correct, but underneath it, he's trying to make you believe Personal strive === Overwork.
It worth notice that Jack Ma also said "If you love your job, 12 hours is not very long" (“如果你热爱（工作），其实12个小时不算太长”[0]) just days ago. Hit: If you don't work 12 hours a day, you don't love your job.
Some background: Jack Ma is a lair who also likes to pretend to be a Life Advisor, he will sometime throw out some bullshit to convince others to sacrifice for him. You need to read between lines.
> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.
The headlines are different, but the content is the same. If you read into the SCMP headline, what it's actually saying is that Jack Ma expects employees to want to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week, without being forced.
This is why I wish we had a topics based news aggregator. A site which lists topics and under each topic, you get a list of different headlines and sources ( hopefully from different countries and with different perspectives and ideologies ). That way, we can see what different media groups are saying about the same event.
Google news and other social media used to do this until they got pressured to "localize" the news and favor "authoritative" sources.
What is shocking is how the same event is covered so differently by different countries and media groups. But the only way you would know this is if you actively search for news which is getting more difficult and which hardly anyone does.
edit: seems like there are contradicting statements from him on this so I'll remove the stuff I had written earlier. It appears he is generally against forced hours but highly encourages his employees to work those hours anyways.
Most people think fake news is reporting false information. But nowadays it’s relatively easy to fact-check something. Much more onerous is selecting facts to report on so as to tell a story that fits an agenda. It’s harder to recognize, and hey—it’s facts! What could go wrong?
He said two things: people should work extreme overtime, and companies should not force them. These two articles are each focusing on one. They’re not contradictory.
Journalists making a story more controversial by tailoring which bits of a speech to quote? How incredibly unusual.
Oh wait, no. The other thing. The thing about never trusting anything you read, especially if it was written by someone who has something to gain by manipulating your emotions.
I find 12 hours a day to be too much. And 6 days a week is throwing the mental health of a person off a cliff.
I’ve frequently found, personally and observing others, that productivity drops after 6h of continuous work especially if it forces you to think a lot (which is pretty much always in software - you still need to apply your brain to connect the plumbing between APIs)
Anything after 6h should either be menial work, cleanup or something else. I’ve found it is usually better to postpone any intense work to the next day. As a solo founder who tried to keep up 12h+ days, I’ve had the same amount of productivity by shutting down my day after 7h. You usually end up stretching things into hours for what would take a couple of minutes with a fresh brain.
I'm actually kind of afraid to comment because I'm generally afraid of the Chinese government and I have a feeling they like Jack Ma and also like wage slavery just as much as him. Plus even if there is no government involved Jack Ma has quite a lot of power because of his money.
But I feel this is a moral issue. The thing is, the system of employment is the evolution of plain old fashioned slavery. That is where Ma is coming from. He believes that he owns those people. Class is still a very strong part of global society.
Just look at the etymology of the word 'employ'. It means using something. Earlier it came from
late 14c., implien, emplien "to enfold, enwrap, entangle"
The thing that is really tough about this is that it's a subtle form of violence as the vast majority of people (even programmers) are in fact dependant upon keeping their jobs.
So in fact the forced overtime is forced labor and is a human rights issue.
I think it's going to get worse rather than better because AI, robotics and automation in general are gradually picking up steam.
Maybe we can be optimistic though and imagine a time where using people ("employing" them) is recognized as unethical. Maybe we will have that luxury someday if we have machines that are smart and dextrous enough to replace human workers. That probably won't end class structures on it's own though.
Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations.
Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.
I understand sometimes people might need to work a bit overtime to get things done or have on-call duties. We all do, but working 12 hours a day/6 days a week is not sustainable whatsoever. Of all these Chinese entrepreneurs, none of them mentioned even the slightest of their total rewards systems, which makes me think they are avoiding this topic on purpose and all their comments are attempts to put out fire while keeping the status quo, sneaky indeed.
To be honest, if someone I manage constantly works crazy hours with no rest for a long period of time, voluntarily or not, I won't even let him/her push any piece of code to production.
Fried brains == Disaster
Edit: had a discussion with some of my friends from China on this. One of the common arguments is "why are developers whining about work conditions while tons of other occupations such as factory/delivery workers and nurses work long hours with lower pay?"
First of all, other occupations having bad work condition does not justify the legitimacy of 996. This is yet another common logical fallacy when it comes to arguments like this. Also, how can people assume workers of other occupations are fine with endless long hours? Did anyone consider the possibility that they never had a systematic way to express their dissatisfaction and just tried going along with it for as long as possible before they were burnt out and got replaced?
Can someone explain to me how you can be productive for 12 hours on a single day?
When I do concentrated programming work, I can maybe do 4 hours, at best 6 hours. It seems I can stretch it when doing more mundane work when I know what needs to be done. But this time is seriously reduced when I have to think about architecture or more complex stuff.
The literature also point into this direction, where writers and serious thinkers do these kind of few hours (also see Cal Newport on deep work).
I know John Carmack said you can be more productive when you can do more easy tasks to fill up the day, but it ends somewhere.
I have a master degree in computer science, and during the exams, my head was full at 20:00. Nothing could get in after that. I know people who could study until 3 in the morning. But you know what, after questioning them, they didn't do shit in the morning.
At work, I always had great reviews and my employers loved me (I'm almost 40 now). I always felt I was slacking off because I worked too little. But then I understood, if I work so little and get great reviews, what are those other guys doing?
So 12 hours a day? You are just lying to yourself. Those people are slacking off like crazy, and probably can't get anything done during the day. And at the end of the day, they are angry at themselves that they didn't do shit and wasted most of those 12 hours slacking off.
But I am sincerely asking to prove me wrong. Is it possible to work 12 productive hours a day? I was always searching for this how some people claim to be able to pull this off. But after investigation, they never really were able to do this.
I've had trouble finding a workplace that understood this. Even on the days where I put in 5-6 hours of high quality work I'd attract the suspicion of managers.
After that they typically begin to "check on me" regularly to make sure I'm not "slacking." This would go on long-term.
I have never worked anywhere where this didn't happen.
I entirely agree with you, with one caveat: I have met one, maybe two persons in my life who were able to work and be intellectually productive 12 hours a day on a prolonged basis, but they are the absolute exception. Building an entire company on the assumption that they are the norm is insane.
I was able to go through a short period when I did 7-8 hours of productive work, but I also lost 15 pounds. I would just work until I was too hungry to think and only eat then. It definitely wasn't sustainable long term.
I think it's a mistake to force people to stay in the office and work for this long. Even if it isn't 100% productive work hours, it still deprives them of opportunities to do other things with their lives such as family, hobbies and fitness activities.
It's as if he doesn't realize he's doing tangible harm to thousands of lives.
I also find it strange that someone that is currently retired at the early age of 54 can demand that other people (earning salaries) work 996. If working is so great and virtuous then why did Jack Ma retire early?
You don't work full 12 hour continuously. You'll take numbers of breaks in between, for example lunch, snacks, napping, coffee, stroll around, exercise, gym, meditation, games, etc.
When people with equity asks regular employees with salaries to work their ass off unsustainably it is just very insensitive to the inherent difference between them.
If owners and top executives were doing an amazing job directing the company then front line employees would not even have to work that hard because the company already has a strategic advantage.
I agree with you, but I suspect the people in China subjected to these inhumane work hours don't have the option for a job with better working conditions. I would not be surprised in companies were colluding such that the 996 is the default work week.
Those who can stick with a 996 are either stupid or desperate (I assume mostly desperate with enough stupid sprinkled in to keep this going). This idea of working your life away for a piece of shit like Ma needs to die. The culture in such places is absolutely toxic and frankly disgusting, not to mention detrimental to the final product. It's amazing to me that this is the norm in much of Asia and the US. I don't know what exactly is wrong with cultures who share this stupid idea, but it's something very serious. The desperation that drives people to almost kill themselves for work is incredible. It seems to be a form of self enslavement. The alternatives must be truly horrific for people to do this to themselves. They definitely are in the US and I imagine they are worse in China. I think people probably know this and don't need assholes like Ma to not only demand this enslavement of themselves, but also to demand that they enjoy their own enslavement and torture. What a scumbag.
'“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.' says a billionaire...
That's a pretty wild assumption, especially coming from a billionaire, but I guess he needs to justify treating his employees like crap to himself somehow.
I assert that there are a great numbers of CEOs who would absolutely love their employees to be working 996 without overtime pay, only most of them won't admit it directly. We cannot expect CEOs to be paragons of virtue - part of the reason they succeed because they discard virtue in favor of profit. Having said that, the solution is not simple. In places like China, it's probably up to the government.
Exactly that is why there are laws (in China I guess not). I can't work more than 200h overtime in a year or 48h in 4weeks (meaning that after four 52h weeks I can't do anymore overtime), regardless of whether I'm paid for it or not. So after two 996 weeks my manager would be in criminal territory if I don't get two very short weeks afterwards. In my experience, this seems to actually work too. Crunch time is replaced by slipping or hiring, as it should.
These laws don't require that anyone forced anyone to do it - the manager is literally responsible to make sure people don't work too much. Obviously this will happen occasionally anyway, but now it is at least llegal.
Jack Ma will be surprised to find out that it doesn't matter how many hours you spend at the office. Actual productive activities will total only 2-3 hours per day.
So spending 12 hours per day at the office actually means more time for social media, news sites, gossip, etc
(i'm not going to dwell on the negative effects of his comments since they're well understood - less time spent at the office = better productivity).
Jack Ma is right about working overtime and have work consume your life when 'passion is not limited to monetary gains', but more often than not, these people that are full of passion realise that it was the wrong choice all along, esp considering how short a healthy life is. The regrets people have on their death bed isn't of not having worked hard, but not having had more time for friends and family.
I sometimes think that there's only ever been one economic model - slavery. Various excuses are periodically found to justify it, like aristocracy, caste system, slavery, Gulag, meritocracy, passion, etc. - ultimately, as a society, we do not want fair wages to be given to workers, so that we can consume more, cheaper goods, and glorify a few billionaires as super(wo)men.
Imagine if you will, a textile mill in North Carolina in the year 1864.
Unpaid labor performing most of the factory's value-added activities, along similar lines to how the cotton was raised agriculturally on nearby plantations.
Company accountant complains about "$9,800 of total labor cost" for the year, which is about $800 more than it was the year before. "When is it going to end?" is often heard, even though the actual workers recieve no payment and never have, there is still a fundamental cost of labor even in a pure slavery situation.
Another year comes & goes, the Civil War ends, slaves are emancipated, and the factory is then required to actually divert some cash directly to the newly christened "employees" for the first time, in the form of a regular paycheck.
The accountant has never been so grumpy. "Looks like we're going to have over $15,000 in labor costs this year, thanks to the plumb fool Yankees."
And life goes on.
When is it going to end?
Anyway, I prefer to work a 12-hour day because I get more accomplished than would otherwise be accomplished over two 8-hour days. Relatively speaking, someone else's 16-hour project which
takes them two workdays and completes no sooner than 34 hours after assignment, can often be completed in only 12 hours after assignment if all energy is directed continuously until completion.
For those that do not have that much ability to focus, I understand.
I wonder how many processes are not automated because of peer pressure of 996. Heard stories about when India was just opening as a outsourcing hub, people would use notepad to create HTML pages. As that means more billable hours. No syntax highlighting, macro and other support. Something similar must happen for 996 to be practical.
Leaving aside the questions around the ethics of 996... is this kind of schedule actually effective? Do companies that work knowledge workers like this actually outperform competitors?
I spent a good chunk of my twenties working a schedule of 8 hours coding at work followed by 6 hours coding on a side project, with my entire weekend on the side project as well. I didn't have any sort of social life (largely by choice but also because I was remote working in a tiny rural village).
It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a startup. When you're young, moderately fit, and ambitious you can crank out a ton of code.
However, the important point is that it was my choice to do that. You can't ignore the ethics because that's what makes it wrong - asking people to do it while (even silently) implying bad things will happen if they don't is deeply unethical.
I think it probably works. The 6th day in particular seems like it would be a big boost. Technically, even if having a work week 80% longer than your competitors only ekes out a 10% boost to the amount of work done, that's still a big advantage.
I shouldn't think so. Early in my career I work in some consulting company that prides themselves for working their engineers until late at night. Never again. A real strategic advantage would trump hard work every time.
Jack Ma is an idiot for doing this for very simple reasons. It's a country of 1 billion people. His company has 5 billion dollars in revenue, they pay their developers like 30k USD. Burning out your brightest is a stupid business strategy. They can afford to hire many more people as they have plenty of money to afford to do so. It's like some stupid idea of machismo. Like be a man! Yeah fuck that noise.
It's in fact physically sickening to subject people to this. As they are sitting 12 hours a day for 6 days a week and then probably sleeping all day on the 7th to recover.
>Richard Liu, chief executive of Alibaba arch-foe JD.com Inc., said in a recent post on his WeChat moments that, while he would never force staff to work a 996 schedule, people who slacked off were not considered his “brothers.”
Holy cow! People went ballistic when Elon said in his post that the employees should hold up for the sake of the company.
[+] [-] human20190310|7 years ago|reply
Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were not his "brothers".
The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line... and I have no idea why. I don't buy the explanation that all of this is just "dumb". Something is up with this.
[+] [-] rwallace|7 years ago|reply
The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.
But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.
So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.
[+] [-] BigJono|7 years ago|reply
All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.
Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.
[+] [-] regularfry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpking|7 years ago|reply
Kai-Fu Lee discusses this culture in the Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next. He suggests that many of the workers will be the only ones in their family who have high paid office jobs. The rest work in factories, farms and other manual labor. Thus, they see an opportunity to be successful and lift their family out of poverty.
[+] [-] thetechlead|7 years ago|reply
That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.
[+] [-] scruple|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjw3|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...
[+] [-] rqs|7 years ago|reply
Most of those companies are not forcing their employees to work 996 on paper. But if you don't, then first, your team leader will give you some hint to ask you to stay longer. If you still don't, you will be fired for any number of reasons (KPI is too low for example).
Because of that, the company actually don't need to force it's employees. It just keep giving them tasks which cannot be finished without work 996, plus some peer pressures (One of it is "Boss's still here, you can't leave").
Jack Ma's "forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’" statement is basically the same thing: You need to fight for your own future. On the surface, it's correct, but underneath it, he's trying to make you believe Personal strive === Overwork.
It worth notice that Jack Ma also said "If you love your job, 12 hours is not very long" (“如果你热爱（工作），其实12个小时不算太长”[0]) just days ago. Hit: If you don't work 12 hours a day, you don't love your job.
Some background: Jack Ma is a lair who also likes to pretend to be a Life Advisor, he will sometime throw out some bullshit to convince others to sacrifice for him. You need to read between lines.
> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.
You see what's going on here :)
[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/china/gncj/2019-04-12/doc-ihvhie...
Edited to fix some grammar problem. Hope that will make it easier to read. Thanks for pointing out :)
Yes, I fixed it again.
[+] [-] rmrfrmrf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttflee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basetop|7 years ago|reply
Google news and other social media used to do this until they got pressured to "localize" the news and favor "authoritative" sources.
What is shocking is how the same event is covered so differently by different countries and media groups. But the only way you would know this is if you actively search for news which is getting more difficult and which hardly anyone does.
[+] [-] rococode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmytucson|7 years ago|reply
Most people think fake news is reporting false information. But nowadays it’s relatively easy to fact-check something. Much more onerous is selecting facts to report on so as to tell a story that fits an agenda. It’s harder to recognize, and hey—it’s facts! What could go wrong?
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|7 years ago|reply
Oh wait, no. The other thing. The thing about never trusting anything you read, especially if it was written by someone who has something to gain by manipulating your emotions.
[+] [-] inapis|7 years ago|reply
I’ve frequently found, personally and observing others, that productivity drops after 6h of continuous work especially if it forces you to think a lot (which is pretty much always in software - you still need to apply your brain to connect the plumbing between APIs)
Anything after 6h should either be menial work, cleanup or something else. I’ve found it is usually better to postpone any intense work to the next day. As a solo founder who tried to keep up 12h+ days, I’ve had the same amount of productivity by shutting down my day after 7h. You usually end up stretching things into hours for what would take a couple of minutes with a fresh brain.
[+] [-] ilaksh|7 years ago|reply
But I feel this is a moral issue. The thing is, the system of employment is the evolution of plain old fashioned slavery. That is where Ma is coming from. He believes that he owns those people. Class is still a very strong part of global society.
Just look at the etymology of the word 'employ'. It means using something. Earlier it came from
late 14c., implien, emplien "to enfold, enwrap, entangle"
The thing that is really tough about this is that it's a subtle form of violence as the vast majority of people (even programmers) are in fact dependant upon keeping their jobs.
So in fact the forced overtime is forced labor and is a human rights issue.
I think it's going to get worse rather than better because AI, robotics and automation in general are gradually picking up steam.
Maybe we can be optimistic though and imagine a time where using people ("employing" them) is recognized as unethical. Maybe we will have that luxury someday if we have machines that are smart and dextrous enough to replace human workers. That probably won't end class structures on it's own though.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuffedBelly|7 years ago|reply
Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.
I understand sometimes people might need to work a bit overtime to get things done or have on-call duties. We all do, but working 12 hours a day/6 days a week is not sustainable whatsoever. Of all these Chinese entrepreneurs, none of them mentioned even the slightest of their total rewards systems, which makes me think they are avoiding this topic on purpose and all their comments are attempts to put out fire while keeping the status quo, sneaky indeed.
To be honest, if someone I manage constantly works crazy hours with no rest for a long period of time, voluntarily or not, I won't even let him/her push any piece of code to production.
Fried brains == Disaster
Edit: had a discussion with some of my friends from China on this. One of the common arguments is "why are developers whining about work conditions while tons of other occupations such as factory/delivery workers and nurses work long hours with lower pay?"
First of all, other occupations having bad work condition does not justify the legitimacy of 996. This is yet another common logical fallacy when it comes to arguments like this. Also, how can people assume workers of other occupations are fine with endless long hours? Did anyone consider the possibility that they never had a systematic way to express their dissatisfaction and just tried going along with it for as long as possible before they were burnt out and got replaced?
[+] [-] koonsolo|7 years ago|reply
When I do concentrated programming work, I can maybe do 4 hours, at best 6 hours. It seems I can stretch it when doing more mundane work when I know what needs to be done. But this time is seriously reduced when I have to think about architecture or more complex stuff.
The literature also point into this direction, where writers and serious thinkers do these kind of few hours (also see Cal Newport on deep work).
I know John Carmack said you can be more productive when you can do more easy tasks to fill up the day, but it ends somewhere.
I have a master degree in computer science, and during the exams, my head was full at 20:00. Nothing could get in after that. I know people who could study until 3 in the morning. But you know what, after questioning them, they didn't do shit in the morning.
At work, I always had great reviews and my employers loved me (I'm almost 40 now). I always felt I was slacking off because I worked too little. But then I understood, if I work so little and get great reviews, what are those other guys doing?
So 12 hours a day? You are just lying to yourself. Those people are slacking off like crazy, and probably can't get anything done during the day. And at the end of the day, they are angry at themselves that they didn't do shit and wasted most of those 12 hours slacking off.
But I am sincerely asking to prove me wrong. Is it possible to work 12 productive hours a day? I was always searching for this how some people claim to be able to pull this off. But after investigation, they never really were able to do this.
[+] [-] theprotocol|7 years ago|reply
After that they typically begin to "check on me" regularly to make sure I'm not "slacking." This would go on long-term.
I have never worked anywhere where this didn't happen.
[+] [-] isolli|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HansLandaa|7 years ago|reply
I think it's a mistake to force people to stay in the office and work for this long. Even if it isn't 100% productive work hours, it still deprives them of opportunities to do other things with their lives such as family, hobbies and fitness activities.
It's as if he doesn't realize he's doing tangible harm to thousands of lives.
I also find it strange that someone that is currently retired at the early age of 54 can demand that other people (earning salaries) work 996. If working is so great and virtuous then why did Jack Ma retire early?
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_jends|7 years ago|reply
If owners and top executives were doing an amazing job directing the company then front line employees would not even have to work that hard because the company already has a strategic advantage.
[+] [-] mabbo|7 years ago|reply
Oh, what's that? You want to pay me the same total compensation as any other company, but make me spend twice as many hours working?
No thank you. I'll seek employment elsewhere.
[+] [-] mywittyname|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnm1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spinach|7 years ago|reply
That's a pretty wild assumption, especially coming from a billionaire, but I guess he needs to justify treating his employees like crap to himself somehow.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iliketosleep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|7 years ago|reply
These laws don't require that anyone forced anyone to do it - the manager is literally responsible to make sure people don't work too much. Obviously this will happen occasionally anyway, but now it is at least llegal.
[+] [-] kmlx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyjones|7 years ago|reply
Yes, the richest self-made man in China will soon be lectured by a random commenter on the Internet about how he got it all wrong.
[+] [-] helloindia|7 years ago|reply
But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which maligns the reputation of China.
[+] [-] earenndil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ignoramous|7 years ago|reply
https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/
[+] [-] sn41|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|7 years ago|reply
Unpaid labor performing most of the factory's value-added activities, along similar lines to how the cotton was raised agriculturally on nearby plantations.
Company accountant complains about "$9,800 of total labor cost" for the year, which is about $800 more than it was the year before. "When is it going to end?" is often heard, even though the actual workers recieve no payment and never have, there is still a fundamental cost of labor even in a pure slavery situation.
Another year comes & goes, the Civil War ends, slaves are emancipated, and the factory is then required to actually divert some cash directly to the newly christened "employees" for the first time, in the form of a regular paycheck.
The accountant has never been so grumpy. "Looks like we're going to have over $15,000 in labor costs this year, thanks to the plumb fool Yankees."
And life goes on.
When is it going to end?
Anyway, I prefer to work a 12-hour day because I get more accomplished than would otherwise be accomplished over two 8-hour days. Relatively speaking, someone else's 16-hour project which takes them two workdays and completes no sooner than 34 hours after assignment, can often be completed in only 12 hours after assignment if all energy is directed continuously until completion.
For those that do not have that much ability to focus, I understand.
[+] [-] negamax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anbop|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|7 years ago|reply
It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a startup. When you're young, moderately fit, and ambitious you can crank out a ton of code.
However, the important point is that it was my choice to do that. You can't ignore the ethics because that's what makes it wrong - asking people to do it while (even silently) implying bad things will happen if they don't is deeply unethical.
[+] [-] rococode|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_jends|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geowwy|7 years ago|reply
If there are a lot of people in the company doing 996 every day I think they're probably spending most of their time doing mindless busywork.
[+] [-] timavr|7 years ago|reply
It is not like you can do the same project twice, one crunching and one not and see what the results are?
In terms of health, definitely not good.
Also from economics, makes no sense if you are not a founder.
[+] [-] devoply|7 years ago|reply
It's in fact physically sickening to subject people to this. As they are sitting 12 hours a day for 6 days a week and then probably sleeping all day on the 7th to recover.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|7 years ago|reply
Holy cow! People went ballistic when Elon said in his post that the employees should hold up for the sake of the company.