This is clearly rage bait, given that it starts with one 120-person company doing this and then tries to pivot into “the tech industry” without any supporting evidence that it’s widespread.
> Each job ad contains a warning: "Please don't join if you're not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person
If a company is going to demand long weeks, this is the only way to do it: Be up front and explain it in the job listing so nobody is surprised or wastes time interviewing for a job they’re not compatible with.
Modern day tech journalism is just lazy, you browse a bunch of HN and reddit threads, if you're feeling it, ask ChatGPT for some stats to support your propaganda piece and hit publish. Fact check, spell check and everything else is done by AI. It's not like you have to run around the streets with camera crew, interviewing real people, so...yeah. I doubt if even they write the articles themselves, I've seen models on Huggingface for "creative, human-like writing". So maybe it was just a prompt "write me some ragebait on AI companies as I'm having a slow news day and my job is hanging by a thread"
> The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:
- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.
- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.
- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).
I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.
Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.
Layoffs should happen exactly once for a very long time.
Round-after-round of layoffs craters morale because all workers will think about is how miserable, uncertain, chaotic, and stressful is the business and how clueless and incompetent is their management. It will completely hollow-out a business and most all of the really good talent will leave. The dinosaurs that engage in it are because their leadership is insulated from reality and don't know what they're doing. Zuck is a poster-child for clueless amateurs lacking understanding of business, reality, or real empathy; I'm surprised he's not in the Epstein files, oh, wait.
“Is not life on earth a drudgery, its days like those of a hireling?
Like a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for wages,
So I have been assigned months of futility, and troubled nights have been counted off for me.
When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn. My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs, my skin cracks and festers;
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope.”
I'm glad they're up-front about it. Not a fan, but I think it makes sense for a startup to make unconventional choices and recruit accordingly.
Over 20 years ago I joined a startup that leaned way into Extreme Programming and it was a lot of fun. It helped a lot that everyone working there wanted to try working that way.
We worked sensible hours and went home feeling very productive. The startup failed, though, in part because "pivoting" wasn't really a thing yet.
Pretty sure it was claimed that using "AI" would mean people would need to work less. So they aren't practicing what they preach, and in fact the opposite.
As I recall it, the claim was that people would become less valuable, not that they would necessarily work less. The goal is to reduce the cost of hiring, not to give people freedom.
The value proposition for automation and industrialization is always along the lines that, as unskilled workers lose jobs and are displaced by machinery, more jobs will be created for skilled workers to design, supervise, and maintain that machinery.
So if you install kiosks at McDonald's and 3 cashiers lose their jobs, you've created 9 jobs in the R&D and maintenance industries for techies to manufacture and support those kiosks. Win/win, right?
Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks? I doubt my employer would.
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
> Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks?
If you are working on them for 168 hours per week, then yes it does.
> I doubt my employer would.
No, and nor should it. They can't and should not control what you do or think about outside of work hours. Presumably they aren't asking you to do any of that.
"But our brains can't just turn off" -- sure, and a lot of blue collar work has a significant cerebral component too and people think about what they've done or will do on their time off. Your body is also tired and worn down on your days off after hard manual labor. Working in public facing jobs can take a strain on mental health. Etc. None of that is explicitly accounted for as line items, it is just taken as a cost of the job and presumably implicitly factored in to cost of labor as part of supply and demand if nothing else.
But also, I'm on team "Its really hard to do the same mental job ~20 hours a week". I can do 2hr x 3 cycles x 5 days a week. But that means breaks.. When I did 12 hour days I was terrible at hours 9-12.
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
The dot com bubble. The reboot of tech after (pre 2008) at the dawn of podcasting, Web 2.0, the "open web".
70 hour weeks weren't unheard of. Why... because the money was stupid and you had skin in the game.
Lots of people got wealthy, very wealthy. Fuck you money wealthy.
I know a lot of people who did that and then kept working. The large majority of them in fact.
If you're here and you're looking at one of these jobs, this is the critical sentence you need to ask when negotiating: "Can I see a cap table." If they say anything other than yes, then your response is "with out a cap table the value of the equity being offered is ZERO, I'm going to need a lot more cash".
16 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep - this is what it should be. no PTO. salary don't matter cause you have no time to spend any of it. need to put in 65 years like this before you get the pension. utopia!
That's not the widespread change I'm seeing. The actual widespread change I'm seeing is the deep, overt and silent change in the expectations of productivity. Some of us are reaching out skill ceiling, and some others are finding wind under their wings. Sad about the former.
They will be fine. Big banks are doing it, consulting firms are doing it. They top it off with layoffs to show their deep appreciation to their overworked staff. People still apply.
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
Whats most amazing is that these people are putting in 12 hours a day 6 days a week for the goal of putting hundreds of millions of people out of a job, including themselves. The only people who will benefit in the end are their billionaire bosses they're slavishly working to make even wealthier and they'll all be hung out to dry in the end with everyone else.
These are suicidal and omnicidal acts by stupid, subservient enablers and class traitors who believe the rich and powerful will somehow look out for them rather than kick them to the curb with the rest of us. Effective unionizing, solidarity, and worker-owned co-ops are the rational responses, but semi-higher-paid people scoffed because they assumed with all of the perks the elite jackals wouldn't eat their faces too. Stupid fools.
This is a big issue that I also thought about. Current crop of AI tools increases capital leverage, but workers are still left with existing tools. Without push-back, employees will get an even a shorter end of the stick than before. That ain't good for society.
I'll probably be downvoted, I feel like the whole AI adoption and much of our technological progress over the centuries has been a prime Prisoner's Dilemma example.
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
If anyone wants to sterotype the proper response to this thread, I'm down. I'll play:
Work from home made me more productive. AI Coding makes bad code that is harder to code. If we worked 10 hour days, I'd be more productive. Nuclear and Solar power... CEOs make bad code for everyone. If you spend little on programmers, you get bad quality.
Alright I lost a bit at the end. Maybe someone can ChatGPT this into the 4chan sniper meme. "What the ... did you just fucking say about me, you little ..."?
Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do.
The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He gets finite reward (even if above market average), then is fired, while owners continue extracting value from the work indefinitely.
I think we need to come up with a third alternative to communism and capitalism. I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.
I thought ClawdBot and an agent swarm fishing in a data lake were doing all the work while the developers were chilling and sipping coffee. Now it is 996? Which is it?
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
70 hour weeks are dumb - it's a red flag that the company leadership has no idea what they're doing. Those types of working hours are actually counter-productive to good work, and there is plenty of research to support that. This kind of thing is performative, not actually a good way to run a business.
Of course, critical deadlines occasionally require overtime to compensate for poor planning or acts of god, but it should be a last resort, not something to "embrace".
Exactly. After 4-5 five hours of focus you then mostly just typing on autopilot.
After twelve hours behind desk every day, your body starts to seriously hurt which makes concentration even harder. It is not the most productive way to create something, it is usually just about signalling dedication.
Same cringe like from so called internet grind culture. You usually do not need to sit behind computer till you smell yourself. It's ludicrous.
It does reek of a place spinning its wheels, praying for traction, burning through other people’s cash without a serious business.
These “businesses” aren’t trying to produce the greatest number of widgets in a given day. If their business model doesn’t support proper hiring, there’s something very wrong.
I'm personally doing kind of the opposite. I'm getting way more done with less time, and spending the difference with family. But things like this do make me realize that my ability to do this might be short lived. So I'm enjoying it while I can.
One would think the company is doing something state-of-the-art moonshot worthy. But, no.
“ Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients.”
Which idiots are giving away their lives for this.
at my current company i happen to work 70hrs/week but it doesn't feel like a ton of work, i'm having fun and let's be honest a chunk of the "work" is meetings & hanging out with my coworkers who are also my friends. the vast majority of people's productivity drops off after 4-6 hours of focused work. if i wanted to rest and vest there's plenty of companies to do that but your upside is capped hard
a company that 'requires' 996 doesn't understand why people work that hard in the first place.
That sounds less like “70-hour weeks” and more like admitting only ~30 of those hours matter - everything else is vibes and calendar theater. Which kind of proves the point: forced 996 optimizes for visible suffering, not actual output or upside.
Aurornis|21 days ago
> Each job ad contains a warning: "Please don't join if you're not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person
If a company is going to demand long weeks, this is the only way to do it: Be up front and explain it in the job listing so nobody is surprised or wastes time interviewing for a job they’re not compatible with.
neya|21 days ago
iugtmkbdfil834|21 days ago
stingraycharles|21 days ago
Rage bait seems to be working judging by the comments over here.
unknown|21 days ago
[deleted]
prng2021|21 days ago
fc417fc802|21 days ago
Hello fellow children vibes.
SirensOfTitan|21 days ago
- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.
- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.
- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).
I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.
Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.
burnt-resistor|21 days ago
Round-after-round of layoffs craters morale because all workers will think about is how miserable, uncertain, chaotic, and stressful is the business and how clueless and incompetent is their management. It will completely hollow-out a business and most all of the really good talent will leave. The dinosaurs that engage in it are because their leadership is insulated from reality and don't know what they're doing. Zuck is a poster-child for clueless amateurs lacking understanding of business, reality, or real empathy; I'm surprised he's not in the Epstein files, oh, wait.
red-iron-pine|20 days ago
rawgabbit|21 days ago
“Is not life on earth a drudgery, its days like those of a hireling? Like a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for wages, So I have been assigned months of futility, and troubled nights have been counted off for me. When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on; I am filled with restlessness until the dawn. My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs, my skin cracks and festers; My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope.”
tbrownaw|21 days ago
skybrian|21 days ago
Over 20 years ago I joined a startup that leaned way into Extreme Programming and it was a lot of fun. It helped a lot that everyone working there wanted to try working that way.
We worked sensible hours and went home feeling very productive. The startup failed, though, in part because "pivoting" wasn't really a thing yet.
leptons|21 days ago
9rx|21 days ago
RupertSalt|21 days ago
So if you install kiosks at McDonald's and 3 cashiers lose their jobs, you've created 9 jobs in the R&D and maintenance industries for techies to manufacture and support those kiosks. Win/win, right?
__lain__|21 days ago
umanwizard|21 days ago
veqq|21 days ago
userbinator|21 days ago
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
stinkbeetle|21 days ago
If you are working on them for 168 hours per week, then yes it does.
> I doubt my employer would.
No, and nor should it. They can't and should not control what you do or think about outside of work hours. Presumably they aren't asking you to do any of that.
"But our brains can't just turn off" -- sure, and a lot of blue collar work has a significant cerebral component too and people think about what they've done or will do on their time off. Your body is also tired and worn down on your days off after hard manual labor. Working in public facing jobs can take a strain on mental health. Etc. None of that is explicitly accounted for as line items, it is just taken as a cost of the job and presumably implicitly factored in to cost of labor as part of supply and demand if nothing else.
cjbgkagh|21 days ago
PlatoIsADisease|21 days ago
Let us not be silly that these are the same.
But also, I'm on team "Its really hard to do the same mental job ~20 hours a week". I can do 2hr x 3 cycles x 5 days a week. But that means breaks.. When I did 12 hour days I was terrible at hours 9-12.
mystraline|21 days ago
Thats why the NBA doesnt present in the Olympics.
choonway|21 days ago
they cannot judge a brilliant insight from a slacker that would have saved thousands of man-hours rushing the wrong way.
do you really want to work for such a company?
Stratoscope|21 days ago
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
apical_dendrite|21 days ago
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
zer00eyz|21 days ago
70 hour weeks weren't unheard of. Why... because the money was stupid and you had skin in the game.
Lots of people got wealthy, very wealthy. Fuck you money wealthy.
I know a lot of people who did that and then kept working. The large majority of them in fact.
If you're here and you're looking at one of these jobs, this is the critical sentence you need to ask when negotiating: "Can I see a cap table." If they say anything other than yes, then your response is "with out a cap table the value of the equity being offered is ZERO, I'm going to need a lot more cash".
nilslindemann|21 days ago
red-iron-pine|20 days ago
gritspants|21 days ago
SoftTalker|21 days ago
bdangubic|21 days ago
Volundr|21 days ago
PlatoIsADisease|21 days ago
orangecoffee|20 days ago
dietr1ch|20 days ago
whatever1|21 days ago
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
jmclnx|21 days ago
mactavish88|21 days ago
dsajfhsdkjhfk|21 days ago
burnt-resistor|21 days ago
unknown|21 days ago
[deleted]
TSiege|21 days ago
Klaster_1|20 days ago
tartoran|20 days ago
mannanj|21 days ago
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
mikert89|21 days ago
PlatoIsADisease|21 days ago
Work from home made me more productive. AI Coding makes bad code that is harder to code. If we worked 10 hour days, I'd be more productive. Nuclear and Solar power... CEOs make bad code for everyone. If you spend little on programmers, you get bad quality.
Alright I lost a bit at the end. Maybe someone can ChatGPT this into the 4chan sniper meme. "What the ... did you just fucking say about me, you little ..."?
add-sub-mul-div|21 days ago
holografix|21 days ago
chasd00|21 days ago
bloqs|21 days ago
martin-t|21 days ago
The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He gets finite reward (even if above market average), then is fired, while owners continue extracting value from the work indefinitely.
I think we need to come up with a third alternative to communism and capitalism. I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.
krasin|21 days ago
To a degree, this is what copyright was supposed to do.
tramhk|21 days ago
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
charcircuit|21 days ago
root_axis|21 days ago
Of course, critical deadlines occasionally require overtime to compensate for poor planning or acts of god, but it should be a last resort, not something to "embrace".
hsuduebc2|21 days ago
After twelve hours behind desk every day, your body starts to seriously hurt which makes concentration even harder. It is not the most productive way to create something, it is usually just about signalling dedication.
Same cringe like from so called internet grind culture. You usually do not need to sit behind computer till you smell yourself. It's ludicrous.
dd8601fn|21 days ago
These “businesses” aren’t trying to produce the greatest number of widgets in a given day. If their business model doesn’t support proper hiring, there’s something very wrong.
resonious|21 days ago
jzig|21 days ago
belter|21 days ago
brookst|21 days ago
operatingthetan|21 days ago
hedora|21 days ago
The easiest way to close it is to prevent the humans from sleeping.
tbrownaw|21 days ago
neofrommatrix|21 days ago
“ Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients.”
Which idiots are giving away their lives for this.
kokoe|20 days ago
red-iron-pine|20 days ago
treelover|21 days ago
ej88|21 days ago
at my current company i happen to work 70hrs/week but it doesn't feel like a ton of work, i'm having fun and let's be honest a chunk of the "work" is meetings & hanging out with my coworkers who are also my friends. the vast majority of people's productivity drops off after 4-6 hours of focused work. if i wanted to rest and vest there's plenty of companies to do that but your upside is capped hard
a company that 'requires' 996 doesn't understand why people work that hard in the first place.
rudolftheone|20 days ago