4 ms·

Does anyone actually believe this kind of schedule is actually effective? I don't see how anyone performs well under these circumstances unless they are horrib

by rocqua 9y ago

Does anyone actually believe this kind of schedule is actually effective? I don't see how anyone performs well under these circumstances unless they are horribly overqualified for the job. In order for a programmer to be even 60% effective at this kind of schedule, the work has to be essentially trivial. I don't see any debugging happening in this kind of situation. The only explanation I see is that there is a 'social status' for bosses to have their employees work a lot. Because I do not believe this actually yields decent commercial results for anyone.

WalterSear 9y ago
I've worked with Chinese people, on this schedule. It's not effective. As you mentioned, it's about social signalling.
SlowBro 9y ago
I’m currently working from about 8am until 10pm every day, and usually in bed reading something that applies to my job between 10p and 12p and yes, 6 days a week. I’ve got a day job but am also spinning up a hardware manufacturing business. Been doing this for over a year. My clarity and productivity haven’t suffered that I notice, but I do not anticipate doing this forever. I’d burned out once before ten years ago doing even more hours and days. This is about my limit. You have a point though. Look at the crap China churns out. Edited to add: Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
- fellellor 9y ago
  Yeah but you're doing this for your own business. If it works out well you'll end up reaping most of the rewards. I seriously doubt these companies pay these guys that much. At the end of the day, these are just jobs and businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own.
  - bsenftner 9y ago
    "businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own" hahaha Business owners tend to think their employees have a sense of "ownership" and use that to drive them as hard as they drive themselves. It is astounding the low EQ of many business owners.
- coldcode 9y ago
  I did 100 hr weeks for my first startup 3 decades ago for about 4.5 months, then wound up in a hospital. The code turned out OK but my body was pretty much used up. After that I decided becoming more efficient in 40 hrs or less is much better.
  - SlowBro 9y ago
    Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  I work similar hours, have forever. The only way to work such hours is if you have points, equity, ownership of the revenues or your name in bold on the product. That incentive creates the will to perform for your benefit. Working such hours for mere salary is insanity.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    I learned early in my career that there is no reward for working insanely hard as a mere salaried programmer in the middle of the cube-farm (or worse, open office). "You're a real workhorse! Here, have some more work..." Now, if my title were 'Co-Founder' or some equivalent such that excelling at my job could very well translate into financial freedom for myself (and my family), that would be different :)
- fnordsensei 9y ago
  Passion and interest can keep you going at a high pace for quite some time. However, you're statistically more likely to eventually burn out with a job that you truly enjoy, than you are with a job that's easy to put down at the end of the day. There's more incentive to eat in to your long-term energy storage in the former case. In the case of 996, it's almost as if the employees are being asked to behave as if they are wildly passionate about what they do, as if it is their destiny and calling. I can only presume that they will burn out all the more quickly. Although I suppose, if, as others have implied, the job is actually a non-complex assembly line-ish thing, then perhaps employees are easily replaceable, and it makes economic sense to use one up until it is empty, and then proceed to the next one. On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Seems more likely that they are fooling themselves, and that the entire setup is there to give upper management a sense of satisfaction rather than to create actual productivity.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    > On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Because in a country with a large population of poor people such as China, unskilled and semi-skilled (as in a typical factory job) labor has got to be dirt cheap, such that it makes sense to have humans performing trivial tasks that could be easily automated.
    - fnordsensei 9y ago
      There's a lot of variables surrounding employing humans that can make automation worthwhile even if pay is very low. The "maintenance" of people, such as hiring, managing, loss of production because of absence—those sort of things. I'm just speculating, I've no idea how they are reasoning. But I do suspect it's more cultural/personal rather than practical or to maximize productivity.
zelos 9y ago
The mindset involved in complex programming feels quite similar to writing long-form fiction to me. It seems common for people writing novels to consider 4 hours of actual writing a day to be a maximum, beyond which their productivity plummets. Sure, they may be thinking about the novel outside that, but they're not actually sat at a keyboard typing.
- sn41 9y ago
  Seems to correspond to what is said in "A Mathematician's Apology" by G. H. Hardy: "Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked at his own mathematics. Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician, he used to say."
ardit33 9y ago
Nope I worked with a team of Korean engineers (Samsung) to integrate one of my employer's products (MobiTV) into their first true touch screen phone. This was in 2007 at Sprint's headquarters in Kansas. They all worked very very long hours, will get in around 9-10am and stay until 10pm in the office, with Saturdays being half days. It was cultural to show you working hard, and "sleeping" in your desk was seen as a badge of honor: (so tired form working hard, that I have to sleep on the desk). The code they produced was shit, and full of bugs. For every fix, there was another bug introduced. But whatever, they eventually ended up shipping an "ok" product, but they way they went to it was horribly inefficient. I personally would not recommend. In addition, now that I am working on my own app full time, I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. It seems that there is a natural limit on how much 'intelectual' work can be done in a week, and spending more time is counter productive. On the other hand, if the tasks are easy and don't require brainpower (i.e. small UI tweaks, adjustments, etc), spending more time doesn't necessary reduce efficiency. My strategy has been work on the hard tasks first (usually 3-4 hours), then spend the rest of your time on low intensity items.
- bonesss 9y ago
  > I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. In addition to decreasing efficiency at code-production (ie fewer lines being written), the major killer with tired coding is that adrenaline takes over and you get into 'go mode'... suddenly you're punching out widgets and no longer stopping to question your approach. It's doubly bad because that kind of work tends to mate with deadlines to create higher stress and a feeling of having no time to try out alternatives... Head down and plowing though is a good approach to some problems sometimes. But for IT work? There's a good chance that OT work isn't just poor quality and slow, but also contains a lot of unnecessary effort that never needed to be done at all. A good Engineer will solve your problem in 5 days. A great Engineer will spend 4 days figuring out how to solve your problem in 1... A tired Engineer under a deadline will work a 110 hour week cranking out a half-assed bare-minimum solution only to find it replaced in less than 10 hours by someone who was awake enough to consider some alternatives and needed something that worked :/
emidln 9y ago
I've worked 12+ hours 6-7 days a week at multiple points in my career for an extended period (the longest lasting 8 months). In my most recent case (which was 10 years ago), I was starting a company with a friend and we signed client contracts very early. We knew what we were obligated to build. I learned Javascript, CSS, and PHP (coming from a background of embedded C/C++, Python scripting, and Linux/Unix administration) at the same time as I shipped a vertical-specific CMS. I didn't have a family, significant other, or other time commitments and so I could focus 100% of my energy on the joys of learning and building. I don't know that building a large CMS tuned to a specific vertical is trivial, but it wasn't the most technically challenging problem I have ever worked on. There were a boatload of details (especially in the analytics and traffic arbitrage modules), very tight deadlines, and entirely new technologies to learn. I was getting normal amounts of sleep per night (5-7 depending on how I felt) and when I was tired, I'd take a half day or day off. I communicated mainly via SIP phone, IRC, and email with my cofounder and both of us understood when the other needed some time to decompress. The thing was, working for ourselves building something we wanted to exist, we didn't need much time for decompression. I made enough off that business to be debt-free (from a starting point of about -140K USD), build up savings and retirement accounts I ignored before, and coast for the next 18 months doing whatever I felt like (which was a self-directed study of computer science and a lot of Magic: the Gathering). I didn't get rich, but I did improve my situation substantially. If I didn't have commitments to my family, I would jump at a chance to do something like this again.

by rocqua 9y ago

WalterSear 9y ago

I've worked with Chinese people, on this schedule. It's not effective. As you mentioned, it's about social signalling.

SlowBro 9y ago

I’m currently working from about 8am until 10pm every day, and usually in bed reading something that applies to my job between 10p and 12p and yes, 6 days a week. I’ve got a day job but am also spinning up a hardware manufacturing business. Been doing this for over a year. My clarity and productivity haven’t suffered that I notice, but I do not anticipate doing this forever. I’d burned out once before ten years ago doing even more hours and days. This is about my limit. You have a point though. Look at the crap China churns out. Edited to add: Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.

fellellor 9y ago
Yeah but you're doing this for your own business. If it works out well you'll end up reaping most of the rewards. I seriously doubt these companies pay these guys that much. At the end of the day, these are just jobs and businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  "businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own" hahaha Business owners tend to think their employees have a sense of "ownership" and use that to drive them as hard as they drive themselves. It is astounding the low EQ of many business owners.
coldcode 9y ago
I did 100 hr weeks for my first startup 3 decades ago for about 4.5 months, then wound up in a hospital. The code turned out OK but my body was pretty much used up. After that I decided becoming more efficient in 40 hrs or less is much better.
- SlowBro 9y ago
  Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
bsenftner 9y ago
I work similar hours, have forever. The only way to work such hours is if you have points, equity, ownership of the revenues or your name in bold on the product. That incentive creates the will to perform for your benefit. Working such hours for mere salary is insanity.
- jcadam 9y ago
  I learned early in my career that there is no reward for working insanely hard as a mere salaried programmer in the middle of the cube-farm (or worse, open office). "You're a real workhorse! Here, have some more work..." Now, if my title were 'Co-Founder' or some equivalent such that excelling at my job could very well translate into financial freedom for myself (and my family), that would be different :)
fnordsensei 9y ago
Passion and interest can keep you going at a high pace for quite some time. However, you're statistically more likely to eventually burn out with a job that you truly enjoy, than you are with a job that's easy to put down at the end of the day. There's more incentive to eat in to your long-term energy storage in the former case. In the case of 996, it's almost as if the employees are being asked to behave as if they are wildly passionate about what they do, as if it is their destiny and calling. I can only presume that they will burn out all the more quickly. Although I suppose, if, as others have implied, the job is actually a non-complex assembly line-ish thing, then perhaps employees are easily replaceable, and it makes economic sense to use one up until it is empty, and then proceed to the next one. On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Seems more likely that they are fooling themselves, and that the entire setup is there to give upper management a sense of satisfaction rather than to create actual productivity.
- jcadam 9y ago
  > On the other hand, if the job truly is easily represented by some simple algorithm, why not teach a machine to do it cheaper and more consistently? Because in a country with a large population of poor people such as China, unskilled and semi-skilled (as in a typical factory job) labor has got to be dirt cheap, such that it makes sense to have humans performing trivial tasks that could be easily automated.
  - fnordsensei 9y ago
    There's a lot of variables surrounding employing humans that can make automation worthwhile even if pay is very low. The "maintenance" of people, such as hiring, managing, loss of production because of absence—those sort of things. I'm just speculating, I've no idea how they are reasoning. But I do suspect it's more cultural/personal rather than practical or to maximize productivity.

zelos 9y ago

The mindset involved in complex programming feels quite similar to writing long-form fiction to me. It seems common for people writing novels to consider 4 hours of actual writing a day to be a maximum, beyond which their productivity plummets. Sure, they may be thinking about the novel outside that, but they're not actually sat at a keyboard typing.

sn41 9y ago
Seems to correspond to what is said in "A Mathematician's Apology" by G. H. Hardy: "Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked at his own mathematics. Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician, he used to say."

ardit33 9y ago

Nope I worked with a team of Korean engineers (Samsung) to integrate one of my employer's products (MobiTV) into their first true touch screen phone. This was in 2007 at Sprint's headquarters in Kansas. They all worked very very long hours, will get in around 9-10am and stay until 10pm in the office, with Saturdays being half days. It was cultural to show you working hard, and "sleeping" in your desk was seen as a badge of honor: (so tired form working hard, that I have to sleep on the desk). The code they produced was shit, and full of bugs. For every fix, there was another bug introduced. But whatever, they eventually ended up shipping an "ok" product, but they way they went to it was horribly inefficient. I personally would not recommend. In addition, now that I am working on my own app full time, I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. It seems that there is a natural limit on how much 'intelectual' work can be done in a week, and spending more time is counter productive. On the other hand, if the tasks are easy and don't require brainpower (i.e. small UI tweaks, adjustments, etc), spending more time doesn't necessary reduce efficiency. My strategy has been work on the hard tasks first (usually 3-4 hours), then spend the rest of your time on low intensity items.

bonesss 9y ago
> I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. In addition to decreasing efficiency at code-production (ie fewer lines being written), the major killer with tired coding is that adrenaline takes over and you get into 'go mode'... suddenly you're punching out widgets and no longer stopping to question your approach. It's doubly bad because that kind of work tends to mate with deadlines to create higher stress and a feeling of having no time to try out alternatives... Head down and plowing though is a good approach to some problems sometimes. But for IT work? There's a good chance that OT work isn't just poor quality and slow, but also contains a lot of unnecessary effort that never needed to be done at all. A good Engineer will solve your problem in 5 days. A great Engineer will spend 4 days figuring out how to solve your problem in 1... A tired Engineer under a deadline will work a 110 hour week cranking out a half-assed bare-minimum solution only to find it replaced in less than 10 hours by someone who was awake enough to consider some alternatives and needed something that worked :/

emidln 9y ago

I've worked 12+ hours 6-7 days a week at multiple points in my career for an extended period (the longest lasting 8 months). In my most recent case (which was 10 years ago), I was starting a company with a friend and we signed client contracts very early. We knew what we were obligated to build. I learned Javascript, CSS, and PHP (coming from a background of embedded C/C++, Python scripting, and Linux/Unix administration) at the same time as I shipped a vertical-specific CMS. I didn't have a family, significant other, or other time commitments and so I could focus 100% of my energy on the joys of learning and building. I don't know that building a large CMS tuned to a specific vertical is trivial, but it wasn't the most technically challenging problem I have ever worked on. There were a boatload of details (especially in the analytics and traffic arbitrage modules), very tight deadlines, and entirely new technologies to learn. I was getting normal amounts of sleep per night (5-7 depending on how I felt) and when I was tired, I'd take a half day or day off. I communicated mainly via SIP phone, IRC, and email with my cofounder and both of us understood when the other needed some time to decompress. The thing was, working for ourselves building something we wanted to exist, we didn't need much time for decompression. I made enough off that business to be debt-free (from a starting point of about -140K USD), build up savings and retirement accounts I ignored before, and coast for the next 18 months doing whatever I felt like (which was a self-directed study of computer science and a lot of Magic: the Gathering). I didn't get rich, but I did improve my situation substantially. If I didn't have commitments to my family, I would jump at a chance to do something like this again.