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Some of China’s '996' tech tribe quit, seek less stress

158 points by eplanit 7y ago

drchewbacca 7y ago
Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code. IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you do 40 hours per week. You won't, you'll do less. Executives who think the best way to measure business performance is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are idiots.
- apabepa 7y ago
  I recall hearing/reading that a lot of the time in the office is passive/suboptimal. The productivity gain is that you have the people there in standby. The gain is that the important work that do happen is not blocked by people being off work since you can pull them in instantly compared to "Only Bob knows X and he left for the day, lets schedule a meeting tomorrow"
  - TheOperator 7y ago
    Or you could just schedule people to arrive at the same time but have them work shorter hours.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Or stagger shifts so that there's always someone at the ready.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      That would cause an impossibly tight schedule for everyone and no actual work would have time to happen The way I see it is: Bursts of work combined with prolonged pauses because of others' schedules and other issues with coordination
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Henry Ford was an early, outspoken (and reviled) advocate of the 40-hour work week. Not because he was concerned about his employees' welfare--he absolutely wasn't--but because he tried running factories at everything from 20 to 80 hours a week and found that 40 was the sweet spot. Anything beyond that and you're actually losing total productivity per week. And that's for assembly-line work. It's mostly rote. It stands to reason that the number is lower for knowledge workers.
  - close04 7y ago
    I think initially you get 50% more productivity with 50% extra hours in the work week. After a week or two though you’re lucky to break even and get the 40h worth of productivity. After another week or two it’s all but guaranteed that overall productivity is actually lower, you’re just destroying your health and possibly screwing up the work.
    - bpicolo 7y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. I doubt most people can't maintain productive focus for 12 hours of a work day.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Really gotta define what sort of work. As a knowledge worker, I'm really only in the zone for maybe half my day now - I doubt that increasing the work day would get more highly productive time out of me. Maybe manual labour jobs may be better for that, but even there I doubt it, and they'll have physical exhaustion before I hit mental exhaustion, if only because it's much easier for me to be present at my work and NOT be largely productive (jokes about people leaning on shovels not withstanding).
      - close04 7y ago
        I doubt most people can maintain productive focus for 12h every day more than a few consecutive weeks. They may at the beginning but fatigue sets in and by the end they are less productive than after a good 8h day. I’ve seen it in others, I went through it myself. Perhaps in some fields it’s different but I doubt it. Even playing games 12h every day means you start making more and more mistakes than a fresh gamer. I’d say normal work will be even more tiring and stressful given the higher stakes. Especially for a knowledge worker.
- vageli 7y ago
  It's funny how the notion of diminishing returns is never mentioned with regards to work performed.
  - hckrnrd 7y ago
    Right. Diminishing returns are a force multiplier in the gross hours of work equation. It’s the whole reason why some managers incentive “butts in seats” vs. “quality of output.”
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  For me it's often in spurts. Some days I get nothing done but then there are other days when I can go 12 hours straight. Worst for me are days with one meeting in the morning, one before lunch and then one in the afternoon. These days are effectively lost because I lose my train of thought and spend the whole day struggling getting things back together in my head. Such days are negative in productivity.
  - 2sk21 7y ago
    This. Even a 15 minute meeting can have very a disruptive effect on my thinking process if it comes at the wrong moment.
    - babuskov 7y ago
      Reminds me of this comic: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/ https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
- matz1 7y ago
  996 doesn't necessarily mean working 72 hours nonstop. You can still do 2-3 hours works then breaks, then another 2-3 hours works.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    That sounds even worse...
    - matz1 7y ago
      how ?
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        Because it eats up more of your day. For me, anyway, short breaks aren't really helpful -- they just serve to derail my "flow" and cause lost time as I ramp back up afterwords. I'd much prefer working straight through and then have a larger single block of time off.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Yeah, this is an offer to not be any more useful AND never see the wife and kids.
        crucialfelix 7y ago
        If I'm excited and grinding towards one goal then it's hard to get myself to stop. But often I'm solving architecture or features and I get blocked trying to solve or make risky decisions. That's the time to go for a walk. Then the relaxed brain drifts around the problem and solutions pop up.
        matz1 7y ago
        Yea its not for everyone.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  Executives who think the best way to measure business control is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are succeeding.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  I wouldn't cargo cult everything leaders like Jack Ma propose just because they're highly successful. Sure some 996er's at a company at say, the senior management level can be worth it since you do actually get more work done. Abliet incredibly inefficiently while getting paid the entire time. I don't see how its efficient to have the core of your business being nothing but employees who are working at decreased efficiency yet are getting paid the same wages. Theres some benefit in cutting down on communication/management overhead but more employees seems like a better idea overall... It's also simply a practical reality not everybody in society CAN work like this.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    They would be salaried - I suspect if these 996 legally had to be paid overtime the practice would quickly stop.
  - icelancer 7y ago
    >>> Sure some 996er's at a company at say, the senior management level can be worth it since you do actually get more work done. Working 12 hours/day is actually more productive for management. Most people look at it from a coder/developer perspective, where more hours does not mean more work given how mentally exhausting the task is and how non-linear the gains are. (I do not make my technical staff work more than 50 hours a week, and have forced many to take time off / stop working X hours in the office.) But speaking as a founder/President of a company that has 40 employees, and someone who basically does 40 hours a week of management tasks alone before I do any of my "real job," there is no way I can make my schedule efficient enough to do all my work in 40 hours over 5-6 days. It just cannot happen. I've delegated literally everything I can (I've probably overdelegated to be honest), but senior management just tends to have way more dependencies and a full schedule of corporate partnerships, external sales, marketing, HR tasks, advisery services across various departments, and observation of work and meetings and blah blah blah. I have to work 60 hours/week to get my work done and push the ball forward while I mentor my direct reports and train them. (Typically work 4x12, 1x8, 1x4 WFH). Yes, a technical worker crushing 996 demonstrably sees exponential dropoff (though I think someone working 80 hours a week still gets more done than someone working 40 hours per week, they just don't get 2x done, probably more like 1.2x), but management is a much different scenario.
- asark 7y ago
  I can do way more as long as it's not all the time, and the work's interesting. Think 80hrs writing some software, followed by a lighter week that's mostly cooking involved meals, or gardening, or prototyping board games, or building furniture. Maybe no code written for another 5-6 weeks. That'd be my "natural"—absent economic pressure—relationship with projects and with writing software. Maybe a week a month or less, but very heavy and focused when in that mode. Then heavy and focused on something else for a while. But yeah, my "real work" limit for a day's probably like 4hrs tops in any kind of sustained way. I've rarely seen a job that can manage to keep even that much real work slung my way on a regular basis, though. And at this point I provide 90+% of my value just by knowing the right thing or having the right insight, and communicating that info. That top-of-the-value-pyramid work is maybe a handful of minutes a week, on a good week. Most of my salary's justified by a few hours a year—it's just hard to know which hours it'll be.
- dcolkitt 7y ago
  Intuitively and introspectively I agree with you. But then I ask myself, where are all the successful 30-hour week companies? Why is it that nearly every single successful organization has a culture of long hours? I personally know that I can't sustainably work 10+ hours a day. But the observed results in the real world seem to say something different. It's hard to square that circle, and I'm genuinely interested in anyone who has insight on this.
  - matwood 7y ago
    That's because even though productivity does not scale linearly with hours it can continue to go up. That little bit extra can make a big difference where the margins between success and failure are small.
  - foobarqwertz 7y ago
    Looking at the games industry where passion stands for self exploitation. If you don't push back most employers will take everything they can get.
    - hackerbabz 7y ago
      But the question is, what do they get? Would they develop products faster if the employees worked less?
      - _iyig 7y ago
        What if they don’t? What if crunch works, at least in the short term, for the employer? Does any criticism of crunch time necessarily hinge on productivity? Does the health and well-being of individual employees warrant sufficient concern by itself to scale back working hours?
        CalRobert 7y ago
        The pattern seems to be : * Get a new job at game studio * Start off OK-ish, then get pushed to crunch more and more as release date nears and then slips (probably by design) * Release game * lay off most staff * They're broke for a while but the time without work is nice * Repeat I can't find a source but I understand the average length of a career in the industry is 5-6 years. Also, I couldn't help but notice at my last place that those of us doing more general work (python, data engineering, etc.) were a hell of a lot more relaxed than those with video-game-specific skillsets (Unity3d).
- arethuza 7y ago
  None of this has anything to do with maximising actual objective performance - I suspect its just a way of executives competing by having their teams work longer and longer hours to show how "tough" they are.
- pault 7y ago
  Normally I can only do about 4hr/day of productive work, but with my ADD meds I can do 6-8 (big surprise: amphetamines allow you to work more). I do work longer hours, but I don't try to squeeze every ounce of mental energy; I spend the extra time catching up on all of the planning and documentation that doesn't involve intense mental focus. In my middle age I've actually started enjoying the planning and documentation process; to me, it's part of the craft, and what makes the difference between good software and great software. Trying to code for 12 hours straight is counter-productive, but spending an extra four hours tidying up really does add a lot of value.
  - tamrix 7y ago
    I agree. I work for one of the big four tech companies and we are all on prescription drugs to enhance our work productivity. Although it's not enforced, anyone who isn't popping uppers and downers just can't keep up in this industry and falls out. There's one guy here on 18! Yes, you read that right, prescription drugs. He is so smart and productive and it shows! Fancy car and house. He's smarter than everyone here. I'm only on 9 prescription drugs. I hope one day to be as rich and smart as him when I work my way up to 18.
    - boomboomvoom 7y ago
      He must be backed up on the other end for days and you half that time stockpile some docusate
    - drchewbacca 7y ago
      You're joking right? This sounds like Brave New World.
- unicornmama 7y ago
  For the last month I have tracked my productivity with a spreadsheet. I punch out between breaks, lunch, Reddit, etc. On a typical day I average 2-3 hours. Hitting 4-5 hours or more I feel burnt out.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >Executives who think the best way to measure business performance is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are idiots. From what bloggers say online, this is how Japan works in general.
- chaostheory 7y ago
  Dustin Moskovitz cites decades old research to back it up. You can only work overtime for about two weeks before it starts getting inefficient and you get diminishing returns for the hours you put in. https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679...
- davidwitt415 7y ago
  True. Those same executives who are working the '80 hour week' include lunch, cocktail parties, dinners, etc. into their hours, as for them schmoozing = work.
crispyambulance 7y ago
Can anyone from China who has worked a 996 provide an account of what the work is like? Do they have heavy PMP-managed work with meeting paralysis or is it just sitting at your desk and being expected to magically perform, or is it just sitting around doing nothing and not being able to leave? All of those are their own types of hell, but they're all different. What are they doing in those 12 hours?
- tluyben2 7y ago
  As I see my colleagues in China; they are mostly wasting time to stay the longest in the office. I know a few guys who have some shares, that either do not go home or go home for 3-4 hours only. They arrive at 6 am, leave at 8 pm and then go to KTV to do sales which basically means drink like a maniac. And then either back to the office or home for a quick nap. Their boss does not directly tell them to but he does go crazy when they underdeliver or deliver past deadlines, so they show they did anything. Not sure if it helps or not. Some of them seem happy and content doing that life and show no signs os stress even at 40y/o, some are walking dead. The happy ones seem to be the ones that are well paid and get to sit and write code, while the unhappy ones deal with red tape and meetings. Which is what usually happens in my experience in the west as well.
- whoevercares 7y ago
  Not a direct answer, but most Chinese had undergone tougher hours and more dreadful win-or-your-life-is-screwed college examination pressure during high school. I was in a class where the morning session started from 5:30am and the day ends around 9pm(and we have full Sat and Sunday morning). Just imagine how mentally tough Chinese is when 1 point left you 10+k behind in regional ranking. So honestly 996 means nothing for a lot of people (esp new grads). Even though there are protests now, I’m pessimistic it’ll shake anything eventually
  - viscanti 7y ago
    Cumulative stress is cumulative. One doesn't recover from burnout with more burning.
Aromasin 7y ago
On a somewhat related note, I'd love a set of those pictured sleep capsules at my office. I've taken to running to my car to catch a quick 20 minute snooze during my lunch break, but it's way too bright, I'm uncomfortably sleeping sitting slightly upright, and I've got to have the windows open in a noisy car park. Having a cool, dark, dedicated sleeping pod would be much more civilised.
- copperx 7y ago
  Having an office with a door that closes solves that problem too. I have one and take naps on the floor with a yoga mat and a pillow I bring from home on my lunch break. It's sad that most workplaces are still "open." Even when I was a grad student I took naps on my library cubicle. Cubicles would be a step up from the warehouse setup of most workplaces.
  - Aromasin 7y ago
    That would be wonderful, but my company has fully embraced the 'open office' idea. Even upper management have offices that are completely windowed. All this setup seems to achieve is to provide on open door for people to ask questions that could be done over email, interrupting work flow every couple of minutes so no one gets anything done. The best chance I'd have of finding a place to nap in private would be finding a crate of packing peanuts in dispatch and hoping I get shipped off to France.
throwvatars 7y ago
Hackernews obsessed with anti China nowadays ! Propaganda machines are working well again. Xenophobia and FOMO on the rise.
nickthemagicman 7y ago
I love how there's tons of hype from leaders to have employees work more hours but not so much hype to PAY THEM MORE. It's just your DUTY?
- sushisushisushi 7y ago
  It makes sense when you understand that those at the top really don't view the rest of us in the same terms that they view each other. We're not accorded the same hopes, dreams, desires, needs, etc. They're special; we're not. Everything they do, morally speaking, proceeds from that premise.
rb808 7y ago
I know a lot of Korean and Chinese school kids who cram study until late and night and that is just normal. I suspect 996 isn't that weird to many young Chinese developers because that is what they've done their whole lives. 9pm is probably an earlier end than when they were doing homework. Even in the US now children are getting more and more homework and stressed out about getting into the most prestigious universities. If that is normal when growing up, spending all your time in the office is just more of the same, except you get paid more than everyone else so society loves you too.
- HansLandaa 7y ago
  In Korea they actually passed a law banning private prep classes after midnight. And there are "raids" to stop the students from studying! The mentality there is very different from the US
throwaway_63679 7y ago
The funny part is that one VC firm proudly names their podcast “996 podcast”: https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/ https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/ Talk about out of touch
ddeokbokki 7y ago
> heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz highlighted it as a competitive advantage over the United States. It's an issue when the so-called tech heavyweights don't understand the basics of worker productivity in the industry.
- _iyig 7y ago
  What if 996 work hours do, on average across a large population, make workers more productive? When they burn out, they are easy to replace. Would this justify such a work schedule? EDIT: This post is not in support of 996. Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore?
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    At some point productivity just isn't worth it when it leaves you workers with like...one day a week to live. What a bleak and pointless existence.
    - _iyig 7y ago
      Yes, that's what I was driving at.
  - ta34729384 7y ago
    > Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore? Not since "begging the question" became an acceptable way to enforce "official" modes of thought in places like this.
AFascistWorld 7y ago
High-paying and comfortable jobs(government jobs, state-owned companies; for example you need to bribe like 30K usd to stay in the military and get promoted) in China are reserved for people with connections, even then they hardly have to do anything if show up at all, there's a hierarchy, those who don't need to work and those who have to work extra. So while the examples in this story sound good, but majority of people don't really have a choice.
commandlinefan 7y ago
Is stress the right word? I get stressed when I can’t figure out how I’m going to get my bills paid or when I’m stuck in traffic and there’s a meeting I’m trying to get to. Working long hours isn’t _stressful_, it’s exhausting. I’ve done the unreasonable peer-pressure driven long work hours thing before and I just want to go to sleep and I’m frustrated that everybody is just demanding more and more out of me.
- leesec 7y ago
  Sounds like stress to me.
instabird 7y ago
This is the biggest reason why I didn't return to China after university even though I really wanted to. 996 is clearly violating the labor law, but big companies' spokesmen can publically admit they will enforce 996 without any major backslash. The fact that 996 has become a norm among business lines is REALLY terrifying.
freddy418_sc 7y ago
I question the whole premise of this article. The use of "some" in the title also seems incorrect when just one person actually quit. The person also quit to go to an industry where all she has to do is charge rent, in other words, she quit to go do nothing. I think that another perfectly reasonable explanation is that her quitting had nothing to do with the stress of whatever '996' job she had. She quit because she didn't want to work.
tylerFowler 7y ago
I worked at Ant Financial for a time (startup acquihire) and spent some time working in offices in both Beijing and Hangzhou. As an American 996 was surprising but also doesn't quite live up to it's name, or at least not at Ant afaik. In practice the typical "996" day would usually go something like this: - ~9:30 - 10am Arrive, commutes could vary as you might imagine - 10 - 11:30am Morning meetings, usually a team stand-up or two - 12 - 1:30pm Lunch, typically 1.5 hours - 1:30 - 7pm Most work is done during this period, with some meetings later in the day - 7 - ~8:30pm Team dinner, sometimes in the office and sometimes at a nearby restaurant* - 8:30 - 9/10pm People start to leave * - I was a visitor in the China offices so that could've affected how long we spent at dinner or how often we actually left the office for it On top of the large breaks it was fairly common that the work day was filled with breaks and naps and such, so I didn't really observe people actually working for much longer than most western offices but it did tend to increase the bonds of teams by keeping them together for the entire day. As for working Saturdays... I asked various colleagues about it and was told that it was rare, only when it was absolutely necessary to ship something on a set schedule. Another thing I found interesting was that our office in the US had Tue/Thur work from home days and when folks from the China offices would visit they were just as surprised as I was when I first heard about 996. Some of them asked me how I would get any work done from home or how management could enforce it. In general I saw that management in China placed a lot of value in office time even though the levels of productivity seemed to match it even less than in western offices.
deehouie 7y ago
This' another example of the current wide-spread anti-China sentiment. It suggests only Chinese firms inflict such inhuman work demand on their employees. Totally not true. Stressful work condition is the norm in Silicon Valley, it's the norm on Wall Street for years. Investment bankers start their day at 5:30am and don't go home till 10pm. Some need to follow foreign markets and stay even later than that.
stevenwliao 7y ago
3 anecdotes and a single untargeted statistic isn't much. Reuters should dig deeper.
alphagrep12345 7y ago
Is 996 completely new though? Wall Street folks, associates at law firms, and employees at early startups in SV all work crazy hours.

158 points by eplanit 7y ago

Personally I can't do more than 2-3 hours of genuine "deep work" per day. That is high quality, focused, immersed thinking on a difficult problem and writing code. IMO people who work a large number of hours each week get cognitively slowed. They can't tell they've slowed down (partly because they don't have a control to compare against) and so think that if you do 80 hours per week you'll do twice as much as if you do 40 hours per week. You won't, you'll do less. Executives who think the best way to measure business performance is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are idiots.

apabepa 7y ago
I recall hearing/reading that a lot of the time in the office is passive/suboptimal. The productivity gain is that you have the people there in standby. The gain is that the important work that do happen is not blocked by people being off work since you can pull them in instantly compared to "Only Bob knows X and he left for the day, lets schedule a meeting tomorrow"
- TheOperator 7y ago
  Or you could just schedule people to arrive at the same time but have them work shorter hours.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Or stagger shifts so that there's always someone at the ready.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    That would cause an impossibly tight schedule for everyone and no actual work would have time to happen The way I see it is: Bursts of work combined with prolonged pauses because of others' schedules and other issues with coordination
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Henry Ford was an early, outspoken (and reviled) advocate of the 40-hour work week. Not because he was concerned about his employees' welfare--he absolutely wasn't--but because he tried running factories at everything from 20 to 80 hours a week and found that 40 was the sweet spot. Anything beyond that and you're actually losing total productivity per week. And that's for assembly-line work. It's mostly rote. It stands to reason that the number is lower for knowledge workers.
- close04 7y ago
  I think initially you get 50% more productivity with 50% extra hours in the work week. After a week or two though you’re lucky to break even and get the 40h worth of productivity. After another week or two it’s all but guaranteed that overall productivity is actually lower, you’re just destroying your health and possibly screwing up the work.
  - bpicolo 7y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. I doubt most people can't maintain productive focus for 12 hours of a work day.
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      Really gotta define what sort of work. As a knowledge worker, I'm really only in the zone for maybe half my day now - I doubt that increasing the work day would get more highly productive time out of me. Maybe manual labour jobs may be better for that, but even there I doubt it, and they'll have physical exhaustion before I hit mental exhaustion, if only because it's much easier for me to be present at my work and NOT be largely productive (jokes about people leaning on shovels not withstanding).
    - close04 7y ago
      I doubt most people can maintain productive focus for 12h every day more than a few consecutive weeks. They may at the beginning but fatigue sets in and by the end they are less productive than after a good 8h day. I’ve seen it in others, I went through it myself. Perhaps in some fields it’s different but I doubt it. Even playing games 12h every day means you start making more and more mistakes than a fresh gamer. I’d say normal work will be even more tiring and stressful given the higher stakes. Especially for a knowledge worker.
vageli 7y ago
It's funny how the notion of diminishing returns is never mentioned with regards to work performed.
- hckrnrd 7y ago
  Right. Diminishing returns are a force multiplier in the gross hours of work equation. It’s the whole reason why some managers incentive “butts in seats” vs. “quality of output.”
maxxxxx 7y ago
For me it's often in spurts. Some days I get nothing done but then there are other days when I can go 12 hours straight. Worst for me are days with one meeting in the morning, one before lunch and then one in the afternoon. These days are effectively lost because I lose my train of thought and spend the whole day struggling getting things back together in my head. Such days are negative in productivity.
- 2sk21 7y ago
  This. Even a 15 minute meeting can have very a disruptive effect on my thinking process if it comes at the wrong moment.
  - babuskov 7y ago
    Reminds me of this comic: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/ https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
matz1 7y ago
996 doesn't necessarily mean working 72 hours nonstop. You can still do 2-3 hours works then breaks, then another 2-3 hours works.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  That sounds even worse...
  - matz1 7y ago
    how ?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Because it eats up more of your day. For me, anyway, short breaks aren't really helpful -- they just serve to derail my "flow" and cause lost time as I ramp back up afterwords. I'd much prefer working straight through and then have a larger single block of time off.
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        Yeah, this is an offer to not be any more useful AND never see the wife and kids.
      - crucialfelix 7y ago
        If I'm excited and grinding towards one goal then it's hard to get myself to stop. But often I'm solving architecture or features and I get blocked trying to solve or make risky decisions. That's the time to go for a walk. Then the relaxed brain drifts around the problem and solutions pop up.
      - matz1 7y ago
        Yea its not for everyone.
mistrial9 7y ago
Executives who think the best way to measure business control is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are succeeding.
TheOperator 7y ago
I wouldn't cargo cult everything leaders like Jack Ma propose just because they're highly successful. Sure some 996er's at a company at say, the senior management level can be worth it since you do actually get more work done. Abliet incredibly inefficiently while getting paid the entire time. I don't see how its efficient to have the core of your business being nothing but employees who are working at decreased efficiency yet are getting paid the same wages. Theres some benefit in cutting down on communication/management overhead but more employees seems like a better idea overall... It's also simply a practical reality not everybody in society CAN work like this.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  They would be salaried - I suspect if these 996 legally had to be paid overtime the practice would quickly stop.
- icelancer 7y ago
  >>> Sure some 996er's at a company at say, the senior management level can be worth it since you do actually get more work done. Working 12 hours/day is actually more productive for management. Most people look at it from a coder/developer perspective, where more hours does not mean more work given how mentally exhausting the task is and how non-linear the gains are. (I do not make my technical staff work more than 50 hours a week, and have forced many to take time off / stop working X hours in the office.) But speaking as a founder/President of a company that has 40 employees, and someone who basically does 40 hours a week of management tasks alone before I do any of my "real job," there is no way I can make my schedule efficient enough to do all my work in 40 hours over 5-6 days. It just cannot happen. I've delegated literally everything I can (I've probably overdelegated to be honest), but senior management just tends to have way more dependencies and a full schedule of corporate partnerships, external sales, marketing, HR tasks, advisery services across various departments, and observation of work and meetings and blah blah blah. I have to work 60 hours/week to get my work done and push the ball forward while I mentor my direct reports and train them. (Typically work 4x12, 1x8, 1x4 WFH). Yes, a technical worker crushing 996 demonstrably sees exponential dropoff (though I think someone working 80 hours a week still gets more done than someone working 40 hours per week, they just don't get 2x done, probably more like 1.2x), but management is a much different scenario.
asark 7y ago
I can do way more as long as it's not all the time, and the work's interesting. Think 80hrs writing some software, followed by a lighter week that's mostly cooking involved meals, or gardening, or prototyping board games, or building furniture. Maybe no code written for another 5-6 weeks. That'd be my "natural"—absent economic pressure—relationship with projects and with writing software. Maybe a week a month or less, but very heavy and focused when in that mode. Then heavy and focused on something else for a while. But yeah, my "real work" limit for a day's probably like 4hrs tops in any kind of sustained way. I've rarely seen a job that can manage to keep even that much real work slung my way on a regular basis, though. And at this point I provide 90+% of my value just by knowing the right thing or having the right insight, and communicating that info. That top-of-the-value-pyramid work is maybe a handful of minutes a week, on a good week. Most of my salary's justified by a few hours a year—it's just hard to know which hours it'll be.
dcolkitt 7y ago
Intuitively and introspectively I agree with you. But then I ask myself, where are all the successful 30-hour week companies? Why is it that nearly every single successful organization has a culture of long hours? I personally know that I can't sustainably work 10+ hours a day. But the observed results in the real world seem to say something different. It's hard to square that circle, and I'm genuinely interested in anyone who has insight on this.
- matwood 7y ago
  That's because even though productivity does not scale linearly with hours it can continue to go up. That little bit extra can make a big difference where the margins between success and failure are small.
- foobarqwertz 7y ago
  Looking at the games industry where passion stands for self exploitation. If you don't push back most employers will take everything they can get.
  - hackerbabz 7y ago
    But the question is, what do they get? Would they develop products faster if the employees worked less?
    - _iyig 7y ago
      What if they don’t? What if crunch works, at least in the short term, for the employer? Does any criticism of crunch time necessarily hinge on productivity? Does the health and well-being of individual employees warrant sufficient concern by itself to scale back working hours?
      - CalRobert 7y ago
        The pattern seems to be : * Get a new job at game studio * Start off OK-ish, then get pushed to crunch more and more as release date nears and then slips (probably by design) * Release game * lay off most staff * They're broke for a while but the time without work is nice * Repeat I can't find a source but I understand the average length of a career in the industry is 5-6 years. Also, I couldn't help but notice at my last place that those of us doing more general work (python, data engineering, etc.) were a hell of a lot more relaxed than those with video-game-specific skillsets (Unity3d).
arethuza 7y ago
None of this has anything to do with maximising actual objective performance - I suspect its just a way of executives competing by having their teams work longer and longer hours to show how "tough" they are.
pault 7y ago
Normally I can only do about 4hr/day of productive work, but with my ADD meds I can do 6-8 (big surprise: amphetamines allow you to work more). I do work longer hours, but I don't try to squeeze every ounce of mental energy; I spend the extra time catching up on all of the planning and documentation that doesn't involve intense mental focus. In my middle age I've actually started enjoying the planning and documentation process; to me, it's part of the craft, and what makes the difference between good software and great software. Trying to code for 12 hours straight is counter-productive, but spending an extra four hours tidying up really does add a lot of value.
- tamrix 7y ago
  I agree. I work for one of the big four tech companies and we are all on prescription drugs to enhance our work productivity. Although it's not enforced, anyone who isn't popping uppers and downers just can't keep up in this industry and falls out. There's one guy here on 18! Yes, you read that right, prescription drugs. He is so smart and productive and it shows! Fancy car and house. He's smarter than everyone here. I'm only on 9 prescription drugs. I hope one day to be as rich and smart as him when I work my way up to 18.
  - boomboomvoom 7y ago
    He must be backed up on the other end for days and you half that time stockpile some docusate
  - drchewbacca 7y ago
    You're joking right? This sounds like Brave New World.
unicornmama 7y ago
For the last month I have tracked my productivity with a spreadsheet. I punch out between breaks, lunch, Reddit, etc. On a typical day I average 2-3 hours. Hitting 4-5 hours or more I feel burnt out.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>Executives who think the best way to measure business performance is by how much your employees are sat at their desks are idiots. From what bloggers say online, this is how Japan works in general.
chaostheory 7y ago
Dustin Moskovitz cites decades old research to back it up. You can only work overtime for about two weeks before it starts getting inefficient and you get diminishing returns for the hours you put in. https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d https://medium.com/building-asana/work-hard-live-well-ead679...
davidwitt415 7y ago
True. Those same executives who are working the '80 hour week' include lunch, cocktail parties, dinners, etc. into their hours, as for them schmoozing = work.

crispyambulance 7y ago

Can anyone from China who has worked a 996 provide an account of what the work is like? Do they have heavy PMP-managed work with meeting paralysis or is it just sitting at your desk and being expected to magically perform, or is it just sitting around doing nothing and not being able to leave? All of those are their own types of hell, but they're all different. What are they doing in those 12 hours?

tluyben2 7y ago
As I see my colleagues in China; they are mostly wasting time to stay the longest in the office. I know a few guys who have some shares, that either do not go home or go home for 3-4 hours only. They arrive at 6 am, leave at 8 pm and then go to KTV to do sales which basically means drink like a maniac. And then either back to the office or home for a quick nap. Their boss does not directly tell them to but he does go crazy when they underdeliver or deliver past deadlines, so they show they did anything. Not sure if it helps or not. Some of them seem happy and content doing that life and show no signs os stress even at 40y/o, some are walking dead. The happy ones seem to be the ones that are well paid and get to sit and write code, while the unhappy ones deal with red tape and meetings. Which is what usually happens in my experience in the west as well.
whoevercares 7y ago
Not a direct answer, but most Chinese had undergone tougher hours and more dreadful win-or-your-life-is-screwed college examination pressure during high school. I was in a class where the morning session started from 5:30am and the day ends around 9pm(and we have full Sat and Sunday morning). Just imagine how mentally tough Chinese is when 1 point left you 10+k behind in regional ranking. So honestly 996 means nothing for a lot of people (esp new grads). Even though there are protests now, I’m pessimistic it’ll shake anything eventually
- viscanti 7y ago
  Cumulative stress is cumulative. One doesn't recover from burnout with more burning.

Aromasin 7y ago

On a somewhat related note, I'd love a set of those pictured sleep capsules at my office. I've taken to running to my car to catch a quick 20 minute snooze during my lunch break, but it's way too bright, I'm uncomfortably sleeping sitting slightly upright, and I've got to have the windows open in a noisy car park. Having a cool, dark, dedicated sleeping pod would be much more civilised.

copperx 7y ago
Having an office with a door that closes solves that problem too. I have one and take naps on the floor with a yoga mat and a pillow I bring from home on my lunch break. It's sad that most workplaces are still "open." Even when I was a grad student I took naps on my library cubicle. Cubicles would be a step up from the warehouse setup of most workplaces.
- Aromasin 7y ago
  That would be wonderful, but my company has fully embraced the 'open office' idea. Even upper management have offices that are completely windowed. All this setup seems to achieve is to provide on open door for people to ask questions that could be done over email, interrupting work flow every couple of minutes so no one gets anything done. The best chance I'd have of finding a place to nap in private would be finding a crate of packing peanuts in dispatch and hoping I get shipped off to France.

throwvatars 7y ago

Hackernews obsessed with anti China nowadays ! Propaganda machines are working well again. Xenophobia and FOMO on the rise.

nickthemagicman 7y ago

I love how there's tons of hype from leaders to have employees work more hours but not so much hype to PAY THEM MORE. It's just your DUTY?

sushisushisushi 7y ago
It makes sense when you understand that those at the top really don't view the rest of us in the same terms that they view each other. We're not accorded the same hopes, dreams, desires, needs, etc. They're special; we're not. Everything they do, morally speaking, proceeds from that premise.

rb808 7y ago

I know a lot of Korean and Chinese school kids who cram study until late and night and that is just normal. I suspect 996 isn't that weird to many young Chinese developers because that is what they've done their whole lives. 9pm is probably an earlier end than when they were doing homework. Even in the US now children are getting more and more homework and stressed out about getting into the most prestigious universities. If that is normal when growing up, spending all your time in the office is just more of the same, except you get paid more than everyone else so society loves you too.

HansLandaa 7y ago
In Korea they actually passed a law banning private prep classes after midnight. And there are "raids" to stop the students from studying! The mentality there is very different from the US

throwaway_63679 7y ago

The funny part is that one VC firm proudly names their podcast “996 podcast”: https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/ https://996.ggvc.com/category/podcast/ Talk about out of touch

ddeokbokki 7y ago

> heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz highlighted it as a competitive advantage over the United States. It's an issue when the so-called tech heavyweights don't understand the basics of worker productivity in the industry.

_iyig 7y ago
What if 996 work hours do, on average across a large population, make workers more productive? When they burn out, they are easy to replace. Would this justify such a work schedule? EDIT: This post is not in support of 996. Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore?
- notfromhere 7y ago
  At some point productivity just isn't worth it when it leaves you workers with like...one day a week to live. What a bleak and pointless existence.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    Yes, that's what I was driving at.
- ta34729384 7y ago
  > Does anyone do Socratic dialogue in comment threads anymore? Not since "begging the question" became an acceptable way to enforce "official" modes of thought in places like this.

AFascistWorld 7y ago

High-paying and comfortable jobs(government jobs, state-owned companies; for example you need to bribe like 30K usd to stay in the military and get promoted) in China are reserved for people with connections, even then they hardly have to do anything if show up at all, there's a hierarchy, those who don't need to work and those who have to work extra. So while the examples in this story sound good, but majority of people don't really have a choice.

commandlinefan 7y ago

Is stress the right word? I get stressed when I can’t figure out how I’m going to get my bills paid or when I’m stuck in traffic and there’s a meeting I’m trying to get to. Working long hours isn’t _stressful_, it’s exhausting. I’ve done the unreasonable peer-pressure driven long work hours thing before and I just want to go to sleep and I’m frustrated that everybody is just demanding more and more out of me.

leesec 7y ago
Sounds like stress to me.

instabird 7y ago

This is the biggest reason why I didn't return to China after university even though I really wanted to. 996 is clearly violating the labor law, but big companies' spokesmen can publically admit they will enforce 996 without any major backslash. The fact that 996 has become a norm among business lines is REALLY terrifying.

freddy418_sc 7y ago

I question the whole premise of this article. The use of "some" in the title also seems incorrect when just one person actually quit. The person also quit to go to an industry where all she has to do is charge rent, in other words, she quit to go do nothing. I think that another perfectly reasonable explanation is that her quitting had nothing to do with the stress of whatever '996' job she had. She quit because she didn't want to work.

tylerFowler 7y ago

I worked at Ant Financial for a time (startup acquihire) and spent some time working in offices in both Beijing and Hangzhou. As an American 996 was surprising but also doesn't quite live up to it's name, or at least not at Ant afaik. In practice the typical "996" day would usually go something like this: - ~9:30 - 10am Arrive, commutes could vary as you might imagine - 10 - 11:30am Morning meetings, usually a team stand-up or two - 12 - 1:30pm Lunch, typically 1.5 hours - 1:30 - 7pm Most work is done during this period, with some meetings later in the day - 7 - ~8:30pm Team dinner, sometimes in the office and sometimes at a nearby restaurant* - 8:30 - 9/10pm People start to leave * - I was a visitor in the China offices so that could've affected how long we spent at dinner or how often we actually left the office for it On top of the large breaks it was fairly common that the work day was filled with breaks and naps and such, so I didn't really observe people actually working for much longer than most western offices but it did tend to increase the bonds of teams by keeping them together for the entire day. As for working Saturdays... I asked various colleagues about it and was told that it was rare, only when it was absolutely necessary to ship something on a set schedule. Another thing I found interesting was that our office in the US had Tue/Thur work from home days and when folks from the China offices would visit they were just as surprised as I was when I first heard about 996. Some of them asked me how I would get any work done from home or how management could enforce it. In general I saw that management in China placed a lot of value in office time even though the levels of productivity seemed to match it even less than in western offices.

deehouie 7y ago

This' another example of the current wide-spread anti-China sentiment. It suggests only Chinese firms inflict such inhuman work demand on their employees. Totally not true. Stressful work condition is the norm in Silicon Valley, it's the norm on Wall Street for years. Investment bankers start their day at 5:30am and don't go home till 10pm. Some need to follow foreign markets and stay even later than that.

stevenwliao 7y ago

3 anecdotes and a single untargeted statistic isn't much. Reuters should dig deeper.

alphagrep12345 7y ago

Is 996 completely new though? Wall Street folks, associates at law firms, and employees at early startups in SV all work crazy hours.