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Bleak write-up. Question: does it work? In a counterfactual where some of these corporate cultural things were alleviated, what would the impact be in the abili

• jiggawatts 3y ago
  For most intellectual jobs, the 996 schedule is demonstrably counterproductive. Study after study has shown that it's basically impossible to squeeze out more than about 30 hours of actual productivity from the general population per week, especially when this is sustained for long periods of time. Western countries are starting experiments with 4-day work weeks precisely because it's more productive, not less. I've worked with people doing these types of hours (Indian subcontractors) and they were 100% useless 100% of the time because they were too exhausted to do anything other than rote work. Even that rote work was riddled with errors because they were too tired to think about what they're doing or do any quality assurance. They were successful only at the most trivial tasks, tasks so simple that a script would have sufficed. I needed humans, they were meat robots. In some countries, that's precisely how managers view their employees: As annoying robots that complain too much, or slaves that they need to also pay (as little as possible). It's only in a few (not all!) western countries that businesses treat intellectual labour such as IT work as creative "value generation" instead of manual labour to be extracted.