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When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 3

When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European. That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.

alephnerd 9mo ago
You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well. > So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week. And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs
- thesuavefactor 9mo ago
  Working more hours however =/= getting more done. In fact, some experiments show the opposite (within boundaries of course).
  - alephnerd 9mo ago
    I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
  - throwaway2037 9mo ago
    I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched. From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
    - avcloudy 9mo ago
      You're making a feely argument for a phenomenon that has evidence. The evidence is that there's a max amount of work you do per week, and the more you work the less you do per hour - and that max amount is below 40 hours, incidentally. There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better. And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best. Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  As usual, the problem is not 996 itself but comp. You can get 996, you just have to pay for it. The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the extra effort isn't fairly compensated.
  - cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
    Not only is it rarely compensated, it's rarely effective. Software work is bursty and creative, not mechanical and hourly.
    - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true. it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in startups. there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope.
      - cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
        and the quality of software produced that way shows
      - Nextgrid 9mo ago
        > there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope. And it's readily visible in terms of software quality and technological capability of the company.
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      I think the occasional burst of activity can and does work, but it’s a budget you need to spend strategically and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won’t work.
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation. it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
- pyrale 9mo ago
  > But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup You don't need to push yourself into burnout as an employee in order to participate in an early stage startup. > earning €80k 80k€ gross is not a lot for a decent SWE in western europe. The reason people complain in Amsterdam is not the hours, it's that your comp is shit.
  - hahahahhaah 9mo ago
    140k AUD. In major cities in Australia that is a reasonable mid level salary. I imagine that is good in Prague.
    - pyrale 9mo ago
      It's a much better salary in Czech republic, Poland, etc, yes. 80k a few years ago was the price point at which you would get few Western Europe remote candidate and many Eastern Europe ones.
dcastm 9mo ago
Which is why fewer and fewer companies are hiring in Europe.
- 1121redblackgo 9mo ago
  And why people are jumping out of buildings, actually and metaphorically, in 996 cultures.
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    i think Amazon only had one person jump out of a building last year. it's not as common as you might think.
    - zxcvasd 9mo ago
      "One company only had one suicide via jumping last year" is not a ringing endorsement.
    - dbetteridge 9mo ago
      One is too many...
      - simianwords 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        LemonWho 9mo ago
        This is the Charlie Kirk argument against gun control, "I'm ok with a small number of gun deaths, it's a small price to pay for freedom". All well and good until you become one of those gun deaths.
        simianwords 9mo ago
        I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual. One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires. Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?
OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad management... but management by people who read articles about how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers, manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a "growth hacking" hack. just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.
joe_mamba 9mo ago
>I currently work 4 hours a week. Which employers hand out 4h contracts?
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  Depends what one considers “work”; if you’re only counting focused, active coding work then there are places where 4 hours is the max you’re going to achieve of that anyway.
  - joe_mamba 9mo ago
    I count work the contracted time I need to be available/tied to my employer. Doesn't matter if I'm doing focused coding or not, it's still work because I can't be paragliding or swimming in that time, I need to be at the office or near my laptop, so it's not leisure, it's still work time. But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.
hahahahhaah 9mo ago
4 is very low. Kind of an outlier. I guess either you have wealth, very low costs or a great hourly rate, or you are the one person who got that Tim Ferriss book to work.
everlier 9mo ago
I'm in EU and I can't agree this describes most engineers. Overwork culture is also present here and exploited by a lot of companies.
- casparvitch 9mo ago
  I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc. Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago
  I second this. On paper Austria has below average working hours in EU statistics but I've seen a lot of overwork in the tech companies I've been at by some people, but which was never officially reported because the workers themselves just went along with it. Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written orders from management imposing those long hours but workers just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there. Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt noticed that they were working longer hours than their colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues from Italy and France. So work hours are super dependent on local culture and industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
hxugufjfjf 9mo ago
How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I’m so curious when people throw completely alien statements like this out like it’s something that doesn’t even warrant explanation.
- systemtest 9mo ago
  I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support tasks for former clients. For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code). For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this. The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features. I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.
Aurornis 9mo ago
Don't get the wrong impression from this article. 996 is exceedingly rare in the United States. Most engineers in the US work normal 40 hour work weeks, too.

alephnerd 9mo ago

You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well. > So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week. And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour workweek while earning €80k TCs

thesuavefactor 9mo ago
Working more hours however =/= getting more done. In fact, some experiments show the opposite (within boundaries of course).
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  I agree, but the issue is the impetus behind the statement. The tone which that poster took and the default negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
- throwaway2037 9mo ago
  I disagree. It is more accurate to say that more working hours is a continuum of productivity. Imagine that you have two nearly identical software engineers. One works 40 hours per week and the other 41 hours per week. Which will be more productive? Very likely the 41 hour per week engineer. Now, if you compare 50 vs 51, then 60 vs 61, and so forth, the productivity gap will become much smaller, possibly hard to measure after 60. I have witnessed a few young engineers in my career with simply unbelievable work ethic and talents that could work 80+ hours a week for months on end. It was amazing to see, and their output was unmatched. From personal experience, I worked like a dog in my younger years for two reasons: (1) To become a better engineer, you need to make a lot of mistakes and fix them yourself. (2) Much junior engineering work is just time in front of the screen pounding out simple features for a CRUD app. The more that you complete, the quicker you get promoted.
  - avcloudy 9mo ago
    You're making a feely argument for a phenomenon that has evidence. The evidence is that there's a max amount of work you do per week, and the more you work the less you do per hour - and that max amount is below 40 hours, incidentally. There's effective evidence that people who work 6 hours a day are more productive than people working 8 hours a day, and after 4 hours of active practice, you aren't getting any better. And on top of this, perpetually tired and exhausted people are not at their best. Regardless of whether or not you accept that someone working 41 hours really isn't doing more work than someone doing 40 - you can see that two people working 30 is much better than one person working 60. Working people for long hours is mismanagement, at some level.
Nextgrid 9mo ago
As usual, the problem is not 996 itself but comp. You can get 996, you just have to pay for it. The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the extra effort isn't fairly compensated.
- cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
  Not only is it rarely compensated, it's rarely effective. Software work is bursty and creative, not mechanical and hourly.
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true. it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in startups. there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope.
    - cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
      and the quality of software produced that way shows
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      > there are corners of the world where it is less true than one would hope. And it's readily visible in terms of software quality and technological capability of the company.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    I think the occasional burst of activity can and does work, but it’s a budget you need to spend strategically and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won’t work.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated by money. if you surround yourself with people who are motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's motivation. it is often useful to think of people as only being motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how they are motivated.
pyrale 9mo ago
> But some people do wish to participate in an early stage startup You don't need to push yourself into burnout as an employee in order to participate in an early stage startup. > earning €80k 80k€ gross is not a lot for a decent SWE in western europe. The reason people complain in Amsterdam is not the hours, it's that your comp is shit.
- hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  140k AUD. In major cities in Australia that is a reasonable mid level salary. I imagine that is good in Prague.
  - pyrale 9mo ago
    It's a much better salary in Czech republic, Poland, etc, yes. 80k a few years ago was the price point at which you would get few Western Europe remote candidate and many Eastern Europe ones.

dcastm 9mo ago

Which is why fewer and fewer companies are hiring in Europe.

1121redblackgo 9mo ago
And why people are jumping out of buildings, actually and metaphorically, in 996 cultures.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  i think Amazon only had one person jump out of a building last year. it's not as common as you might think.
  - zxcvasd 9mo ago
    "One company only had one suicide via jumping last year" is not a ringing endorsement.
  - dbetteridge 9mo ago
    One is too many...
    - simianwords 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - LemonWho 9mo ago
        This is the Charlie Kirk argument against gun control, "I'm ok with a small number of gun deaths, it's a small price to pay for freedom". All well and good until you become one of those gun deaths.
        simianwords 9mo ago
        I agree with him by the way. But this kind of maximalist thought ending cliche is weird and anti intellectual. One death of an amazon employee means we should change the whole system? A huge number of people are employed by them, enjoy their lives, became multi millionaires. Why am I flagged for a fairly normal opinion? A few deaths are okay if the wast majority are satisfied?

OhMeadhbh 9mo ago

not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad management... but management by people who read articles about how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers, manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a "growth hacking" hack. just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to greater fools. there's also a down side.

joe_mamba 9mo ago

>I currently work 4 hours a week. Which employers hand out 4h contracts?

Nextgrid 9mo ago
Depends what one considers “work”; if you’re only counting focused, active coding work then there are places where 4 hours is the max you’re going to achieve of that anyway.
- joe_mamba 9mo ago
  I count work the contracted time I need to be available/tied to my employer. Doesn't matter if I'm doing focused coding or not, it's still work because I can't be paragliding or swimming in that time, I need to be at the office or near my laptop, so it's not leisure, it's still work time. But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.

hahahahhaah 9mo ago

4 is very low. Kind of an outlier. I guess either you have wealth, very low costs or a great hourly rate, or you are the one person who got that Tim Ferriss book to work.

everlier 9mo ago

I'm in EU and I can't agree this describes most engineers. Overwork culture is also present here and exploited by a lot of companies.

casparvitch 9mo ago
I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc. Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
joe_mamba 9mo ago
I second this. On paper Austria has below average working hours in EU statistics but I've seen a lot of overwork in the tech companies I've been at by some people, but which was never officially reported because the workers themselves just went along with it. Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written orders from management imposing those long hours but workers just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there. Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt noticed that they were working longer hours than their colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues from Italy and France. So work hours are super dependent on local culture and industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

hxugufjfjf 9mo ago

How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I’m so curious when people throw completely alien statements like this out like it’s something that doesn’t even warrant explanation.

systemtest 9mo ago
I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support tasks for former clients. For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate process which generates pull-requests for updated dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead. Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours (need to rewrite some code). For another company I create a report once a month for all outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I bill an hour on this. The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features. I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours. This is comparable to the income of someone in employment working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk obviously.

Aurornis 9mo ago

Don't get the wrong impression from this article. 996 is exceedingly rare in the United States. Most engineers in the US work normal 40 hour work weeks, too.