> Each job ad contains a warning: "Please don't join if you're not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person
If a company is going to demand long weeks, this is the only way to do it: Be up front and explain it in the job listing so nobody is surprised or wastes time interviewing for a job they’re not compatible with.
Rage bait seems to be working judging by the comments over here.
Hello fellow children vibes.
“Is not life on earth a drudgery, its days like those of a hireling? Like a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for wages, So I have been assigned months of futility, and troubled nights have been counted off for me. When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on; I am filled with restlessness until the dawn. My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs, my skin cracks and festers; My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope.”
Over 20 years ago I joined a startup that leaned way into Extreme Programming and it was a lot of fun. It helped a lot that everyone working there wanted to try working that way.
We worked sensible hours and went home feeling very productive. The startup failed, though, in part because "pivoting" wasn't really a thing yet.
- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.
- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.
- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).
I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.
Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.
Round-after-round of layoffs craters morale because all workers will think about is how miserable, uncertain, chaotic, and stressful is the business and how clueless and incompetent is their management. It will completely hollow-out a business and most all of the really good talent will leave. The dinosaurs that engage in it are because their leadership is insulated from reality and don't know what they're doing. Zuck is a poster-child for clueless amateurs lacking understanding of business, reality, or real empathy; I'm surprised he's not in the Epstein files, oh, wait.
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
If you are working on them for 168 hours per week, then yes it does.
> I doubt my employer would.
No, and nor should it. They can't and should not control what you do or think about outside of work hours. Presumably they aren't asking you to do any of that.
"But our brains can't just turn off" -- sure, and a lot of blue collar work has a significant cerebral component too and people think about what they've done or will do on their time off. Your body is also tired and worn down on your days off after hard manual labor. Working in public facing jobs can take a strain on mental health. Etc. None of that is explicitly accounted for as line items, it is just taken as a cost of the job and presumably implicitly factored in to cost of labor as part of supply and demand if nothing else.
they cannot judge a brilliant insight from a slacker that would have saved thousands of man-hours rushing the wrong way.
do you really want to work for such a company?
Let us not be silly that these are the same.
But also, I'm on team "Its really hard to do the same mental job ~20 hours a week". I can do 2hr x 3 cycles x 5 days a week. But that means breaks.. When I did 12 hour days I was terrible at hours 9-12.
Thats why the NBA doesnt present in the Olympics.
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
So if you install kiosks at McDonald's and 3 cashiers lose their jobs, you've created 9 jobs in the R&D and maintenance industries for techies to manufacture and support those kiosks. Win/win, right?
at my current company i happen to work 70hrs/week but it doesn't feel like a ton of work, i'm having fun and let's be honest a chunk of the "work" is meetings & hanging out with my coworkers who are also my friends. the vast majority of people's productivity drops off after 4-6 hours of focused work. if i wanted to rest and vest there's plenty of companies to do that but your upside is capped hard
a company that 'requires' 996 doesn't understand why people work that hard in the first place.
Work from home made me more productive. AI Coding makes bad code that is harder to code. If we worked 10 hour days, I'd be more productive. Nuclear and Solar power... CEOs make bad code for everyone. If you spend little on programmers, you get bad quality.
Alright I lost a bit at the end. Maybe someone can ChatGPT this into the 4chan sniper meme. "What the ... did you just fucking say about me, you little ..."?
70 hour weeks weren't unheard of. Why... because the money was stupid and you had skin in the game.
Lots of people got wealthy, very wealthy. Fuck you money wealthy.
I know a lot of people who did that and then kept working. The large majority of them in fact.
If you're here and you're looking at one of these jobs, this is the critical sentence you need to ask when negotiating: "Can I see a cap table." If they say anything other than yes, then your response is "with out a cap table the value of the equity being offered is ZERO, I'm going to need a lot more cash".
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He gets finite reward (even if above market average), then is fired, while owners continue extracting value from the work indefinitely.
I think we need to come up with a third alternative to communism and capitalism. I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.
To a degree, this is what copyright was supposed to do.
So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect.
And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work.
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But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work.
Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high.
Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
> the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
Both statements can be true. IP law attempts to incentivize innovation by instituting a system that is hoped to (very approximately) award creators in proportion to the transitive value of their work. This is much easier to see with patents, where each use of the idea itself requires an explicit license. In the case of copyright it is assumed that both buyer and seller are able to accurately assess the value, that the market is efficient, etc. Generally a bunch of stuff that's only approximately true in the most hand-wavey sense.
> There's no way a single person could do all of that ... Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.
Presumably you own a smartphone. Presumably it was relatively cheap in comparison to your total yearly income. Yet I am quite certain that you could not manufacture an equivalent device from scratch on your own. A modern CPU is hundreds of man years of work just for the blueprint; you still need to figure out fabrication. And then there's the rest of the SoC, the RAM, the display, the radio, ...
Sure. I mentioned it because some people have been pretty hostile to the idea that IP should protect people. They argued as if a technology that makes human innovation obsolete should automatically invalidate copyright because it's would be no longer needed either. And screw the people whose work that innovation was built upon - licenses, consent, etc.
> Presumably you own a smartphone
Maybe the plane was a bad example, I used it because it was one of the first things which made me realize how many orders of magnitude individual wealth spans.
There are everyday items which you could make on your own (e.g. furniture) and on the other end there are massive projects which require their own specialized supply chains (e.g. planes). Smartphones fall somewhere in the middle, probably. They benefit immensely from economies of scale and that the same infrastructure (fabs) can make parts for smartphones, computers and make other device types - both unlike planes.
A more telling comparison perhaps would be how many people you need to get together to make 1) one of the item, 2) how many to make enough to serve that group, and 3) how many so each person in the group has one. A plane can, after all, serve many people at once. Having one for yourself is, in part, where the extravagance of owning one as a singular person comes from.
I may well have been one of those people in a previous exchange. I argue that IP law only protects people as a means to an end. As a severe restriction of individual freedoms, I firmly believe that its only legitimate purpose can be the net benefit of society as a whole. If any given aspect of IP law (including copyright) is no longer required to encourage innovation then it should be abolished.
All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work which itself follows naturally from the goal of incentivizing innovation.
Regarding the plane, I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling. I understood and agree with the point you were trying to make about income inequality. Private jets constitute an almost absurd level of physical resource allocation to the individual. Jet engines alone require significant quantities of rhenium, an element that's slightly rarer than platinum. I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.
Of course, critical deadlines occasionally require overtime to compensate for poor planning or acts of god, but it should be a last resort, not something to "embrace".
These “businesses” aren’t trying to produce the greatest number of widgets in a given day. If their business model doesn’t support proper hiring, there’s something very wrong.
After twelve hours behind desk every day, your body starts to seriously hurt which makes concentration even harder. It is not the most productive way to create something, it is usually just about signalling dedication.
Same cringe like from so called internet grind culture. You usually do not need to sit behind computer till you smell yourself. It's ludicrous.
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
Which is why you should always work for an employee-owned co-op where you share in profits from productivity gains.
The easiest way to close it is to prevent the humans from sleeping.
Extreme programming (XP) was all about going as fast as you could go. One of their rules was "never work more than 40 hours for more than one week in a row". Why? Because when you get tired, you slow down. The net effect is negative after the first week.
“ Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients.”
Which idiots are giving away their lives for this.