AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China's Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US (bbc.com) 93
The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China's own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in the field, warns applicants on its careers page to expect roughly 70-hour weeks. Browser-Use, a seven-person startup building tools for AI-to-browser interaction, operates out of a shared "hacker house" where the line between living and working barely exists.
In a market where dozens of startups are racing to ship similar AI products, founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge. But the research disagrees. A WHO and ILO analysis tied 55-plus-hour weeks to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease globally in 2016 alone. Michigan State University found that an employee working 70 hours produces nearly the same output as one working 50.
In a market where dozens of startups are racing to ship similar AI products, founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge. But the research disagrees. A WHO and ILO analysis tied 55-plus-hour weeks to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease globally in 2016 alone. Michigan State University found that an employee working 70 hours produces nearly the same output as one working 50.
a 7-man AI startup works long hours (Score:3)
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70 hour weeks, for at least a short run, there is nothing wrong with this IF....you get paid properly.
I'd do this if I were doing it 1099 with good negotiated contractor bill rate....I expect to get paid for every hour I work.
I would also jump at this if I were younger....when you are more bullet proof and can do the long hours thing without much problem....
Now would I want to do this for salary and long term, no....but often that old saying "make hay while the sun
Re:a 7-man AI startup works long hours (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah I'd have jumped at that when i was younger. If there was a chance to pull in several times my then-salary (+stock options i presume) by working double the hours then I'd totally do it. Honestly at 45 I'd probably still do it for a year for triple my current salary - that'd be enough to pay off my mortgage.
I have my doubts about the efficiency of it all - in the rare instances where I've put in a 70 hour week I notice the precipitous drop in my productivity much about 50, but as the employee that wouldn't be my problem.
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I too would not do this in my position / age now but socking away several hundred $K early-career in the market can give somebody a tremendous leg up after a few decades of compounding.
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Yeah, when I was in my 20s I usually stayed in the office hours later than anyone else just to see what was going on, had no life outside of work to pull me away. In my 30s, though, fuck that shit. I have things to do. And 9AM-9PM is a terrrible time range. Your entire day is destroyed. Nothing is open early enough to get shit done before 9AM and everything else is closed by the time you get off. 6AM-6PM would be better, but the Jesus freaks would go nuts over calling it a "666" schedule.
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There's everything wrong with this, no matter the pay. What's the point of having a well-paying job if there's no room left for living a life outside the work hours?
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Err...no one said "do it forever"...
I mean make hay while the sun shines....work hard for a bit, long hours, big money, sock the money away....and then if that job doesn't go eventually to "normal" hours....then find another place of employment with regular hours.
When you're young, you can put in that kinda grind, just make sure you get PAID
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I am familiar with the concept, perhaps a bit too familiar in that I'm in my late 40s now and have delayed gratificaiton for so long, because it never seemed the time to change habits, that I now deeply regret it. There are ways to over-seek current gratificaiton - never saving anything and stuff like that, but I now think that it's not worth spending even a single year in this kind of situation, and even (legally or culturally) allowing these kinds of jobs in a society is a mistake because it creates press
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And let's face it - if we're talking about working 70-80 hours a week for a year or two in order to have a damn good shot at walking away fabulously wealthy, that's a pretty good deal.
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge.
This is such nonsense. Overtime works for incidental cases, not structurally. If you work one or two days overtime, it might help with completing a job that could otherwise not be done. After that, the productivity falls back to normal due to fatigue creeping in. After a week, a 70 our week is as productive as a 40 hour one, at best.
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As someone who has worked in numerous startups, I will say: Bullshit.
In the '90s, when provided with stock options, a good chance the company would IPO, or be bought out, a high salary, and other perks, yes, it may be worth it. For yet another AI startup that will be long forgotten when the market closes, not really.
Plus, there is fatigue and burnout. An IT group I was in did 100 hour work weeks during an outage, then realized the MSP was full of shit, and management actually wanted to cause outages so p
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How many times have you been able to actually cash in those stock options and make 10-25X what you invested in them in recent times? In the 80's and 90's you had a much better chance of getting this kind of return on your investment, then the current generation trying it these days. To play the game now, working for post IPO companies is a less risky approach, even though the RSU's aren't as good as the privately held stock options, but the starting salaries are better.
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Lincoln freed the slaves.
Don't become one. A well-lived life doesn't work like that.
The influencer-fed Become A BIllionaire rubric is for suckers.
Face the fact that you only enrich the predatory class, and the barriers to entry for the entrepreneurial class are higher than most can jump. Realistically, this means most people reading this.
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Exactly. There was a time when one could become a "Dellionaire", or make bank with Red Hat. Those times are gone now. I have not seen people really strike it rich, other than the holding companies, or the top brass, for a number of years now. These days, one is better off winning the lottery.
The best you can do is get a business idea, start making your business by yourself, show it is profitable, and maybe then hit the VC guys... but you will need to be dragging in 5-10 million a year before most will e
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Honestly - I have to wonder if, from the point of view of the founder/CEO, the fact that they'll be burning through people quickly with lots of turnover is by design.
Unlike the old days, where almost all of the initial team would earn significant chunks of the company as a reward... nowadays it's just one or two people who are hoarding the ginormous payday when a startup manages to make it big.
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I used to call the former "burst overtime" and it is great for debugging or overcoming technical issues. The latter is "chronic overtime" and once that starts, it it best to dust off the resume.
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996 work schedules are not intended to produce technological results. They craft an image that can be used to raise capital then sell the company.
Indeed. Pure virtue signaling, intended to impress dumb investors.
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Exactly. Incidentally, the peak of human performance was investigates a long time ago by Henry Ford and others. And they just wanted the most output from their workers. What they found was 30h/week for mental work (you can fluff that up to 40h by doing 2h of very simple things each day) and 40h/week for manual workers. If people work more per week, productivity per week _drops_ due to increased errors, inaccuracies, accidents, and sickness.
The idiots working more are just clueless about reality and virtue-s
There is also a big difference between the workday (Score:5, Interesting)
It is viewed as improper, even for a workplace supervisor, to interfere with the nap time.
Chinese taking lessons from the French (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't expect to be able to shop or visit many attractions in your average french town between 12 and 2/3pm, they've all buggered off home for lunch. Which also leads to the interesting phenomenon of 4 rush hours per day.
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While it is different from the norm you are overstating it by a factor of 2. The typical Chinese lunch break is around 1.5-2 hours. But yes napping is something culturally significant there over lunch.
That said this isn't unique. Many parts of France, Italy, and definitely Spain have extended lunch breaks as a norm as well, Spain culturally so.
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Interesting. So it is all fake. Not much of a surprise.
Sweatshop (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked, at least tangentially, with IT folk from various cultures. The 996 is for sweatshop work. I remember one place where people sat at their desks entering code, or whatever. Walking around behind them was the boss, who would go from person to person, telling them *exactly* what to do. All the way down to telling one person to put a CD back into its case. The people were barely even code monkeys - more like typists. Probably you can do that 996 without losing productivity. No idea how the boss functioned. Maybe he swapped out with someone else?
When I was studying for my first master's degree, there was a brief time where I had coursework as well as my thesis. To get everything done, I worked highly structured 80 hour weeks. That was only possible, because it was only for a few weeks - there was an end in sight. That sort of schedule cannot be maintained. Anyone who thinks it can be is spending a lot of time staring into space / talking at the water cooler / something else non-productive.
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My first job out of law school was at a (now defunct) Wall Street law firm where people "worked" 70 hours a week regularly. But just because they had their butt in the chair and the billing clock on didn't mean they were actually being productive during that time. Outside of short bursts or performance enhancing drugs (which really only extend those bursts well beyond healthy levels), humans just aren't built to focus and work productively for those sorts of hours.
Law firms are particularly toxic in this re
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Investment bankers, on the other hand, work 60-120 (how!?!?!) hours chasing commissions and bonuses.
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Again, investment bankers only "work" those 60-120 hour a weeks. Those extreme hours for junior bankers are more like fraternity hazing than something intended to produce actual accomplishment. At the senior levels, much of the time is schmoozing and networking rather than true work.
70 hours (Score:2)
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Nah, probably just the usual monomanical autists who don't have an existence beyond their monitor screen and assume everyone else is the same. They probably wouldn't recognise a social life if they tripped over one.
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true this. There are people who will work around the clock, because they feel like the have to prove they're better than everyone else. I had one job in my 20's where we worked for 16 hours on some days, but the office was nice enough to hang out in. Mostly what we were doing was compiling and playing video games to make sure the latest build didn't have any bugs. It didn't take a lot of brain work. Another job after that was way worse. Sometimes I'd get exhausted after 10 hours and just start the hour driv
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I've done it before. Bills to pay. Ambition. Greed. Optimism. There are lots of reasons to do this.
The worst one I did 7am-7pm, 6 days a week. Then half day (6 hours) on Sunday. Felt pretty burned out after 4 months of that.
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It's a race... but to what? Has China figured out what they can actually do with AI unlike the west?
I think most governments have figured out [fbi.gov] what to use it for.
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Has China figured out what they can actually do with AI
Yes. Adding Chinese code [slashdot.org] to all the telematics they are adding to our products.
Who the fuck wants an engineer after 40h? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've done this before. I used to be young, stupid, and paid by the hour. I grew up poor, so I asked for every bit of overtime I could get...and I nearly got myself fired because I was billing twice as much to do a task and snapped at a few managers when they asked some very stupid questions they should have known better (although I admit I was a moron at 24 both for working over 60h and thinking I could talk to those paying my salary with anything other than deference, especially when I was a new programmer). Those weekend tasks?...much higher rate of error and missed requirements....but this was the dot-com boom and everyone was a recent grad and working late...like it's a badge of honor how hardcore you are.
Your value goes down with each hour....especially if you're vibe coding, because the whole fucking point is that you're carefully reverse centauring the slop to ensure it's not introducing errors....cause all those tools generate slop...and as everyone knows by now, it looks really good...even when it's total shit that will get your data stolen...the consequence of being a giant word guessing engine.
If they were smart, they wouldn't be mandating 70h work weeks...they'd be mandating that every engineer showed up with 8h of sleep and offering all the caffeine and ritalin they can get.
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Cult leaders looking for followers.
Re:Who the fuck wants an engineer after 40h? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ask these same people if they would get into a cab if they knew the driver were on their 69th hour that week.
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Correction, should be 71th hour. Or do I round up? Mixing math and English is too hard a problem for a Monday.
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Ask these same people if they would get into a cab if they knew the driver were on their 69th hour that week.
I suspect they would as they don't want to acknowledge that they're paying what is effectively an illegal taxi company who underpays and abuses their workers because that cab company is a few shekels cheaper than the legitimate option. And it'll only be a few shekels cheaper as long as a legitimate alternative exists (which it's their mission to destroy).
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If this is in the US, how is this kind of thing even legal?
Although, I suppose being that it's a desk job, I doubt OSHA would get involved. As long as they pay OT rates for anything over 40 hours, they wouldn't break DoL rules.
But, with minimum-wage being what it is now, the company will go broke in no time flat. And, then, when the company folds, all those claiming unemployment will drain the entire state's unemployment fund, and they'll be stuck in that same sleep schedule (slowly driving them nuts, eve
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Monied interests.
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I have to wonder if these stories are actually real, or if this is just Big Tech putting out these scare pieces to prevent senior IT people from looking for another job.
Sure, many of us haven't had a meaningful raise in years and recently had our work from home benefits taken from us, but they're hoping that we read this crap and think "Gee... at least we aren't being asked to work 70 hours a week, maybe I should stick around a bit longer".
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Okay... the "salaried exempt" thing... I've never had a job like that, and never will. (+5 points to Gryffindor)
After some reading, there's no federal laws (or state laws) besides the ol' Department of Labor (but, correctly, a place that pays salary is exempt from OT, at a minimum)... that's my bad. (+50 points to Slytherin)
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Are these people young or stupid? Your cognitive function goes WAAY down after hour 40. Your error rate goes up, your efficiency goes down. Things that take you 4h from 8 to 12PM can be replicated in 30 min in the morning after you got some sleep. You have to be a moron to think otherwise. Hours 1-40?...you're at your best. If you're in your 20s and have no life to distract you, then hours 50-60, you MIGHT be somewhat lucid, just making a lot more mistakes and taking a lot longer to do everything. Hours 60-72?...you're just keeping a chair warm and snapping at your coworkers as your mental health deteriorates.
I've done this before. I used to be young, stupid, and paid by the hour. I grew up poor, so I asked for every bit of overtime I could get...and I nearly got myself fired because I was billing twice as much to do a task and snapped at a few managers when they asked some very stupid questions they should have known better (although I admit I was a moron at 24 both for working over 60h and thinking I could talk to those paying my salary with anything other than deference, especially when I was a new programmer). Those weekend tasks?...much higher rate of error and missed requirements....but this was the dot-com boom and everyone was a recent grad and working late...like it's a badge of honor how hardcore you are.
Your value goes down with each hour....especially if you're vibe coding, because the whole fucking point is that you're carefully reverse centauring the slop to ensure it's not introducing errors....cause all those tools generate slop...and as everyone knows by now, it looks really good...even when it's total shit that will get your data stolen...the consequence of being a giant word guessing engine.
If they were smart, they wouldn't be mandating 70h work weeks...they'd be mandating that every engineer showed up with 8h of sleep and offering all the caffeine and ritalin they can get.
It's not about productivity, it's about control.
Getting you to give up your hard won rights as a worker is the first step towards serfdom, first it's done by offering money... the incentives are slowly reduced but the long work hours remain. Before you know it, 60+ hour weeks are considered the norm as most people have given up their rights by accepting a pat on the head over defending them.
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"Arrows cost money. Send in the Irish: the dead cost nothing."
Reform the Fair Labor Standards Act (Score:4, Insightful)
Replace it with something similar to the EU's Working Time Directive. Regrettably this will never happen in the United States. The business interests finance the elections, and they get to nominate who we vote for by paying for their campaign.
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This is just the thing: This does not help getting higher productivity. In fact, working like that, productivity per week will be much lower due to errors, sickness, lack of creativity and insight and all competent people leaving sooner or later. All I can see here is virtue signaling via giving the appearance of maximum exploitation.
Great way to... (Score:5, Informative)
develop severe insomnia.
12-hours home for six days, then 1 full day off... for those six days, that's barely enough to unwind, maybe have a few beers or couple drinks, shower, eat dinner (or cook it if you live alone), and get to bed for a decent night's sleep... and that full-day off is gonna throw off your whole schedule.
Insomnia sucks... I developed it while working third shift at Electrolux (I was foam head operator)... 11PM Sunday to 7AM Monday, five days a week, Saturday was the only day fully off (when it wasn't mandatory OT) which became grocery day, and Sunday would be laundry day... the whiplash from having Saturday off to flipping back to regular schedule resulted in me developing primary insomnia (working there ended in 2012, I still have it to this day... up to 80mg Trazodone nightly).
How the hell are you supposed to have a family life (or any life at all) working like that? Or, is it just 'sign your life over to the company, and only exist for the company' until they wheel your corpse out?
Even when I was young (Score:3)
...my brain turned to spaghetti when I worked long hours. It might work good enough to finish periodic deadlines that require dotting i's and crossing t's, but general quality becomes wobbly.
Of course, everyone is different, but on average those who work long hours start to look and act funny by my observation.
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That effect applies to everybody, no exceptions. There are just idiots that think themselves supermen and unaffected. But they are wrong.
Work the Hours You're Paid For (Score:3)
If the employees are being paid for every hour they work or have stock to make up the difference, sure, maybe long weeks make sense.
But volunteering free labor so someone else can be rich is pretty foolish.
This is illegal in Germany (Score:3)
No really in this case it's true. Labour regulations limit the maximum work hours to 60h / week only on exception and the average working week needs to be 48h over any given 6 month period. Some regions limit this to a lower point such as 52hours unless there's a government exception granted to the business (e.g. on an industrial plant during maintenance downtime window). But that is compensated with additional leave afterwards.
Where I live (not Germany) a business will get a fine if employees are found working more than 60h per week or more than 12h per day.
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And in most of the EU due to EU working time directive. Business interests have tried to change the law, but have so far failed.
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Because these "business interests" are stupid. They would get less productivity from their people if the worked more.
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Because these "business interests" are stupid. They would get less productivity from their people if the worked more.
You're assuming productivity is the goal... it's not. The goal is control. Many of these companies long for the days when workers had no rights, right now they want us to give up our hard won rights as workers for extra money, once enough people do that they'll reduce the incentives and then all we'll have left is the long working week and no rights as workers.
The rich want to strip us of our ability to challenge them. Not like this is how every communist revolution starts or anything (and we all know th
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Obviously. I call that the "slaveholder mindset" employer. But they are stupid as business people because they are harming their profits.
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You're assuming productivity is the goal... it's not. The goal is control.
Never attribute to malice what can be described by stupidity. Control doesn't benefit the organisation in this case. The laws are protecting idiot managers from themselves.
And for what (Score:2)
so some C-suite can earn a billions extra than another company? If people were smart they'd strike together. People aren't that smart.
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Exactly my thoughts market forces working against us.
This 9-9-6 72 Hour per week work... (Score:2)
Remind me of the second foundation book (foundation and empire), where "the mule" used psionic habilities to enhance the intellect of certain subjects, and made them work themselves to death on intellectual ventures by burning the candle on both ends...
I know is nothing very relevant, I just wanted to say it.
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Similarly, it reminds me of the "Focused" from A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge: people neurologically altered to become "thinking machines," their human emotions and desires forcibly suppressed with drugs and conditioning.
remote work (Score:2)
This is where the bullshit about "return to office" is truly revealed. If they wanted people to put in the hours, they would be all for it. I've been working 100% remote now for 4 years, and when I'm working on something that is very involved and demands time, I put in 16+ hours a day because of how accessible the workspace is, and I enjoy it the actual work. But the flexible schedule of being remote still lets me get my "me time", and I'd never do that if I was commuting to an office.
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I put in 16+ hours a day because of how accessible the workspace is, and I enjoy it the actual work. But the flexible schedule of being remote still lets me get my "me time"
12 of those hours are mostly a waste. Humans are good at high level cognitive work for about 4 hours at a time.
Re: remote work (Score:2)
I agree. And because I've got a great deal of control over my schedule, after a few hours I can take a break. At some point go for a bike ride to keep the oxygen flowing. You'd be surprised how much thought you can put into a project while out on the bike, then come home and start implementing.
Wait-- (Score:3)
Wait, we were assured that AI makes our work more efficient, and that means we should work fewer hours. Shouldn't the AI companies, the ones on the leading edge of the AI revolution, be the first to show these advantages?
no?
Well, at least I assume that they are going to base the salary on 72 hours per week, including time-and-a-half for overtime? They're not just using this as a way to get more work for the same pay, right?
no?
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Wait, we were assured that AI makes our work more efficient, and that means we should work fewer hours.
Exactly what I was thinking. This reminds me of when Zoom required [slashdot.org] their employees to return to work in-person.
It seems to contradict their entire reason for being.
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Were we though?
I seem to recall Elon Musk predicting that in the next 20 years or something.
Let me put it this way... (Score:2)
While I was working at Ameritech in the mid-nineties, I had one week I broke 70 hours. Around that time, my late wife was semi-serious about suing Ameritech for alienation of affection.
FUCK THIS SHIT. You want to be an indentured servant?
So much for the "promise of AI" (Score:3)
Yet this company is advertising longer hours, more grueling work.
CEO's promised AI will multiply productivity without burning people out, in practice it seems to be just justifying pushing people harder.
CEO's promised AI will elevate talent and create better jobs, yet this seems to be showing that "talent" is a disposable input. Fuel for the AI race.
CEO's promised AI will reinvent how we work. In practice it's "We work the same way, just more of it"
This is all the exact opposite of the "AI will make work more productive and humane" storyline that they have been pushing for the past few years.
This is like the "paperless office" (Score:2)
Back in the 80's vendors promised companies a "paperless office", but cynics noted that the equipment sold always included printers.
Now we're looking at a promise of a post-human-labor era, delivered by armies of human drones performing mountains fo soul-crushing labor.
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It took 30+ years, but I would say we have finally achieved a paperless office for the most part. My old company had substantial paper files well into the mid 2010s, but better monitors, cloud solutions, and e-signatures like Docusign have finally killed off paper except for the occasional convenience copy of a document or very large/formal business transactions. I go months without printing anything at my office job. It wasn't a bad idea- it was just that the tech wasn't good enough yet in the 80s.
Perhaps
Slavery in disguise (Score:3)
The only phrase that accurately summarises it.
been there done that (Score:2)
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I'm not sure where people get the idea that union jobs are easy. I think all labor should be organized, but a lot of so-called progressives wonder if the highway could be finished in one summer rather than 3 if IDOT wasn't required to hire union workers.
The last union job I had as a bus mechanic for the city was 8-5, hour lunch and 2 15 minute breaks. You could sit all you wanted to as long as your head was inside or under a bus and your hands were pulling wrenches. I got written up for being 1 minute late
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Berries (Score:2)
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Maybe your brain. My brain was designed to sit in the AC and eat hamburgers.
Move to Mexico... (Score:2)
Well, duh (Score:3)
"founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge"
Of course, overworking and burning out employees gives founders a huge advantage in upping the probability of a life-changing payout. Now, if we're talking about the employees themselves, that's a completely different story. Only desperate or delusional people sign up for being overworked for essentially zero chance of a life-changing payout. There are those that do indeed enjoy some aspects of the work experience, but they're different because they acknowledge that there's no chance of a life-changing payout.
There's a reason that founders try to cast the moral light on overworking the masses so that they can reap billions. Appealing to morality, religion, nationalism, and anything other than economic benefit for the workers is the only way to fool these workers into slaving away for the founder's benefit. This type of economic system bears similarities to a plantation.
Reality has a second opinion (Score:2)
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Work smarter, not harder. But God help you if they catch you not working harder.
More importantly: appearing to do so. No wonder the vast majority of startups fold in short order. Bloody idiots.
Irony (Score:2)
Arbeit macht frei!!! (Score:1)
This looks a little bit like the infamous "concentration camps" few decades ago, with however some differences...
Back then, people were forced to go to these camps to work (very) hard. But they got free tattoos. They did not have to pay for a place to stay, to get food, water, shower...
This article about USA seems to describe more or less the same concept, except that people are free to accept to go and work hard or not. But, they do have to pay to get their tattoos, to get a place to stay, to eat, drink an