Would you like to work nearly double the standard 40-hour week?
Maybe in the USA. It is 37.5h where I am.
known as “996,” or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. In other words, it’s a 72-hour work week.
Fuck off.
So many studies say this will lead to far less productivity for anything remotely knowledge work, especially over a long period.
Meanwhile smarter companies are going to a 4 day work week. https://www.investopedia.com/four-daywork-week-study-success-11777896
Nothing to do with productivity. It’s all about small dick energy CEOs wanting to validate and underline their self-perceived superior status. “How dare the little people work as little time as me?”
Yeah they’re not going for productivity, they’re an AI company. They just want the appearance of it to juice up their valuation or to stroke an executive’s ego.
Any company that wants me to work a “996“ can fuck ALLLLLLLLLL the way off
The founders can do all the 996 they want, but if they want to have their employees do the same, they should offer a fair share of the company at least.
Sorry, best we can do is offer a .00001% stake and pretend like it’s your ticket to early retirement.
That’s ok, they can promise more with no intention of ever paying it because there’s a special privileged ‘preferred’ stock that the bigger investors and executives get that’s prioritized for sales and dividends before anyone else’s.
You are not kidding. I have some experience with startup stock options and… it’s not pretty.
Before anyone retorts with remarks about “phantom stock” and other similar offers, I want you to do some math.
Figure out what the ‘strike price’ of that stock is likely to be when it matures, and calculate what the payout will be. Then figure out capital gains tax and subtract that. Divide what’s left over by the amount of unpaid overtime (hours in excess of 40 a week) you’re going to put in for the maturation window. Lastly, compare these figures to other testimonials in your field, and also, look up typical yearly bonus figures for more mature companies. You’re going to see that it’s not a lot of cash for the extra time, that it’s nowhere near your base pay rate, and more established companies are going to do a better job of compensating folks for less effort. You may even find that with a 996 grind-set, it might pay out less than taking a second job at retail.
I can also warn you that if the company sells instead of going IPO, you may get a much smaller payout than all that. I was in a situation where they threw the advertised strike price in the trash, and negotiated a sale of everyone’s stock to the buying company for much, much less.
As long as I get paid 2.5x my 40hr pay sure. Otherwise my fellow unionized tech bros are collectively saying “go fuck yourself”
That sounds like a good way to have your entire workforce quit on you…
It’s a startup, the goal is to get people who work for vaporous promises of future wealth So you squeeze them as hard as you can imagine then the company collapse and you take their work and sell it to private equity aka “angels”
I would work that many hours a week as long as I got paid +$1 million a year. Otherwise, it would just make more sense to start my own business.
People are stupid, they have whole nature around them, but they are killing it to create computers and escape the planet.
That’s sad.What’s really sad about it is that most of the shit they believe is complete sci-fi bullshit and they won’t build a super-intelligence nor escape the planet no matter how much of their finite time they pump into these futile efforts.
Silicon Valley Workforces Embracing Controversial ‘Kill The Asshole CEOs’ Strategy
Yes, work yourself to death for the profits of the oligarchy, you morons. See what thanks you get.
A sense of pride and accomplishment, right?
Right…?
Management is on 1034.
I gots to find me one of those jobs. My wife and I are in middle management and are more like 10-12 hour days, 5 to 6 days a week. I’m not a fan.
The Americans and their piss poor labor laws, They like working beyond the point of diminishing return.
Reminder: authority only exists because we let it.
Authority is the right word, nothing in this is about actual products or traditional economic value.
It’s feudal (or crook) impression economy. That “AI” is liked by people who can afford to continuously waste money on it. Such schedules are liked by the same people. They are the “Silicon Valley elite” or whatever.
I’ve read once a description by Russia’s ambassador to Persia during Qajars how this historically worked.
So - Qajar Persian court, they’ve received, say, 2 (I don’t remember, maybe 6) modern (for that moment) Russian cannons as a gift. What do they do with the cannons? The cannons stay with the court and are shot for fun at an empty ground with no aim, while the whole court and the monarch moan “ja-a-a-n” with every shot.
It’s the same. The oligopolization of tech has made these people so much money and connections with other such people who have money, that they don’t care about results at all. It’s all shared impressions of what they “already have”. They don’t have to “run to stay on the same place”. They don’t have to compete - they collectively own search, social media, what we use instead of pen and paper, everything.
Or a more traditional example (I might have gotten the years wrong, but I think the idea doesn’t suffer) - a bunch of knights in XV-century tournament armor are not a very good army compared to cuirassed musketeers with a wagenburg and actual discipline, but the societies are built the way that those real soldiers are very rare, expensive and present only in select important areas during real honest-to-god war. While on their tournament the gentry may pretend it’s still XII century and they are competing in useful things.
I avoided this issue by embracing the completely non-controversial “become a contractor” work schedule. When you’re a temp they specifically want you NOT to work overtime without prior authorization - because they have to pay for it. And as a software dev I was always treated identically with employees, except for a few special things like some company meetings and offsite events - which I didn’t want to attend anyway. And I got paid almost twice as much hourly than I would as an employee. Sure, I had to buy my own health insurance and didn’t get paid time off, but when you double your salary those are non-issues. But what about job security? LOL what about layoffs? My job security was that there are always contract jobs everywhere.
I wouldn’t do it for money… I’d do it for a SHITLOAD of money (and then collect unemployment once the bubble bursts, as a soft-retirement)
