This is clearly rage bait, given that it starts with one 120-person company doing this and then tries to pivot into “the tech industry” without any supporting evidence that it’s widespread.
> 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.
Modern day tech journalism is just lazy, you browse a bunch of HN and reddit threads, if you're feeling it, ask ChatGPT for some stats to support your propaganda piece and hit publish. Fact check, spell check and everything else is done by AI. It's not like you have to run around the streets with camera crew, interviewing real people, so...yeah. I doubt if even they write the articles themselves, I've seen models on Huggingface for "creative, human-like writing". So maybe it was just a prompt "write me some ragebait on AI companies as I'm having a slow news day and my job is hanging by a thread"
> The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:
- 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.
Layoffs should happen exactly once for a very long time.
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.
“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.”
I'm glad they're up-front about it. Not a fan, but I think it makes sense for a startup to make unconventional choices and recruit accordingly.
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.
Pretty sure it was claimed that using "AI" would mean people would need to work less. So they aren't practicing what they preach, and in fact the opposite.
As I recall it, the claim was that people would become less valuable, not that they would necessarily work less. The goal is to reduce the cost of hiring, not to give people freedom.
The value proposition for automation and industrialization is always along the lines that, as unskilled workers lose jobs and are displaced by machinery, more jobs will be created for skilled workers to design, supervise, and maintain that machinery.
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?
Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks? I doubt my employer would.
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
> Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks?
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.
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.
Is the suggestion they would work out more if they were paid? I think if obtaining Olympic medals was a function of training more then the avengers would be far higher.
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."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
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.
The dot com bubble. The reboot of tech after (pre 2008) at the dawn of podcasting, Web 2.0, the "open web".
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".
16 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep - this is what it should be. no PTO. salary don't matter cause you have no time to spend any of it. need to put in 65 years like this before you get the pension. utopia!
That's not the widespread change I'm seeing. The actual widespread change I'm seeing is the deep, overt and silent change in the expectations of productivity. Some of us are reaching out skill ceiling, and some others are finding wind under their wings. Sad about the former.
They will be fine. Big banks are doing it, consulting firms are doing it. They top it off with layoffs to show their deep appreciation to their overworked staff. People still apply.
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
Whats most amazing is that these people are putting in 12 hours a day 6 days a week for the goal of putting hundreds of millions of people out of a job, including themselves. The only people who will benefit in the end are their billionaire bosses they're slavishly working to make even wealthier and they'll all be hung out to dry in the end with everyone else.
These are suicidal and omnicidal acts by stupid, subservient enablers and class traitors who believe the rich and powerful will somehow look out for them rather than kick them to the curb with the rest of us. Effective unionizing, solidarity, and worker-owned co-ops are the rational responses, but semi-higher-paid people scoffed because they assumed with all of the perks the elite jackals wouldn't eat their faces too. Stupid fools.
This is a big issue that I also thought about. Current crop of AI tools increases capital leverage, but workers are still left with existing tools. Without push-back, employees will get an even a shorter end of the stick than before. That ain't good for society.
I'll probably be downvoted, I feel like the whole AI adoption and much of our technological progress over the centuries has been a prime Prisoner's Dilemma example.
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
If anyone wants to sterotype the proper response to this thread, I'm down. I'll play:
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 ..."?
Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do.
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.
Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
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.
---
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.
> reward people for the full transitive value of their work
> 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.
I think the discussion should move away from freedoms/rights to consent.
Compare with rights in the physical world:
- If I own a property, whether it's a house or plot of land, I can consent or not consent to other people being there. Walking across a field of grass doesn't damage or depreciate is in any measurable way but nobody is allowed to do that unless I allow it.
- If I own a bike I never use and never intend to use, nobody is allowed to take it for theirs, not even borrow it, without my consent.
It should be the same with my work which is not physical. If I publish code online, my consent should be required for using it in any way - especially if i give specific instructions such as a license file.
Without that, those who are best able to capitalize on an opportunity (typically those who are already in positions of power and have enough wealth) gain the most from it, not those who contributed to the opportunity through their labor.
---
And it shouldn't be about innovation either. If i record my cat doing something funny, I can a) keep the video to myself, or b) upload it to youtube where it has a tiny but real chance to hit millions of views for meaningless internet points, ad money and presumably preferential treatment of my future videos from the algorithm, or c) I can upload it to my website where almost nobody will see it. But the choice c) should not allow Youtube to take my video and host it on their platform. Because I don't consent to that. In fact, I should be able to say for example "you can only rehost this video if you include a link to my website and don't make money from it".
And I should definitely be allowed to say "you can't use this video to make a statistical model of all videos on the internet which can then reproduce non-verbatim patterns from them". And by "you can't", I mean "I don't consent to it and society/law agrees with punishing you if you do".
There's nothing innovative about funny cat videos (for all we know, the exact situation has been recorded thousands of times and posted on youtube already and only one of those videos reaches more than a few views by random chance). Innovation shouldn't be relevant, consent should.
---
> All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work
Not sure if I understand but I think I agree in a theoretical sense but disagree in a practical one. Theoretically, IP law isn't a requirement for reaching this ideal, maybe there is a different rule system which can achieve that. Practically, IP law is a flawed mess but we shouldn't throw it away until we find a better alternative. (I've seen a discussion here where a person basically argued for destroying copyright but only several posts later revealed he was doing it because he had an alternative in mind. Ironically his alternative didn't require copyright to be abolished, it was perfectly compatible AFAICT but also was opt-in so it was effectively powerless and couldn't work towards his stated goals.)
> I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling
It's fine, I used the example because it was one of the things which caused cracks in my acceptance/ignorance of how the world works and made me think more deeply about it. It's good to be able to refine it even further.
> I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.
I think the point I was trying to make is that without rules limiting people's behavior, what happens is that those who already have vastly more than other people tend to be able to use that wealth to gain more even faster than the rest.
Being in high decision making ("leadership") positions allows one to capture a disproportional cut of the income. Ownership doesn't even require any work to generate more wealth for the owner. And now, similarly, huge companies are using their position to repurpose past labor with 100% of the wealth thusly generated going to them instead of those who performed that labor.
I thought ClawdBot and an agent swarm fishing in a data lake were doing all the work while the developers were chilling and sipping coffee. Now it is 996? Which is it?
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
70 hour weeks are dumb - it's a red flag that the company leadership has no idea what they're doing. Those types of working hours are actually counter-productive to good work, and there is plenty of research to support that. This kind of thing is performative, not actually a good way to run a business.
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".
Exactly. After 4-5 five hours of focus you then mostly just typing on autopilot.
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 does reek of a place spinning its wheels, praying for traction, burning through other people’s cash without a serious business.
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.
I'm personally doing kind of the opposite. I'm getting way more done with less time, and spending the difference with family. But things like this do make me realize that my ability to do this might be short lived. So I'm enjoying it while I can.
Because they'll figure it out eventually. While I can't predict the future, I think it's naive to think that as all this catches on and becomes more commonplace that those of us that still have jobs won't be expected to work the same hours with much greater output. So I'd say enjoy it for now as it might not last. Like, computers in general were supposed to do this for us ~30 years ago.
What's the gap between sleep-deprived humans and LLMs?
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.
One would think the company is doing something state-of-the-art moonshot worthy. But, no.
“ 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.
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.
That sounds less like “70-hour weeks” and more like admitting only ~30 of those hours matter - everything else is vibes and calendar theater. Which kind of proves the point: forced 996 optimizes for visible suffering, not actual output or upside.
i would disagree with your dismissal of it as theatre. it's not forced, and it would probably be worse if I skipped those meetings :). meeting customers is not the same mental load as focused coding but it's still work that needs to be done
This is clearly rage bait, given that it starts with one 120-person company doing this and then tries to pivot into “the tech industry” without any supporting evidence that it’s widespread.
> 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.
Modern day tech journalism is just lazy, you browse a bunch of HN and reddit threads, if you're feeling it, ask ChatGPT for some stats to support your propaganda piece and hit publish. Fact check, spell check and everything else is done by AI. It's not like you have to run around the streets with camera crew, interviewing real people, so...yeah. I doubt if even they write the articles themselves, I've seen models on Huggingface for "creative, human-like writing". So maybe it was just a prompt "write me some ragebait on AI companies as I'm having a slow news day and my job is hanging by a thread"
Harassment laws have made old style journalism impossible.
You have a point. It does have the same vibe as 'quiet quitting' and other attempts at framing during attempts to RTO.
If anything, indeed, this company is an outlier because they openly communicate about it.
Rage bait seems to be working judging by the comments over here.
Hard to tell how widespread it is but it’s not just 1 company. https://www.webpronews.com/silicon-valleys-2025-ai-boom-revi...
> The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.
Hello fellow children vibes.
A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:
- 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.
Layoffs should happen exactly once for a very long time.
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.
i believe your points, but give me sources for them.
Eric Schmidt has mentioned they regretted not hiring more people during the (once in every 5yrs?) crisis that came before covid.
Job 7:1-6
“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.”
If there any indication that this is increasing, as opposed to AI stuff just being where the fanatics are being drawn to at the moment?
I'm glad they're up-front about it. Not a fan, but I think it makes sense for a startup to make unconventional choices and recruit accordingly.
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.
Pretty sure it was claimed that using "AI" would mean people would need to work less. So they aren't practicing what they preach, and in fact the opposite.
As I recall it, the claim was that people would become less valuable, not that they would necessarily work less. The goal is to reduce the cost of hiring, not to give people freedom.
The value proposition for automation and industrialization is always along the lines that, as unskilled workers lose jobs and are displaced by machinery, more jobs will be created for skilled workers to design, supervise, and maintain that machinery.
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?
3 cashiers per location and 9 developers per company is not a win/win for the 1,000s of cashiers replaced by the 9 developers.
We will work more and more, endlessly, until we render ourselves useless through our own efforts. That is the quest.
Who claimed that?
Jevons paradox
Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks? I doubt my employer would.
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
> Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks?
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.
Olympic athletes don’t exercise 72 hours a week, more like 20 to 40.
Brain power vs muscle power.
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.
They are also, by definition, not professionals. They dont get paid.
Thats why the NBA doesnt present in the Olympics.
There are many NBA players in the Summer Olympics. Literally the entire U.S. men's team...
Is the suggestion they would work out more if they were paid? I think if obtaining Olympic medals was a function of training more then the avengers would be far higher.
And yet NHL players are in this Olympics.
employers that demand long hours do so because they have no other way to appraise employee ability.
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?
https://archive.is/PEH69
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."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
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.
The dot com bubble. The reboot of tech after (pre 2008) at the dawn of podcasting, Web 2.0, the "open web".
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".
I suggest the other way around: Don't work at all. Zero hours, seven days a week. I call it the 0 Model. It's a huge blessing.
works great so long as you were born a nepobaby
Or, we could organize a basic income.
Youth really is wasted on the young lol. If only I could get all those hours back and do pretty much anything else.
Eh, it was fun at the time. At least for me. I wouldn't do it now.
16 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep - this is what it should be. no PTO. salary don't matter cause you have no time to spend any of it. need to put in 65 years like this before you get the pension. utopia!
Pension? Why should you get paid not to work just because your 80 and have given your whole life to the company? Geez some people have no work ethic.
Do we ignore weekends?
whats that?
That's not the widespread change I'm seeing. The actual widespread change I'm seeing is the deep, overt and silent change in the expectations of productivity. Some of us are reaching out skill ceiling, and some others are finding wind under their wings. Sad about the former.
If AI improves efficiency so much why aren't companies pushing for 30-hour weeks?
They will be fine. Big banks are doing it, consulting firms are doing it. They top it off with layoffs to show their deep appreciation to their overworked staff. People still apply.
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
And I am sure there will be no overtime pay, but they get "perks".
Pizza parties and "unlimited" vacations?
Whats most amazing is that these people are putting in 12 hours a day 6 days a week for the goal of putting hundreds of millions of people out of a job, including themselves. The only people who will benefit in the end are their billionaire bosses they're slavishly working to make even wealthier and they'll all be hung out to dry in the end with everyone else.
These are suicidal and omnicidal acts by stupid, subservient enablers and class traitors who believe the rich and powerful will somehow look out for them rather than kick them to the curb with the rest of us. Effective unionizing, solidarity, and worker-owned co-ops are the rational responses, but semi-higher-paid people scoffed because they assumed with all of the perks the elite jackals wouldn't eat their faces too. Stupid fools.
Now that Tech Oligarchs are a great leap closer to replacing programmers, are we any step closer to seeing the need to organizing and unionizing?
This is a big issue that I also thought about. Current crop of AI tools increases capital leverage, but workers are still left with existing tools. Without push-back, employees will get an even a shorter end of the stick than before. That ain't good for society.
That ship sailed long time ago
I'll probably be downvoted, I feel like the whole AI adoption and much of our technological progress over the centuries has been a prime Prisoner's Dilemma example.
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
This is prime HN rage bait. I expect to see every cynical tech trope, including the idea that ai doesn’t work
If anyone wants to sterotype the proper response to this thread, I'm down. I'll play:
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 ..."?
Lots of useful idiots out there helping employers towards the goal of turning all white collar labor into fungible minimum wage AI operators.
I hope they’re getting stock options and have negotiated themselves out of any bs repurchase rights.
Sounds pretty typical of the startup scene. Long hours for a chance at something great.
"the end of the humans was an ironic one"
Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do.
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.
> 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.
Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
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.
> reward people for the full transitive value of their work
> 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, ...
> Both statements can be true.
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 mentioned it because some people ...
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.
I think the discussion should move away from freedoms/rights to consent.
Compare with rights in the physical world:
- If I own a property, whether it's a house or plot of land, I can consent or not consent to other people being there. Walking across a field of grass doesn't damage or depreciate is in any measurable way but nobody is allowed to do that unless I allow it.
- If I own a bike I never use and never intend to use, nobody is allowed to take it for theirs, not even borrow it, without my consent.
It should be the same with my work which is not physical. If I publish code online, my consent should be required for using it in any way - especially if i give specific instructions such as a license file.
Without that, those who are best able to capitalize on an opportunity (typically those who are already in positions of power and have enough wealth) gain the most from it, not those who contributed to the opportunity through their labor.
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And it shouldn't be about innovation either. If i record my cat doing something funny, I can a) keep the video to myself, or b) upload it to youtube where it has a tiny but real chance to hit millions of views for meaningless internet points, ad money and presumably preferential treatment of my future videos from the algorithm, or c) I can upload it to my website where almost nobody will see it. But the choice c) should not allow Youtube to take my video and host it on their platform. Because I don't consent to that. In fact, I should be able to say for example "you can only rehost this video if you include a link to my website and don't make money from it".
And I should definitely be allowed to say "you can't use this video to make a statistical model of all videos on the internet which can then reproduce non-verbatim patterns from them". And by "you can't", I mean "I don't consent to it and society/law agrees with punishing you if you do".
There's nothing innovative about funny cat videos (for all we know, the exact situation has been recorded thousands of times and posted on youtube already and only one of those videos reaches more than a few views by random chance). Innovation shouldn't be relevant, consent should.
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> All of that is perfectly consistent with the ideal of rewarding people for the full transitive value of their work
Not sure if I understand but I think I agree in a theoretical sense but disagree in a practical one. Theoretically, IP law isn't a requirement for reaching this ideal, maybe there is a different rule system which can achieve that. Practically, IP law is a flawed mess but we shouldn't throw it away until we find a better alternative. (I've seen a discussion here where a person basically argued for destroying copyright but only several posts later revealed he was doing it because he had an alternative in mind. Ironically his alternative didn't require copyright to be abolished, it was perfectly compatible AFAICT but also was opt-in so it was effectively powerless and couldn't work towards his stated goals.)
> I apologize if my tone tended towards quibbling
It's fine, I used the example because it was one of the things which caused cracks in my acceptance/ignorance of how the world works and made me think more deeply about it. It's good to be able to refine it even further.
> I don't really see how any of that relates to copyright or AI though.
I think the point I was trying to make is that without rules limiting people's behavior, what happens is that those who already have vastly more than other people tend to be able to use that wealth to gain more even faster than the rest.
Being in high decision making ("leadership") positions allows one to capture a disproportional cut of the income. Ownership doesn't even require any work to generate more wealth for the owner. And now, similarly, huge companies are using their position to repurpose past labor with 100% of the wealth thusly generated going to them instead of those who performed that labor.
I thought ClawdBot and an agent swarm fishing in a data lake were doing all the work while the developers were chilling and sipping coffee. Now it is 996? Which is it?
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
It is 996. Delegating work to agents gives you more time to delegate work to other agents.
Its agents all the way down!
70 hour weeks are dumb - it's a red flag that the company leadership has no idea what they're doing. Those types of working hours are actually counter-productive to good work, and there is plenty of research to support that. This kind of thing is performative, not actually a good way to run a business.
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".
Exactly. After 4-5 five hours of focus you then mostly just typing on autopilot.
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 does reek of a place spinning its wheels, praying for traction, burning through other people’s cash without a serious business.
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.
I'm personally doing kind of the opposite. I'm getting way more done with less time, and spending the difference with family. But things like this do make me realize that my ability to do this might be short lived. So I'm enjoying it while I can.
Same on all accounts. If I found a tool or system that increases my productivity by 50% what incentive do I have to pass those gains on to leadership?
Because they'll figure it out eventually. While I can't predict the future, I think it's naive to think that as all this catches on and becomes more commonplace that those of us that still have jobs won't be expected to work the same hours with much greater output. So I'd say enjoy it for now as it might not last. Like, computers in general were supposed to do this for us ~30 years ago.
Publicly- and private equity-owned companies will say "Thanks for automating yourself out of a job" and fire you.
Which is why you should always work for an employee-owned co-op where you share in profits from productivity gains.
The only thing produced in hour 71 is poor judgment.
It’s not about productivity, it’s about making the company the only thing in your life.
Like Scientology, it's a cult that promotes slavery and subservience that benefits others based on total obedience and sacrifice.
Lets go the other way towards worker protections and living a healthy lifestyle instead.
You’re thinking about this wrong. Leadership says the gap between human and LLM performance on complex tasks is too big.
The easiest way to close it is to prevent the humans from sleeping.
What's the gap between sleep-deprived humans and LLMs?
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.
Admittedly, while stunningly accurate portrayal of an executive mind, it is almost ridiculously hilarious on its face.
In favor of whom? LLMs?
That requires having more work than workers, so that a bad deal is never the only option.
One would think the company is doing something state-of-the-art moonshot worthy. But, no.
“ 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.
Shocking. Capitalism at its best exploiting workers for the gain of the rich.
this is a startup -- they're not rich yet
Not surprised. It takes obsessive focus to make a startup successful, especially in an industry so saturated with talent.
fwiw i think there's a balance here
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.
That sounds less like “70-hour weeks” and more like admitting only ~30 of those hours matter - everything else is vibes and calendar theater. Which kind of proves the point: forced 996 optimizes for visible suffering, not actual output or upside.
i would disagree with your dismissal of it as theatre. it's not forced, and it would probably be worse if I skipped those meetings :). meeting customers is not the same mental load as focused coding but it's still work that needs to be done