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.
Sign up to that shit and you are part of the problem. Fuck that.
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
As long as I get paid 2.5x my 40hr pay sure. Otherwise my fellow unionized tech bros are collectively saying “go fuck yourself”
If I was in my 20’s I’d have thought about that 2.5x offer. Now that I’m in my 40’s I can say i wouldn’t even do it for 5x. You can’t buy back missed time, no matter how much money you have.
Part of me says that I’d do it for 20x… but I’d just end up quitting in a few months, take my money and retire early.
After 6 months you’d have enough to retire to Vietnam. Another 6 and you’d have enough to pay yourself a low salary forever.
Another 6 and you’d fund a small house in a smaller town where you can retire, and another 6 and you’d be dead from stress.
I did it (we called it 6x12s) for about 2-3 years in my 30s. At the time it felt worth it; food, lodging, and transportation were all covered as well. I don’t really regret it most days but looking back years later I think it may have damaged friendships more than I’d realized until recently.
There’s no fucking way I’d do it now. Now I’m just one bad day away from rage quitting and retiring. Unfortunately I’m in a great position with a great boss and a reasonable work load and ample coverage and support and never been denied time off so that bad day isn’t likely to come anytime soon.
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.
vomits in trashcan
That counts as your break. 🤨
Fuck right off.
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.
Actually saying that they want slave labor is considered bad public relations.
Our product will make all jobs obsolete. That’s why we need to work our employees to death making it!
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…?
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.
Will they be introducing company stores next?
deleted by creator
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.
