Some Startups Are Demanding 12-Hour Days, Six Days a Week from Workers (msn.com) 151
The Washington Post reports on 996, "a term popularized in China that refers to a rigid work schedule in which people work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week..."
As the artificial intelligence race heats up, many start-ups in Silicon Valley and New York are promoting hardcore culture as a way of life, pushing the limits of work hours, demanding that workers move fast to be first in the market. Some are even promoting 996 as a virtue in the hiring process and keeping "grind scores" of companies... Whoever builds first in AI will capture the market, and the window of opportunity is two to three years, "so you better run faster than everyone else," said Inaki Berenguer, managing partner of venture-capital firm LifeX Ventures.
At San Francisco-based AI start-up Sonatic, the grind culture also allows for meal, gym and pickleball time, said Kinjal Nandy, its CEO. Nandy recently posted a job opening on X that requires in-person work seven days a week. He said working 10-hour days sounds like a lot but the company also offers its first hires perks such as free housing in a hacker house, food delivery credits and a free subscription to the dating service Raya... Mercor, a San Francisco-based start-up that uses AI to match people to jobs, recently posted an opening for a customer success engineer, saying that candidates should have a willingness to work six days a week, and it's not negotiable. "We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top," the listing reads.
Being in-person rather than remote is a requirement at some start-ups. AI start-up StarSling had two engineering job descriptions that required six days a week of in-person work. In a job description for an engineer, Rilla, an AI company in New York, said candidates should not work at the company if they're not excited about working about 70 hours a week in person. One venture capitalist even started tracking "grind scores." Jared Sleeper, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm Avenir, recently ranked public software companies' "grind score" in a post on X, which went viral. Using data from Glassdoor, it ranks the percentage of employees who have a positive outlook for the company compared with their views on work-life balance.
"At Google's AI division, cofounder Sergey Brin views 60 hours per week as the 'sweet spot' for productivity," notes the Independent: Working more than 55 hours a week, compared with a standard 35-40-hour week, is linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Productivity also suffers. A British study shows that working beyond 60 hours a week can reduce overall output, slow cognitive performance, and impair tasks ranging from call handling to problem-solving.
Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output after adopting a four-day work week. In a UK trial, 61 companies that tested a four-day schedule reported revenue gains, with 92 percent choosing to keep the policy, according to Bloomberg.
At San Francisco-based AI start-up Sonatic, the grind culture also allows for meal, gym and pickleball time, said Kinjal Nandy, its CEO. Nandy recently posted a job opening on X that requires in-person work seven days a week. He said working 10-hour days sounds like a lot but the company also offers its first hires perks such as free housing in a hacker house, food delivery credits and a free subscription to the dating service Raya... Mercor, a San Francisco-based start-up that uses AI to match people to jobs, recently posted an opening for a customer success engineer, saying that candidates should have a willingness to work six days a week, and it's not negotiable. "We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top," the listing reads.
Being in-person rather than remote is a requirement at some start-ups. AI start-up StarSling had two engineering job descriptions that required six days a week of in-person work. In a job description for an engineer, Rilla, an AI company in New York, said candidates should not work at the company if they're not excited about working about 70 hours a week in person. One venture capitalist even started tracking "grind scores." Jared Sleeper, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm Avenir, recently ranked public software companies' "grind score" in a post on X, which went viral. Using data from Glassdoor, it ranks the percentage of employees who have a positive outlook for the company compared with their views on work-life balance.
"At Google's AI division, cofounder Sergey Brin views 60 hours per week as the 'sweet spot' for productivity," notes the Independent: Working more than 55 hours a week, compared with a standard 35-40-hour week, is linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Productivity also suffers. A British study shows that working beyond 60 hours a week can reduce overall output, slow cognitive performance, and impair tasks ranging from call handling to problem-solving.
Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output after adopting a four-day work week. In a UK trial, 61 companies that tested a four-day schedule reported revenue gains, with 92 percent choosing to keep the policy, according to Bloomberg.
This is just the news media (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how you wag the Dog. You will see more and more of these stories normalizing the death of the 40-hour work week that your great-grandparents fought and died for. I don't mean in world war II
Meanwhile we are automating fucking everything and have been for 45 years. So the last thing you should do is have people work longer hours for less pay.
I keep saying this but the billionaires have had enough of capitalism. They have noticed that they are wealth and privileged and power derives from consumers and they don't like you. They're taking measures to put an end to capitalism but leave them in charge.
Go read up on the history of capitalism. Capitalism is a relatively new invention of humans. It's not something eternal like you were taught to believe in high school. There is absolutely no reason it can't be destroyed with something dystopian and completely unlike the socialist ideas floating around. Something like feudalism but so much worse because it's backed by surveillance and technology
Re:This is just the news media (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not capitalism. Capitalism want to exploit workers the most efficient way. It has been well-established (by Henry Ford and others) that absolute peak performance (per week) for mental workers is around 36h/week with 6h per day. You can add about 2h/day of simple administrative work, but that is it. Have them work more, lose money even if the additional time is unpaid.
What this is is a "slave holder" mind-set where everybody must be miserable and have nothing outside of work so the slaves are to tired and worn-out to even think about rebellion.
Re: This is just the news media (Score:5, Insightful)
Technofeudalism is the end goal for the tech billionaire class. Own the workers and even own the customers (now called users). Most of them think that they are doing us a favor by insisting on "hustle culture" and turning everything into a type of rental service.
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Yep. Dark times.
Close but they don't want customers (Score:5, Insightful)
I guarantee you he is furious that us filthy peasants were able to exercise some minor form of control over him and he is going to do everything of his power to break that dependency.
Techno feudalism means capitalism goes away so no more customers and no more consumers. You have a few hundred thousand or maybe even a few million people that exist for the sole purpose of glorifying and pleasing approximately 6 to 8,000 human beings.
You have a handful of engineers that are basically your Craftsman and artisans, a handful of thugs (AKA knights) to keep those engineers in line and you don't need the peasantry anymore because you have machines to do all that.
You then use surveillance and automated weapons to keep the other however many billion in line. This means you periodically do a cull were you just fire a bomb everybody else.
Remember when the blacks started to form their own little black Wall Street and the racists just blew them the kingdom come? Imagine that on a global scale.
The ultra wealthy consider us vermin. I don't mean that like an insult I mean that in a literal sense. And it absolutely disgust them to be dependent on us vermin.
I think the reason people have a hard time with this is we are taught that capitalism is eternal and that the only threat to it is socialism or communism.
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Yes. Which is why the few sane economists predict a really bad crash. An arrangement like that is inherently instable.
Re: This is just the news media (Score:5, Insightful)
No this is just tech bros bring tech bros. They don't want to enslave anyone, they just want to squeeze more productivity out by paying for their employees' dating app.
*Of course* it's idiotic, and there is tons of evidence that more hours reduces productivity ... but they are tech bros. They're in the position they're in for their ballsiness and ability to convince VCs to give them money, not for actually knowing anything about how to run a company (well).
Re: This is just the news media (Score:4, Interesting)
Control over another human being is very much part of this. Maybe they wouldn't want to call it enslavement. At the risk of over generalizing or putting words in anyone's mouth; the entire culture around pseudo-libertarian Tech Bros and the broader Anarcho-capitalism philosophy is that it is extremely transactional. They believe that two people can come to a fair contractual arrangement, without government regulation or an impartial third party, Despite one person being a billionaire and the other person needing a job to pay their bills.
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Shows that "rich" does not mean "smart". It does seem to imply "bad person" though. We have a nice example of that in the WH at this time.
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No this is just tech bros bring tech bros. They don't want to enslave anyone, they just want to squeeze more productivity out by paying for their employees' dating app.
One of the strange things about this is how does a person "date" if they are always at work. I can see the texting already. Him" "I can free up 30 minutes 6 months from now" Her: Umm, that won't work, I don't have any free time until next year." Him: "Why don't we just sneak off to the basement tonight?"
*Of course* it's idiotic, and there is tons of evidence that more hours reduces productivity ... but they are tech bros.
It is different for different people. Too many of these studies seem to make the base assumption that all humans are identical. They aren't. Some can work much more than the 32 hours considered the maximu
This is capitalism (Score:2)
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"But this time it will be different." -- the song of the sucker.
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Indeed. So either make sure your skills are good enough that you have options and can simply leave when you run inti these assholes, or do not work in tech. If you work in tech without those skills, you are essentially just a victim.
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This is not capitalism. Capitalism want to exploit workers the most efficient way. It has been well-established (by Henry Ford and others) that absolute peak performance (per week) for mental workers is around 36h/week with 6h per day. You can add about 2h/day of simple administrative work, but that is it. Have them work more, lose money even if the additional time is unpaid.
What this is is a "slave holder" mind-set where everybody must be miserable and have nothing outside of work so the slaves are to tired and worn-out to even think about rebellion.
This is one-way capitalism. It makes sense from the viewpoint of the owners and stakeholders who want the most productivity for the least cost. From the viewpoint of the workers, they are being asked to work more for the same amount of pay. In essence, the hi-tech "visionaries" are casting their workers as lazy, unambitious, and apathetic because they are unwilling to take a pay cut.
The visionaries are banking on their PR reputations to push through this narrative. Of course, if the visionaries were tru
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This is not capitalism. Capitalism want to exploit workers the most efficient way.
You're looking at this from a single variable. Efficiency for a unit of person may peak at 36h/week but not necessarily for an organisation. There is a big cost to changing staff, hiring, firing, training. As such if I have a job that needs doing now and I have the choice it may well be cheaper and more effective to get the work done using 3 employees at 60h/week rather than employing 2 additional workers, training them, having the team work for 36h/week and then firing the 2 at the end.
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This is not capitalism. Capitalism want to exploit workers the most efficient way. It has been well-established (by Henry Ford and others) that absolute peak performance (per week) for mental workers is around 36h/week with 6h per day. You can add about 2h/day of simple administrative work, but that is it.
For many people, that is very true. But not everyone. The 40 hour work week was determined by studying people. I think it is an aggregate of a spectrum. I've never been constrained by that number. And some people lose productivity at many fewer less hours. I can do 100 hour weeks in a sort of afterburner mode. It does take a few days to recover after a month of that. OTOH many people simply aren't psychologically built for that grind.
But to these tools at Sonatic, good luck finding the people you are lo
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For manual labour perhaps, but for clerical work, and especially for complex work like engineering, 36h/week of high productivity would be exceptional.
Re: This is just the news media (Score:2)
Let's not forget the articles that say you need X million dollars saved before you can retire.
I will say that there's an argument for "paying your dues" early in a career, but that's not a long-term proposition. Living for work sacrifices your mental well-being in the long run.
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Let's not forget the articles that say you need X million dollars saved before you can retire.
I will say that there's an argument for "paying your dues" early in a career, but that's not a long-term proposition.
I agree - Those articles are bullshit.
Yes, you'll need a lot of saved money if you retire carrying a mortgage. Especially if you were foolish enough to keep refinancing it.
And I've always told people that if you are carrying a mortgage, you can't afford to retire. Not completely accurate, but it is a great way to be poor in retirement.
I saved a lot of money while working, just because I do. Several retirement accounts. Some I haven't touched yet. I guess I'll have to when I hit that age where I'm co
Re:This is just the news media (Score:5, Insightful)
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The correct work life balance is:
1 person, working 37.5 hours per week spread over either 5 x 7.5 hour days or 35 hours via 4 x 9 hour days. And this can be averaged over the 4 weeks in a month.
So if you want to work 60 hours one week and 20 another week, that's fine. But the employer is required to pay you double time for any overtime that falls outside that averaging, and if the employer didn't authorize you to work overtime then they apply that to the next month and tell you to not come to work until tha
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The correct work life balance is: 1 person, working 37.5 hours per week spread over either 5 x 7.5 hour days or 35 hours via 4 x 9 hour days. And this can be averaged over the 4 weeks in a month. And all humans are exactly identical. No, they aren't. There's a whole spectrum of abilities, and too many people seem to believe human's are cookie cutter identical.
Problem is, and it always has been that people like me, who can work a lot more without your drastic falloff in productivity, tend to mop the floor with y'all.
I'm one of those - and here is what seems to happen.
I'm much more productive. I get much bigger raises.Then when an economic downturn happens, guess who gets terminated? In 30+ years, I've weathered a lot of downturns. It was always the least productive. They couldn't keep up.
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Given the high failure rate, low chance of a big IPO or corporate acquisition, there is a difference between the 1% personality type CEOs who can walk away with tens of millions of dollars and the regular staff who will get 2 to 3 years of salary and not retire now money.
Catching all the media words that they are trying to promote here from the article.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
Why these companies insist on a 72-hour workweek - Story by Danielle Abril
Washington Post
Magnus Müller works around-the
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Because if we know the media is one thing, it's pro-Trump.
Do you people even listen to yourselves? 92% overwhelmingly negative coverage. And it's just not enough.
And the tools don't understand that at this time, it is helping Cheeto more than harming him.
At least they have their pronouns. And think voting against their husbands is the path to power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Nothing says 2024 Democrats gestalt than a woman whose personal worth is heading toward half a billion, bellyaching about how bad women have it.
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Marx predicted that Capitalism would eventually turn into fascist authoritarianism. The billionaires do not need liberal capitalism any more in order to gain wealth and power, especially in the U.S.
His system has been the greatest thing that ever happened. The best leaders and heroes of the Revolution, Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, and Little Kim.
"But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow" That's what you consider the path forward? Gonna be a lot of us dead - At least they won't be working long hours, eh comrade? After you seize the means of production, you can make the workweek 10 hours if you like,
I would love this, if... (Score:5, Interesting)
...the work was interesting and I didn't have an idiot boss making me do stupid stuff.
I have had projects where I worked 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. Actually, it's more like 24 hours since once a project takes over my brain, it is always working in the background. I loved it.
This would suck if it was just some artificial deadline, working in a toxic environment, for a disorganized manager who was easily distracted by the new shiny thing of the day.
Make the work interesting, treat workers well, and they will volunteer to work long hours because it's the best thing they can imagine doing.
Otherwise, it's a prison camp.
Re:I would love this, if... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could see myself doing it for longer periods in a promising but understaffed start-up... but if you expect me to work and be motivated like a founder, you better pay me like a founder too, with an equity stake, or options that I can take with me if you fire me (looking at you, Facebook...)
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I could see myself doing it for longer periods in a promising but understaffed start-up... but if you expect me to work and be motivated like a founder, you better pay me like a founder too, with an equity stake, or options that I can take with me if you fire me (looking at you, Facebook...)
No, not even then. Options in a startup that has a 2% chance of making it to IPO are worthless, as is your equity stake. Working yourself to death for a lottery ticket is stupidity.
Startup or not, hire enough people to do the job. If you're pushing people to work crazy hours, you're a moron, and your company is all but guaranteed to be in that 98%.
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I have to imagine it eventually kills productivity though.
Sometimes it's the relaxed brain that comes up with moments of insight when least expected (like in the shower for example).
Like definitely bursts like that for a project that's gripping, but, for myself at least, I'm going to hit a brick wall eventually and step back for a few days, see the problem fresh.
Even if the young folks, it can't be sustainable.
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I did this kind of schedule when I was fresh out of college. I worked long days, and came in on the weekends. After hours and days off I worked on volunteer projects doing basically the same as what I did for pay. It was fun. I did it because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing.
Then I grew up and discovered a life beyond work. Now I still work too much, but I have other priorities besides work.
TLDR: It can be fun to work long hours and accomplish something, but get paid in real money -and quit wh
AI (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was, but I'd imagine that the senior tech workers are busy cleaning up the vibe coded AI slop that the junior tech workers are "writing".
They got more "productive" in terms of raw output, but the quality plummeted and now the QA and tech support teams are being impacted by it. Assuming that your company even has a QA department, anyway. Testing raw code in production that had nothing more than automated unit smoke testing done on it as part of an A-B deployment seems to be more popular now.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
AI exists to allow wealth to access skill without skill accessing wealth.
It's not for you it's for a handful of billionaires so that they can break the dependency on workers and consumers once and for all.
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Wasn't it supposed to lessen the workload?
It will. In the near future, most people will have a lot more free time, as is usual for the unemployed.
Just another scam (Score:3)
Layoff half the workers to be "replaced" by AI. The rest of the workers now must work twice as long and be thankful they weren't part of the first group. AI is a scam just like robots, outsourcing, offshoring, rightsizing, 7 sigma, etc etc. Some new technology or management technique promises huge productivity gains but actually delivers minimal (or no) gains. The real gains come from threatening workers. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
Some people are terminally stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been well established for something like 100 years now that peek performance per week for mental workers is at around 36h/week, 6h per day. You can increase that to around 40h without losing too much. But go to 12h/6 days and performance will drop massively below peak (in absolute performance per week), due to mistakes, wiped out creativity and insight, sickness, burn-out, competent people leaving, etc.
The only thing this approach accomplishes is toxic virtue-signaling. Everybody sane should stay far away from such a place that celebrates abject stupidity.
So that's just the average (Score:3)
For example there are people who can sleep 2 to 4 hours a night and be perfectly okay.
Now none of this is sustainable even for those freaks. Eventually they have health problems and have to stop.
But if you're a billionaire you can draw from the entire global population for your workforce and thanks to automation you need less and less workers every year.
That means you can just burn through all of your workers destroying
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There are going to be some freaks of nature that can exceed the average.
Not really. There may be some people that can perform on those levels, but they will be universally mentally defective in rather serious ways. Humans cannot live without oxygen, fluids and nutrition either, and no amount of "freak" can change that.
Those who ignore history (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a history of what we would now call industrial engineering and human factors going back at least as far as the first written records that shows that working more than a reasonable number of hours per week for any length of time leads to colossal decreases in productivity and quality, not to mention safety. If you have to work 18 hour days for two or even three weeks to get the crop in, yeah, that will work, but trying to keep human beings on this kind of schedule for very long leads to failure, burnout, and health problems up to and including death.
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...leads to failure, burnout, and health problems up to and including death.
Well noted.
Your (or any other "employee's") health (mental and physical) or death is of no concern to the oligarchs.
Your corpse will be pushed aside, and you will be replaced by another moist robot until it, too dies.
You are not valued by your owners^w employers beyond their ability to become richer through your exploitation.
Does that sound about right?
Zero Life to Enrich Delusional Billionaires (Score:2)
Take your weekly pay and divide that by 72 (12 hours 6 days a week) hours.
Being First Is Fine (Score:4, Informative)
But the problem is the race doesn't ever....end. Driving for innovation doesn't work if the applications for that tech aren't sound. I work for a company that's building an AI-powered platform for an industry. Are we the first? Hell no. Everyone's doing this. The problem is their solutions still fall short of specific applications. Okay...AI is great and all; but if it's not built to handle the task, what good is it? If we're not first why should we bother?
Simple. We know our clients. We know their business. We know they don't need to support 40 year old legacy standards anymore and that the current solutions that do just make it harder to get modern things done. We know the current stuff everyone has been first at, no matter how much the developers sell it as capable, just won't actually work. There's a lot of considerations they don't take in to account that we know matter. If anything standing back and watching this explode before doing anything has been good; being a little late to the game won't matter if you build a product that actually works how the customer expects. You can do that when you see what everyone else has done and how incompatible it is with your industry.
Also, at a point, the 996'ers won't be needed. They'll have built the AI that replaced them. The problem is the same people that demand this type of work environment are also doing so in order to replace their biggest cost; people.
I've had about enough of this crap. (Score:3, Interesting)
Labor needs to arm up or shut up. CEOs who try to destroy work-life balance should have the balance taken out of their lives.
Every single day, I care less and less whether liberty will win and instead just want the eschaton to shit or get off the pot. I hate waiting for humanity to end more than I'd hate being dead.
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Switch your news source and the problem instantly goes away.
The chance of any of this actually affecting your life is very small. Small enough that you can ignore it completely.
When I was 25, it was about 45 hours/week (Score:2)
Lower if I was writing new code that stretched my abilities, higher if I was doing code-monkey stuff that I dould do blindfolded with two hands tied behind my back.
I could "stretch" it if I had "breaks" like so: 160 hours one month, 200 the next, then back to 160 and so on, with weekends off all the way around.
My peak efficiency is lower now "because age."
It's (past) time to unionize (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a desperate power grab by the billionaires at the expense not just of the employees, but of everyone. They saw their power shaken by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and it alarmed them -- which is why they're flexing that power to force return-to-office. And now by trying force this.
It's time to unionize and use the power of collective bargaining to apply reciprocal force. We hold the true power here, we just need to concentrate it and use it -- for all the same reasons that other people in other industries have. 60-something years ago Cesar Chavez and his colleagues made it happen for farm workers; we need to make it happen for everyone in IT.
Because if we don't, and if we don't do it now, these people fully intend to furn IT professionals into slaves. And if you think that's hyperbole, then I'll ask you: who, exactly, is going to stop them and how?
Re:It's (past) time to unionize (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's time to unionize ..."
It's also why union busting is a top priority for Republicans.
This is the AI dividend billionaires like to talk about. Dividend for them, slave labor for you, then permanent unemployment until you die.
"... these people fully intend to furn IT professionals into slaves."
LOL IT professionals. As long as it's not you, right?
Looks like "legal" age dicrimination to me (Score:3)
unless the pay can buy me a house (Score:3)
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Unless the pay can buy me retirement in 3 -5 years.
When I was younger maybe 5-10 years.
Technofeudalism (Score:2)
We are all just peons to the capitalist masters.
Fuck them. (Score:3)
I'd be willing to work that much for myself but not for someone else's unstable dream.
Which Raya? (Score:2)
a free subscription to the dating service Raya
I have to assume this is a prostitution service, because when would the worker have time for even flirting, let alone an actual date?
There is a Raya dating app, but it has an application process where they look through your instagram to see if you're attractive and that you have an actually interesting life. The first requirement will eliminate many people, and the second will eliminate everyone else because all they do is work for an AI company. They might as well offer them free pizza on the moon.
12x6=72 (Score:2)
Really? As if! (Score:2)
...and a free subscription to the dating service Raya...
Sure - because people who work 12 hours per day 6 days a week have time for relationships. Hell, they don't even have time for sex beyond a quick rub-one-out before falling asleep.
The better bet would be on paid sex workers in the workplace. But for them, a 996 schedule - even it it was mostly 69 work - would wear 'em out pretty fast. OTOH, at least the sex workers would have a benefits package beyond the friends-with-benefits angle...
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Sure - because people who work 12 hours per day 6 days a week have time for relationships.
Sounds like the engineer who found a talking frog [manythings.org].
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Oh, hell no (Score:2)
Don't let your kids grow up to be professional techies.
Unless they're unwilling to be enslaved and have a union.
What's next? Shackled to the desk? (Score:3)
I retire at the end of the year and am glad to do so. At least I had some semblance of work/life balance.
Workers rights are being eroded and this is the next step. If you have half a brain then you know the end game.
It will be like the gilded age were labor is just another commodity to be exploited by the ruling class.
If you're dumb enough (Score:2)
Sure... go work yourself to death so the guy at the top can try to become the next member of the billionaire club. Forget about anything other than the potential of getting a little bit more of that money for yourself.
WTF is the point of living if all you do is work?
No EU "Working Time Directive" in the USA (Score:2)
For "Exempt" employees.
https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/rights-work/labour-law/working-conditions/working-time-directive_en
And there never will be anything like it in the United States. Ever. The business lobby is way too powerful at the Federal Level. They will spend whatever it takes to to defeat such an effort.
Anyway you look at it things are going to change in the United States. Whole systems are about to be torn down soon at the Federal and State levels of governme
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For "Exempt" employees.
https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/rights-work/labour-law/working-conditions/working-time-directive_en
And yet Europe invented and distributed Perdition (AKA methamphetamine) for both its military and civilian use.
And it wasn't for entertainment - it was to get more work out of them.
Mod me down - but check the truth of what I wrote first.
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USA does have Hours Worked protections (Score:2)
For example, if an employer wants to declare me a professional and therefore overtime exempt they better be careful about declaring that I work certain fixed schedule each day (e.g. arrive by 9am vs allowing me to use my judgement and complete work according to my pro
I'm glad I retired (Score:2)
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This trend is nothing but unhealthy burnout bullshit.
Probably for some. I always put in the hours I needed to put in to do a professional job. Never bothered me other than a surprising number of less productive employees hated me because I "made them look bad". That wasn't the intent
It is a continuum ranging between people who won't work, to regular people who feel strain if they work more than 20 hours a week, or 40 hours a week, to people like me, who a lot of people consider pathological. I put in a complete career, raised a family, spent a lot of time
AI start-up Sonatic (Score:2)
Sounds like Kinjal Nandy has the whole AI thing figured out: Put together a team, announce a product and put your firm up for sale. Before the bottom drops out of the AI fad.
Having an actual working product isn't necessary if you can sell fast enough. So productivity or quality isn't an issue.
Some startups... (Score:2)
Some startups can go fuck themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Some startups can go fuck themselves.
U mad bro? Don't work for them. Don't work at all. I support you never working another day in your life.
Not a life (Score:2)
The sooner the AI dot-bust comes (Score:2)
the better it will be. This idiotic "grind culture" idea needs to die, soon, and take as many of the "AI" bros down as possible.
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Unfortunately, that will just make it worse. Managers will be even more desperate to improve cash flow they know that they will be able to extract even more concessions from their employees.
9PM? Forget that. (Score:2)
Working to 9PM? Ridiculous. Working that late just destroys any possibility of personal time. 6AM to 6PM would be preferable, aka a 666 schedule. An unfortunate number, but more acceptable.
Jobs at sea are like that (Score:2)
You buffoons do that (Score:2)
(loooks around) (Score:2)
Is anyone MAKING you work there?
Fucking walk away. Jesus, why is this hard?
Boss: "Do this thing I want" ...I get it leaving a job is scary. But I'm not super-buying that as these are STARTUPS. You haven't been there 5 years or more.
Employee: "No"
Boss "We will fire you"
Employee "OK"
No, what's happening here I suspect is that people are lured into a job that's too good to be true.
If that's the case, and you were hired under a set of understandings and they CHANGE the understandings midstream, then you have
Are those jobs wage roll or salaried ? (Score:2)
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$250K?? Jesus. You're a pushover.
I wouldn't consider a 72 hour/week job for anything less than $1M/year, and that's if I REALLY wanted the job for some reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:why do these guys value hours over results? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just idiots, there's quite an overlap.
Musk becoming so prominent and popular and insisting on not shutting up about anything had one positive benefit: we saw that the establishment in this country is largely made up of rich psychopaths who neither care about the impact of their policies on normal people, nor understand the impact or even understand how self defeating it ultimately is. And often are just nasty not because they think it's necessary or helpful, but because they can, and they get pleasure out of making other people's lives a misery.
Oh sure, we all suspected, but Musk spoke the quiet part out loud. And he crapped on various groups in public until inevitably he crapped on one you or I was a member of, and we saw what a load of bullshit it all was.
If we survive the next few years and ever get a government that cares about people in again, even to the ludicrously low level that Democrats did (hey, at least they made a half-assed attempt to get us all healthcare), one of the first things on the priority list has to be strengthening the rights of employees and reforming how much businesses prioritize profit compared to their employees and customers. The focus, profit wise, should be on long term sustainability, not on shareholders.
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Given that a white male like you will never be given a management position
Obviously, you have been living under a rock for the last 9 months.
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Once again, that is out. White males are in.
At least ones who bother to keep up with current events.
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More than half of hiring managers whose companies have DEI policies in place
So we've already selection biased that to all hell. Or maybe they didn't this is pretty far from scientific in nature.
This survey was commissioned by ResumeBuilder.com and conducted online by the survey platform Pollfish on November 2, 2022
I mean it's not nothing but there's no real methodology, no summary of questions asked, no survey data to check. It's an online poll of "hiring managers" who are all doing self reports, "I believe" statements abound, AKA it's vibes.
White guys got bad vibes and feel vict
Re:So, young man... (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.epi.org/publicatio... [epi.org]
Managers seem to be 70% white and while not listed here here I would bet it's well over 50% male.
"I want to return to a better time when white males had all of the power instead of just most of it"
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I notice that's not a disagreement of the stat that white males are disproportionately in managerial positions.
This is just whining and meanwhile the article is talking about companies doing exactly what you want. You don't actually care about hiring you just got addicted to bring an eternal victim snowflake.
White men; we're sore winners!
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No, people who are not render insanely sexist and racist by their wokeness want a return to hiring on merit.
You are in deep with a blatantly racist troll my friend. So someone might as well rise to your defense.
Diversity - Hiring a person by their skin color and origin is by any definition of racism, very racist.
Hiring a person by the equipment between their legs is the very definition of sexism.
Equality? Sounds like Orwell's Animal farm where some are more equal than others. The E in DEI is like North Korea calling itself a democracy/
Inclusion - again, something out of uno reverse.
And it doesn't work.
Re:Every success I've had, I worked like that... (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience was different. I did work at a startup where I had to do a lot of overtime to meet deadlines. It sucked, but the company did well and I also did well financially since I had been given shares to join.
A few years later, I started my own company. I worked about 40h/week and I did not expect my employees to work any more than I did. We didn't impose arbitrary deadlines ("When it's ready" was our reply to customers asking when the next release would be.)
We had a happy and chill workplace, and more importantly, a profitable one. I sold my company after 19 years, worked a few more years after that, and then retired (mostly on the proceeds of the sale.) You don't need to be insane to create value.
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As long as there are free markets, competition on merit and relatively shared values companies can compete without slave labor. When companies, and VCs, claim such extreme work conditions it's because they are the sociopaths causing that condition.
It might be worth it to again point out the utter falsehood of the claim that companies are responsible for earning a profit from their shareholders. A company can choose to have whatever values it wants, it is sociopathic behavior that causes corporations to be
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I worked at a startup back in 2008. It went under, but I worked my tail off and learned more there than I did in the last 10 years at my previous place. It's paid dividends to this day. I'm also going to retire soon, well ahead of schedule, because of the hard work I put in. Why don't we just call this 'hard work'? Because that what it is. Hard work pays off, for me at least.
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I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing at least mid-40s. I'm in my late 50s. Things were different back then.
Modern capitalism with the gig economy and exploitative owners is a much harsher environment than in decades past. Today, we reward those who have lots of capital, not those who work hard. I really feel bad for young people who are starting their careers now. They have a much tougher road ahead than I did.
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But not explicitly stated as a requirement for employment.
Not everyone succeeds by ubergrind (Score:2)
...40 hours a week WON'T CUT IT. It just won't. I've made some awesome things that just took waking up at 6AM and working solid til 11PM, for weeks. That is how great things are achieved. ...
That might work for you, but that doesn't work for most glorious achievements, 1) nearly 100% of success in biotech and other hard sciences takes steady, tenacious, *slow* persistence over years (see: practical mRNA medicine), 2) most humans cannot physically survive pulling double-shifts for weeks.
Besides being flagrant abuse of worker welfare, recruiting like this is blatant age-discrimination. 72hour weeks plus free dating service membership? Might as well say "only applicants under 21 with zero real-w
Re: Every success I've had, I worked like that... (Score:2)
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The reality is that awesome things take gobs of time.
True, but people that do awesome things are typically driven by a different kind of motivation than mere "work for hire" and need a project that really engages them.
I bet most of these startups are building yet another slop AI product driven more by marketing than creative ingenuity and willingness to create something "awesome".
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The reality is that awesome things take gobs of time. 40 hours a week WON'T CUT IT. It just won't. I've made some awesome things that just took waking up at 6AM and working solid til 11PM, for weeks. That is how great things are achieved.
Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.
More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.
So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of peopl
Get your lottery ticket here! (Score:2)
Some startup has to win the monopoly prize, right? You could be a billionaire!
There should be a time machine joke in there somewhere. Something like "Maybe you are already a billionaire in the future? Work harder now!"
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Shorter weeks boost productivity. That simple, no caveats, all of the work less advocates say that, as an absolute. The less hours you work, the more productive you are. If that is true, a 0 hour workweek will have productivity of infinite.
The fewer hours you work, the more productive you are during the hours you spend. There's a tipping point where it doesn't break even, though, and there's a point where you have so few hours that bulls**t like catching up on all the emails that people send about things you don't really need to know starts to dominate the time spent and productivity falls off a cliff again.
There are three factors that define productivity:
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You don't need a union when you have the ability to say "no" and walk out the door.