In my experience 996 is a scam to get compensated for doing tons of hours of work while often doing no more work than the employees on a regular schedule. I've seen plenty of people working two jobs who just do the needful and rest every minute they can who do far less work tha their "less hardworking" peers.

You CAN take a 40hr week worker, make them work extra, and their productivity will spike pretty hard. It's just that people eventually adapt by resting more at work. Employers end up seeing little additional work done even if they schedule somebody for an extra 20hrs a week.

The only jobs where more hours = more work sustainably are jobs like trucking where the work is actually very easy and its just a matter of staying awake at the wheel. Long work weeks are mostly a form of virtue signalling which you recieve money for doing. The only reason the 24/7 crunch time companies don't immediately go broke from sheer inefficiency is because they don't pay their staff overtime. Everybody would be better off in the long run with a culture that was focused on hiring a greater number of people to work more reasonable hours with strongly encouraged breaks. This 996 crap is a reflection of the egos of people like Jack Ma who would rather have employees with his work ethic rather than employees that get a lot of work done in little time.

> The only reason the 24/7 crunch time companies don't immediately go broke from sheer inefficiency is because they don't pay their staff overtime.

I think you also have to figure in the absurdly high value of the sort of work we're talking about. A company can launch a website after investing $2 million in its creation and have it pay for itself in a few days. That sort of return on investment is big enough to cover a multitude of grave sins of inefficiency. That's why companies can persist with open floor plan offices which over 1000 studies have shown destroy productivity, having high attrition on purpose so they can staff primarily with entry level candidates, and renting expensive office space that actually drains value rather than contributing any.

I know of two truckers personally who fell asleep at the wheel because of that attitude/culture/expectation, leading to crashes. They were okay but it was scary stuff.

Oh yeah but you legitimately can get more work done. It's just every now and again it causes a trucker to plow through a schoolbus because they're half awake at the wheel. This is why Truckers are hired as independant contractors to limit the liability of companies making them work unsafely. So they can argue they don't need to pay for little Billy's wheelchair.

Yet for the companies involved this arrangement is highly profitable. They don't pay any of the externalities. I'm not saying it's a good thing. It's merely a profitable thing.

I heard from people who work in that culture that it is more for show. Most people still browse YouTube/Reddit and stuff. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency.

I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends.

My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead.

To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.

I’ve worked in that environment as well. One of the problems is it’s a rollercoaster. You crash as soon as the emergency is over and you get nothing done until the next emergency. You just mentally shutdown. So now the quality of work when there is an emergency is shit because you’re rushing and the quality of work when there isn’t an emergency is shit because you’re recharging for the next emergency. Average output goes down even though peak output has gone up but the boss loves to see people putting in the long hours on his way out the door for a round of golf.

If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again.

Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.

I was paid pretty well, but the period of burnout that followed cut my effective hourly rate in half.

The problem wasn't the long hours - it was that places that push long hours tend to get other, even more important things wrong as well, like product-market fit.

Thats only 750K$ - roughly have the price of a house in the Bay Area before taxes (maybe just enough for the down payment).

Certainly, but let's not forget that there exist other places to live :)

... and also consider that taxes (self-employment tax etc.) and expenses (health insurance) are higher when you're a contractor. You'll be lucky to see half that figure hit your bank account.

I'll give you that health insurance is more expensive as a contractor (though not enough to significantly cut into $750k), but if your taxes are also higher then you really need to talk to a good CPA. If you are doing it right, paying less in taxes is one of the BENEFITS of being self-employed.

> we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.

You could do taht with 2 instances and dropwizard (https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.9/docs/)

Or you could do it with a single $5 virtual machine without any of the Amazon "you're an idiot for using the cloud because you don't need it" tax.

don't need more than a single instance, or 1-2 lambdas

Can’t agree more with your sentiment. It’s hard to get people to see that though. I spent so much time trying to help employees prioritize their work, the response was always everything is important. Some people almost thrive on everything being a crisis, because others reward that behavior. People can go take their “rockstars”, I’ll take the people who can function in a team and not spent time trying to suck everyone into their shit vortex.

For those who also were not familiar with 996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Japanese and Korean salaryman culture is 996 and notoriously unproductive.

Koreans have pushed back over the years, and it's much more reasonable now. It was a "trend" at one point, and now that the phase is over, the work-life balance is more favorable. I'm not sure what the situation looks like in Japan, but based on my experience living in Asia, China seems to be lagging behind Korean work culture -- so they will catch the 996 trend for short-lived amount of time, and then it will also normalize again as workers protest and the ill-effects become known.

Working as an engineer in a traditional japanese tech company(大企業), I can say that 996 is not a norm here. In fact at my workplace, working on two consecutive weekends is prohibited. A significant fraction follow 995 though.

To be honest, that's not much better.