My previous employer rushed to open offices in China because the CEO was convinced that 996 and China’s lower wages would double our productivity while cutting costs in half. They opened an expensive office and got recruiters to hire well credentialed people.

Despite having twice as many people and supposedly working twice as many hours, they struggled to deliver comparable work. We spent a lot of time fixing the work that came out of the 996 office in China.

Don’t get me wrong: There were some talented people in that office who I enjoyed working with. However, the 996 schtick always felt more like a performance art than actual productivity technique. The CEO was ecstatic that he could ask a question in Slack at any time day or night and within minutes they would all respond with many enthusiastically positive Slack responses. Whenever they talked about accomplishing something, they made sure to specifically mention that they accomplished it late at night or on the weekend. They seemed to send more e-mails on Saturday than any other day.

But they weren’t actually doing as much as you’d expect for as many people as they had and as much as they claimed to be working. Their code was notoriously unpolished and was often submitted in “good enough” form as soon as they got it to compile or work enough for demos. We also had strange problems with a lot of employees who were trying to use company resources to do freelance work for other companies, assuming we wouldn’t care or notice.

Unfortunately, their 996 performance worked on the CEO for a while. He was convinced they were our highest performing, most dedicated office. It took several years of buggy software and imminent product launches that never materialized for management to realize that they weren’t actually getting more work out of that office, contrary to their impressions.

The lesson is that you get what you reward: If you try to build an office or company around rewarding people for the appearance of long hours and weekend work, that’s what you’re going to get. If you build the culture around expectations of solid software shipped reasonably fast, people will start figuring out how to accomplish that within their own time.