[annoyingcyclist]

A founder who commits to 996 is as a side effect building a brand of "grit", "hustle", etc with their investors. That gives them options, regardless of whether 996 is actually useful for productivity and regardless of who is actually working harder as a result of 996: a golden jetpack into an executive role elsewhere when the company is sold for scrap, fundraising terms that give them liquidity not available to employees, a VC job, etc. They're also insulated from 996 to a degree that employees aren't. No one is going to count hours or badge swipes for the CTO/CEO of the company, and no one's going to tell them they can't leave the office early to spend time with their family. Even if they do work those hours, their job is different enough from normal employees to provide some protection from burnout.

As a rank and file employee, you get none of that. The investors don't even know who you are. The outcome for you if the company fails is that you're looking for another job while fighting burnout from longer hours and from working somewhere that doesn't respect you enough as a professional to let you manage your own time (which tends to come with other things that encourage burnout). All that to juice an "hours worked" KPI that research tells us is a questionable thing to focus on. You can do better.

[godelski]

I think you're right about your analysis but this only moves the question to ask what is the utility of this Kabuki theater?

[qcnguy]

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit.

Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claims that makes them not an AI startup.

But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do, mostly through taking fewer holidays rather than working Saturdays. And the Chinese have caught up to the cutting edge of AI very fast, despite facing trade sanctions, Great Firewalls and other obstacles. It is reasonable to infer that they did this by working really, really hard.

I was once told by a US executive that the rule of thumb is people in America (vs "Americans") work ~20% more than people in Europe. Skill level is the same, but Europeans both get more vacation time, have more national holidays, and are harder to fire for low performance. It adds up to a big difference, especially compounded over time. If 996 adds another 20% for China over America, then the Chinese will take the lead. They might burn out a lot of devs along the way (in fact they will), but maybe not as many as you think - after all America has not suffered mass burnout from having 15 days of vacation a year instead of 25 - and success will continue to accrue.

This is a painful truth. I myself work part time and get European vacations. It is pleasant. Yet I know it cannot last. Europe has become a vassal continent, in which Trump dictates terms and the EU accepts them without negotiation, because of the decisions its society has made; one of the biggest being to take life easy.

[Aerbil313]

It’s weird to believe that US and China are ahead of Europe simply because they work harder. If anything I’d be more inclined to believe they are ahead despite these unhealthy work cultures. Not to mention that US vs. China is not comparable in much any metric. The real reason is the work (and life!) mentality of US where individualism and materialism triumphs, which combined with the dollar hegemony, gives rise to its tech industry. For China it’s posbably the people advantage, combined with a highly focused and determined state massively supporting key areas of technology domestically. Both are unified language, single countries whereas Europe has communication and political barriers internally. And so on…

IMHO your view demonstrates the human bias to attribute simple and easy causes to complex phenomena.

[renaudg]

15 in the top 20 most productive countries per hour worked are European. The US is in 12th place. China is 99th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr...

Diminishing returns is a thing.

[rightbyte]

Any gain from working "20% more" time or whatever we put the limit at is in my opinion easily offset by employee attrition at these no life workplaces.

[godelski]

  > But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do

Okay, by your logic we should also see: Mexico, Vietnam, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and Israel to be ahead because they all work more hours.

I think we can all agree that there's more to this problem than hours. Now the question is if it is just money. Probably not considering that list, but hey, that money doesn't hurt either.

No one is arguing that hours aren't needed. People are arguing that output is not linearly correlated to number of hours worked. Personally, I think it tends to look more S-curved. Imprecise because sometimes 30 minutes of work can be very useful and sometimes it can be even detrimental. But it can take some time to get into the zone and be very productive. At the same time, too much and you are less effective.

The only situations where more working hours directly equates to more output is when you have a very clear widget machine. We've already automated a lot of tasks because of this, but hey there are still hard problems like fruit picking. Though I think it isn't hard to understand how the human becomes less productive as they get tired... I'm not sure why you think that isn't true about coding. I'm really not sure why you think that is true when it comes to doing research. Some of the most famous scientists in history famously worked <6hrs per day because frankly in a research job you're working most hours in the day even when you're doing something else.

tldr: I think you vastly oversimplified the problem.

[smugma]

Israel probably is “ahead” by most startup evaluation metrics, both in HW and SW.

[Yizahi]

I hope you realize that this just completes proof that there is no significant correlation?

Also, as a person who worked with a lot of Israeli engineers, from juniors to senior architects, I can only say haha, try catching any of them in office after 4pm, or at most 5pm :) . They surely don't work 996, they work the same hours like western EU, just start early and finish early.