Some Startups Are Demanding 12-Hour Days, Six Days a Week from Workers (msn.com)
- Reference: 0179868442
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0840227/some-startups-are-demanding-12-hour-days-six-days-a-week-from-workers
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/why-these-companies-insist-on-a-72-hour-workweek/ar-AA1OO4fz
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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," [2]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, [3]according to the World Health Organization . Productivity also suffers. A [4]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.
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> Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output [5]after adopting a four-day work week . In [6]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.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/why-these-companies-insist-on-a-72-hour-workweek/ar-AA1OO4fz
[2] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/996-work-trend-hours-meaning-b2849392.html
[3] https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2727184/
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/04/tech/microsoft-japan-workweek-productivity/index.html
[6] https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-results-are-in-The-UKs-four-day-week-pilot.pdf
I would love this, if... (Score:2)
...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 w
AI (Score:1)
Wasn't it supposed to lessen the workload?
why do these guys value hours over results? (Score:1)
proves to me they are really all salespeople. For sales, results scale to hours.
For RD, no. Some people outperform 10x compared to others, simply not a matter of more hours.
Re: (Score:2)
IDK about salespeople - at least competent ones. These ilk asking for 12h/6d seem more like retards of the executive kind, IMO.
Some people are terminally stupid (Score:3)
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, young man... (Score:1)
Given that a white male like you will never be given a management position, your choices are to work 996 or get a basic income for not working atall.
Which would you prefer ?
Those who ignore history (Score:3)
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.
This is just the news media (Score:4, Interesting)
Trying to force 996 on all of us. Pay attention they are gradually introducing the idea into your head so they can force you to do it, or your kids if you're retired.
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: (Score:2)
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 tire