AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China's Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US (bbc.com)
- Reference: 0180760760
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/02/09/1514248/ai-gold-rush-is-resurrecting-chinas-infamous-72-hour-work-week---in-us
- Source link: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgn2k285ypo
In a market where dozens of startups are racing to ship similar AI products, founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge. But the research disagrees. A WHO and ILO analysis tied 55-plus-hour weeks to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease globally in 2016 alone. Michigan State University found that an employee working 70 hours produces nearly the same output as one working 50.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgn2k285ypo
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
> founders believe longer hours buy them a competitive edge.
This is such nonsense. Overtime works for incidental cases, not structurally. If you work one or two days overtime, it might help with completing a job that could otherwise not be done. After that, the productivity falls back to normal due to fatigue creeping in. After a week, a 70 our week is as productive as a 40 hour one, at best.
There is also a big difference between the workday (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I always had trouble adapting to, when I lived in China, was the long lunch. It is normal for the Chinese to take a three-hour lunch. This allows time to eat and socialise and, quite importantly, to take a long nap.
It is viewed as improper, even for a workplace supervisor, to interfere with the nap time.
Chinese taking lessons from the French (Score:3)
Don't expect to be able to shop or visit many attractions in your average french town between 12 and 2/3pm, they've all buggered off home for lunch. Which also leads to the interesting phenomenon of 4 rush hours per day.
Re: (Score:2)
While it is different from the norm you are overstating it by a factor of 2. The typical Chinese lunch break is around 1.5-2 hours. But yes napping is something culturally significant there over lunch.
That said this isn't unique. Many parts of France, Italy, and definitely Spain have extended lunch breaks as a norm as well, Spain culturally so.
Sweatshop (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked, at least tangentially, with IT folk from various cultures. The 996 is for sweatshop work. I remember one place where people sat at their desks entering code, or whatever. Walking around behind them was the boss, who would go from person to person, telling them *exactly* what to do. All the way down to telling one person to put a CD back into its case. The people were barely even code monkeys - more like typists. Probably you can do that 996 without losing productivity. No idea how the boss functioned. Maybe he swapped out with someone else?
When I was studying for my first master's degree, there was a brief time where I had coursework as well as my thesis. To get everything done, I worked highly structured 80 hour weeks. That was only possible, because it was only for a few weeks - there was an end in sight. That sort of schedule cannot be maintained. Anyone who thinks it can be is spending a lot of time staring into space / talking at the water cooler / something else non-productive.
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I'm not one of these AI true believers that thinks the singularity is right around the corner. But, the sort of work you're describing sounds like something that the current LLM models could be really, really good at automating. That kind of sweatshop work might not be around for much longer.
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And lawyers and people in finance will work 80 hour weeks for decades. Or more. It looks like investment bankers work pretty much around the clock, every day, forever.
70 hours (Score:2)
70 hours a week? That is just sad. There is more to life than work. Adrenaline junkies?
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Nah, probably just the usual monomanical autists who don't have an existence beyond their monitor screen and assume everyone else is the same. They probably wouldn't recognise a social life if they tripped over one.
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I've done it before. Bills to pay. Ambition. Greed. Optimism. There are lots of reasons to do this.
The worst one I did 7am-7pm, 6 days a week. Then half day (6 hours) on Sunday. Felt pretty burned out after 4 months of that.
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> It's a race... but to what? Has China figured out what they can actually do with AI unlike the west?
I think [1]most governments have figured out [fbi.gov] what to use it for.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/emerging-and-advanced-technology/artificial-intelligence
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> Has China figured out what they can actually do with AI
Yes. Adding [1]Chinese code [slashdot.org] to all the telematics they are adding to our products.
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/09/0030214/carmakers-rush-to-remove-chinese-code-under-new-us-rules
Who the fuck wants an engineer after 40h? (Score:3)
Are these people young or stupid? Your cognitive function goes WAAY down after hour 40. Your error rate goes up, your efficiency goes down. Things that take you 4h from 8 to 12PM can be replicated in 30 min in the morning after you got some sleep. You have to be a moron to think otherwise. Hours 1-40?...you're at your best. If you're in your 20s and have no life to distract you, then hours 50-60, you MIGHT be somewhat lucid, just making a lot more mistakes and taking a lot longer to do everything. Hours 60-72?...you're just keeping a chair warm and snapping at your coworkers as your mental health deteriorates.
I've done this before. I used to be young, stupid, and paid by the hour. I grew up poor, so I asked for every bit of overtime I could get...and I nearly got myself fired because I was billing twice as much to do a task and snapped at a few managers when they asked some very stupid questions they should have known better (although I admit I was a moron at 24 both for working over 60h and thinking I could talk to those paying my salary with anything other than deference, especially when I was a new programmer). Those weekend tasks?...much higher rate of error and missed requirements....but this was the dot-com boom and everyone was a recent grad and working late...like it's a badge of honor how hardcore you are.
Your value goes down with each hour....especially if you're vibe coding, because the whole fucking point is that you're carefully reverse centauring the slop to ensure it's not introducing errors....cause all those tools generate slop...and as everyone knows by now, it looks really good...even when it's total shit that will get your data stolen...the consequence of being a giant word guessing engine.
If they were smart, they wouldn't be mandating 70h work weeks...they'd be mandating that every engineer showed up with 8h of sleep and offering all the caffeine and ritalin they can get.
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Cult leaders looking for followers.
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Ask these same people if they would get into a cab if they knew the driver were on their 69th hour that week.
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If this is in the US, how is this kind of thing even legal?
Although, I suppose being that it's a desk job, I doubt OSHA would get involved. As long as they pay OT rates for anything over 40 hours, they wouldn't break DoL rules.
But, with minimum-wage being what it is now, the company will go broke in no time flat. And, then, when the company folds, all those claiming unemployment will drain the entire state's unemployment fund, and they'll be stuck in that same sleep schedule (slowly driving them nuts, eve
Reform the Fair Labor Standards Act (Score:3)
Replace it with something similar to the EU's Working Time Directive. Regrettably this will never happen in the United States. The business interests finance the elections, and they get to nominate who we vote for by paying for their campaign.
Great way to... (Score:2)
develop severe insomnia.
12-hours home for six days, then 1 full day off... for those six days, that's barely enough to unwind, maybe have a few beers or couple drinks, shower, eat dinner (or cook it if you live alone), and get to bed for a decent night's sleep... and that full-day off is gonna throw off your whole schedule.
Insomnia sucks... I developed it while working third shift at Electrolux (I was foam head operator)... 11PM Sunday to 7AM Monday, five days a week, Saturday was the only day fully off (wh
Even when I was young (Score:3)
...my brain turned to spaghetti when I worked long hours. It might work good enough to finish periodic deadlines that require dotting i's and crossing t's, but general quality becomes wobbly.
Of course, everyone is different, but on average those who work long hours start to look and act funny by my observation.
Work the Hours You're Paid For (Score:3)
If the employees are being paid for every hour they work or have stock to make up the difference, sure, maybe long weeks make sense.
But volunteering free labor so someone else can be rich is pretty foolish.
This is illegal in Germany (Score:2)
No really in this case it's true. Labour regulations limit the maximum work hours to 60h / week only on exception and the average working week needs to be 48h over any given 6 month period. Some regions limit this to a lower point such as 52hours unless there's a government exception granted to the business (e.g. on an industrial plant during maintenance downtime window). But that is compensated with additional leave afterwards.
Where I live (not Germany) a business will get a fine if employees are found wor
And for what (Score:2)
so some C-suite can earn a billions extra than another company? If people were smart they'd strike together. People aren't that smart.
This 9-9-6 72 Hour per week work... (Score:2)
Remind me of the second foundation book (foundation and empire), where "the mule" used psionic habilities to enhance the intellect of certain subjects, and made them work themselves to death on intellectual ventures by burning the candle on both ends...
I know is nothing very relevant, I just wanted to say it.
a 7-man AI startup works long hours (Score:2)
nuff said.
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Also pointless talking about hours without pay or other possible upside. I hear more and more about people making $500K total comp as engineers or line managers at FAANG. I don't know how many are lying but if true, you could expect to work 2 jobs worth of hours for 2 jobs worth of pay.
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Yeah I was thinking of all this myself.
70 hour weeks, for at least a short run, there is nothing wrong with this IF....you get paid properly.
I'd do this if I were doing it 1099 with good negotiated contractor bill rate....I expect to get paid for every hour I work.
I would also jump at this if I were younger....when you are more bullet proof and can do the long hours thing without much problem....
Now would I want to do this for salary and long term, no....but often that old saying "make hay while the sun
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Now would I want to do this for salary and long term, no....but often that old saying "make hay while the sun is shining " is apt advice!!
Yeah I'd have jumped at that when i was younger. If there was a chance to pull in several times my then-salary (+stock options i presume) by working double the hours then I'd totally do it. Honestly at 45 I'd probably still do it for a year for triple my current salary - that'd be enough to pay off my mortgage.
I have my doubts about the efficiency of it all - i
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I also wonder if they end up consistently putting in 70 hour weeks of work in the first place. Maybe the hiring manager / entrepreneur just wants to hire people who are willing to do that as needed and ready to put their job and $$$ as FIRST priority at this time, they just don't want to hear the word "no."
I too would not do this in my position / age now but socking away several hundred $K early-career in the market can give somebody a tremendous leg up after a few decades of compounding.
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Yeah, when I was in my 20s I usually stayed in the office hours later than anyone else just to see what was going on, had no life outside of work to pull me away. In my 30s, though, fuck that shit. I have things to do. And 9AM-9PM is a terrrible time range. Your entire day is destroyed. Nothing is open early enough to get shit done before 9AM and everything else is closed by the time you get off. 6AM-6PM would be better, but the Jesus freaks would go nuts over calling it a "666" schedule.
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Other things that matter are how long they can expect to be working those hours, and their age. I wouldn't want to try working those hours now, but when I was in my 20's it was a different matter.
And let's face it - if we're talking about working 70-80 hours a week for a year or two in order to have a damn good shot at walking away fabulously wealthy, that's a pretty good deal.