HN Reader

- BrowserUse - Founded 2024

- Greptile - Founded 2023

The third quote is from a VC who has never founded a startup himself and has a clear interest in pushing founders to trade work-life balance for his own quick returns.

So none of these people worked on anything longer than 2 years. I wonder what will happen if we check back in 5–10 years. Will they still be doing and promoting 996, or will they be burned out and have changed their minds? Make your bets.

But it is the reality the collective chose. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better.

For others with families (spouse, kids, activities for kids, hanging out with friends, spending time with your spouse and friends outside of work) it may not even be an option and may not be able to support it.

Life is like a coin. There are two sides of a coin. Flipping it, it will always land in one side. As a person with a family you have to pick the side that matters otherwise, you are gambling with it. Gambling doesn't always go your way - the cost is higher when it comes to picking work over family.

As a parent myself, I am constantly struggling with picking the right choice. Long hours may pay well, but those long hours also have a negative impact on your family. If you ask, your family rather spend time with you than have a new shiny toy or a big house and a fast car.

I’ve noticed people who promote these extreme work hours seem to spend a lot of time posting on (and I assume reading) social media. Perhaps they feel 12 hours is reasonable when they dedicate 4 hours to brainrot (ahem, or “building a personal brand”)

996 for a business owner or top exec at a big company? It’s the norm. And the risk-reward makes sense to them.

(There were exceptions, particularly the product folks working on early AdWords partnerships. But even in ads most of the engineers kept to more regular hours. I certainly did.)

This

I've worked long hours back in the 2000's. I went home at 4:00AM no one asked me to but because I read somewhere that a certain CEO worked 20hrs a day.

My boss noticed and told me that there was nothing she could offer me for the extra hours.

I still continued to do it only to learn much later what the author posted in the article (see quote).

Working long hours is not a badge of honor, what you produce (in software atleast) is what matters.

This was never literally practiced.

But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career.

But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out.

I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.

Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be intrinsically motivated or to work in the most effective way for them. If you assume people are inherently unmotivated and lazy, well, trackable hours and artificial pressure seem like the obvious consequence.

But it's also a sign of not trusting yourself. Being judged on outcomes—never fully under your control—is scary. Being judged on anything fuzzy or arguable—taste, experience, skill, insight—is scary. If you're the sort of person who is content to "grind", the best way to win competitions is to turn them into grinding competitions. You can't be confident that you are more skilled, more intelligent or have better taste than others, but you can always just "grind" that extra hour. For a certain personality, time spent is by far the easiest metric to control.

If you grow up constantly being praised for how "hard" (read "long") you work, constantly out-competing people by doing more rather than better, the inherent value of "hard" work over everything becomes fundamentally ingrained in your personal story. And, unfortunately, our culture tends to put those people into positions of power, so this tendency gets reinforced and propagated.

Taking a step back, doing something good with less effort ought to be more impressive than doing it with more effort. That's what real potential looks like.

More importantly, even if working more hours purely increased your effectiveness and productivity—and we absolutely know that it doesn't—it would still be a weak form of leverage. Maybe you can work 2× the hours, but you can never work 10x. On the other hand, with taste and experience, you can absolutely come up with a 10× better design, or a 10× better understanding of what you're doing, and, unlike long hours, those 10× advantages compound.

If you trusted your own taste and creativity to give you the leverage you need, you wouldn't work ridiculous hours because you'd know it's counterproductive.

But when you don't, long hours are an easy, socially accepted fallback.

At my company, we only hire in India now and the executives are intentionally causing "attrition" in the US by running people into the ground with demands that amount to 996 style work.

- In grad school, I averaged 4 hours of sleep (6/7 days per week) and about 8 hours on sunday for about 5 months straight.

- In my first startup, I worked 9am to 11pm (had to walk back from the office) for about 12 months.

- During my second startup gig, my son was born and also I had an 8 hour time difference between local time and the primary timezone of the office. I woke up at 4 am and generally went to bed at 10pm most days. Waking up randomly at night to deal with newborn through toddler moments for about 4 years.

My experience with all of this:

Pros:

- Really fun to grind at times and euphoric when something works.

- Build really strong relationships with people in the trenches.

Cons (I felt like I was working but in retrospect I wasn't really productive):

- Pseudo-working - I ended up spinning plates of unnecessary pseudo-work that didn't move the needle.

- Time Dilation (biggest factor) - 9pm to 12am feels like 30 minutes. That's because my brain was slowing down. The more sleep deprivation, the more this happens during the day.

- Physical Burnout - My body felt tired with a constant low level of pain and my energy levels low. Also, stress eating made me fat.

- Mental Burnout - My mind constantly looked for distractions. Even when trying to focus, I couldn't focus

- Tactical Stupidity - I didn't find clever ways to avoid or fix problems. I just focused on the next thing. I didn't have bandwidth to reason effectively as I normally would.

Overall:

It's definitely useful to crunch and a great way to be mission oriented, but crunch cannot be constant. Sometimes you need to eat a pile of shit, but you shouldn't smear shit out and take it one lick at a time.

Furthermore, when you've attained a degree of understanding, you should be able to find better ways to leverage your time. The brain and body needs downtime to be creative--the best solutions are creative.

Finally in the world of agents, we have near infinite leverage. As a community should be engaged in deeper thought, rather than trying to grind towards a finish line that constantly moves.

I have "experimented" with working more but I found it unconstructive. Chances of stress is much higher and with stress comes doing stupid things that I afterwards will regret.

I believe this holds for both working for myself and someone else.

Something will eventually have to give, if we aren’t proactive in addressing the crises before us. Last time, it took two World Wars, the military bombing miners, law enforcement assassinating union organizers, and companies stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns before the political class finally realized things must change or all hell would break loose; I only hope we come to our senses far, far sooner this time around.

If I spend my Saturday toiling for wages digging with my hands, sweating for hours, just please some land owner I feel exploited.

It is not the work or the hours that is the core problem.

Japan tried this non-sense for a while (colleagues told they used to stay on till 11am !) only to completely fail at all three software revolutions (web/smartphone/ai). China obv. has had much better success, but I don't think this is sustainable. The central-banks in these countries operate in the war-economy mode which can heat things up a lot and work very well, but I think social-burnout effects are quite real.

When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.

In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.

But, of course, like many here have noted...there's billion dollar difference in incentives between a founder, and even the early members. For a "rank and file" engineer, you're sacrificing your life to make someone else filthy rich. And if lucky, you'll be left with a payday that's not too different from a regular industry job...

I took a break from tech to open my own bookstore and I definitely work more hours than when I worked at a pre-IPO $7B startup. I'm way less stressed. At least my bookstore doesn't wake me up at 3am 3 nights in a row, and expect me to come to work the next day.

I grew up in a small village in Germany. 500 people, 5000 cows. Only farmers and a cheese factory. In the factory, we worked on Christmas, Easter, and New Year's Eve every morning at 5 am. Farmers don't take days off because cows don't take days off.

Maybe it's not the most healthy way of life. I don't think it physically requires us to take time.

Anyway, I’ve noticed I can only work 6 hours if I write code myself, but can easily hit 10 hours vibe coding / reviewing / writing the tricky bits.

Has anyone tried 10-4 these days? It’s still 40 hours per week, but feels more sustainable.

The only time I’d actually consider crazy schedules was if I was the founder with a huge equity stake and a once in a lifetime opportunity that would benefit from a short period of 996.

For average employees? Absolutely not. If someone wants extraordinary hours they need to be providing extraordinary compensation. Pay me a couple million per year and I’ll do it for a while (though not appropriate for everyone). Pay me the same as the other job opportunities? Absolutely no way I’m going to 996.

In my experience, the 996 teams aren’t actually cranking out more work. They’re just working odd hours, doing a little work on the weekends to say they worked the weekend, and they spend a lot of time relaxing at the office because they’re always there.

I've also heard from executives and management discuss how they work longer hours (from 1:1s as a dev myself). Now as a founder, many of my peers discuss working 24/7 or close to it. Most don't - but there's a hustle culture that glamorized lack of sleep as a badge of honor.

The reality is that the "work" is very different for these different groups of people. Executives and management work by delegating and chatting people up. Founders can vary between executive duties or building or many various other founder duties. But (L3-5) engineering at corp is basically expected to code nonstop or to work oncall.

Working 996 as an executive is not comparable to 996 as an engineer.

Saw this happening even at YC companies. There was always that stupid expectation of overworking, staying until 9.

The reality is that people twiddle thumbs.

And the disorganization and micromanagement power plays are enough to negate any additional worked hour.

This ranges from pure disorganization in terms of what to build to having 3 hour meetings with the whole fucking company where the CEO pretends they have something worthwhile to say for 3 hours.

I have been a software developer for 30+ years now, and I have avoided working outside the 8-5 hours at every opportunity. I had bosses who very much chaffed at this, who were spending literally their entire lives working, and wish that we drones did the same.

I didn't, I just didn't show up if such a thing was expected, and made sure my work was good enough that they wouldn't think to fire me.

Now, I spent time with my kids, I stayed healthy and happy. My wife adores me for the time we spend together. The loss - nothing. I invested my income wisely, low risk, starting in my 20's, and am now sitting 9 million in assets and cash.

My bosses? One divorced, alienated from their kids, their companies sold and disassembled, and super sadly then contracting cancer because they could never give up their cigarettes with the level of stress they felt. They'll never get to enjoy the money from their sold company, they'll never get their family back.

Another, shunned by all their ex-employees, their own children (and grandchildren), suffering from the need to "get back in the game" when they're way past their prime, and when they were near useless at their job before anyway. But they worked all the time!

And another (years after I worked for them), fresh from a failed startup where they had invested all their money, and convinced their friends and family to invest, and having to lay off their entire staff after a failed pivot where they worked 24/7 for 5 years, going slightly nuts and now living in a commune in Massachusetts.

You get one life folks. I don't care if you're having the time of your life with your 24/7 job/startup you love so much. It's like taking drugs - it's great while you're doing it, but the repercussions come later in life. And they're awful.

My belief has been very few lay on their death bed wishing they had given more to their jobs. But many lay there regretting they didn't invest more in their families.

I also believe that 40 truly focused hours is more productive than many people who do 50+ hour weeks just because of the limitations of human physiology.

There are times when a crunch is warranted but they are much fewer than any would be lead to believe. If, on principle, you take away "overtime" as an option, then it makes your more focused with the time you do have.

I've employed people doing software development mostly billed by the hour for almost 20 years. So my personal wealth is directly tied to how much my team works. And in all that time, there was only once that I asked a dev to do 45 hour weeks for a summer due to exceptional circumstances. And I truly asked, I didn't insist.

I've also personally put in more time than that in some weeks/months, but I compensate by working less when that period is done. And, I always know it's not long term sustainable, so there needs to be a goal in mind.

It's not perfect, but I'm confident my priorities are in the right place. And I'm confident my team benefits greatly by being cared for in this way.

I grew up seeing what poverty and lack of opportunities does to people, and I was determined to break away from that.

I got a job at a startup by sheer luck, and it completely changed my life. Heck, I was not even doing 996, I was getting up at 7AM and going to bed at midnight EVERY DAY including Sundays.

When I was not squashing tickets at a 2X rate than my European coworkers, I was learning new things, trying out new projects, writing blog posts for the company, doing customer support. I didn't care.

So yes, I agree now (from a privileged position) that 996 might be unhealthy in the long run. But let's not gate-keep or be naive enough to understand that some kids will need to put that effort if they want to make a difference. And yes, ideally the world would be fair and everybody should need only 40hs/week to make a living, butt that's a fairy tale.

If you're a young ambitious above-average person, and you're going to listen to people claiming this is "bad", please also compare your to their privileges: race, geographic position, net worth of your family, etc...

Or do the 996 thing and try not to think too much about your Alzheimer’s and heart disease filled future. Maybe leave a big gift to the hospital that takes care of you before you die at way too young of an age.

Now I’m was old enough to realize the risk- but given this job market which absolutely sucks for developers but I see young twenty something’s getting influenced by stupid catchphrases like 996

But one point that needs to be made: You don't need to sacrifice your health to run a startup. You can get your 8 hours of sleep and exercise every day and still run your startup.

This notion that you have to get 3 hours of sleep and ruin your health is simply a choice - don't do it.

I also question how much work is actually being completed in such an environment. I have never worked in nor been to Japan, but I do recall reading/hearing about how rough the work culture is over there.

However, I have read/heard that people aren't nose-down in work the entire time. It's not uncommon for people to be in the office for long periods while not actually working.

Rather, it's more about the image -- don't leave before your boss, the later you leave after your boss the better you look, etc..

So, I wonder if the Chinese 996 systems somewhat mirrors what I have read about Japan?

I’ve seen founders work round the clock again and again. That kind of makes sense.

But Stebbings… I’m not going to put 996 in for any firm in your portfolio. And anybody who does is a mug.

This 996 bullshit is a skill issue. Need extra hours at school to finish your work? That’s a shame, all the clever kids are at home already (working on their side hustles that are 10x more likely to pay off).

It doesn’t surprise me that this stems from China: a place where ‘face’ and hours-behind-the-desk culture are extremely prominent.

People should be able to show up, put a shift in and go the fuck home. Sometimes there are reasons to work a little longer…

But expecting this kind of behaviour is objectively shitty leadership.

This debate is part of a critical redefinition of work. Technology has increased productivity, but wages have stagnated, breaking the social contract. As in the past with labor laws, urgent change is needed to avoid a crisis, prioritizing a quality life and a legacy to be proud of, not senseless exploitation.

996 as an employee: screw that. It might be "worth it" if you command a massive, exec-level salary, but for the overwhelming majority of people it's just foolish.

Never at any time did anyone tell us “work X many hours”

If people actually want hard working employees, maybe the answer should be culture first? Hire great people that love working together, on a cool problem, and they’ll do what’s needed? Trust them.

Hiring for 996 says to me you don’t care about innovation or excellence. It says you suck at hiring great talent. And it signals you, as a leader, may not have a healthy relationship to work or leadership. You want control, not excellence.

At this stage equity packages are often <0.5% over 4 years. Founders on the other hand may have more like 30% equity at this stage.

But the odds of success are still quite low - <3% is generous.

In venture funded companies I think it's wrong to say that at <10 employees, founders are 60x more responsible for company outcomes (or taking on 60x more risk), even accounting for what they did to start the company.

That being said - I get working hard if you're appropriately rewarded for it. Just less so if it's primarily on behalf of someone else.

> I’ve pulled many all-nighters, and I’ve enjoyed them. I still do. But they’re enjoyable in the right context, for the right reasons, and when that is a completely personal choice, not the basis of company culture.

The new year eve of millennium Dec 31, 1999 - we went to Fishermans's wharf, roamed around and then went back to work at 1 am. No Y2K issues.

- Gregor Zunic [1]

“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.”

-apocryphally attributed to Napoleon

1. https://x.com/gregpr07/status/1964392101682303438

Nobody is paying you to sit, people care about the working product.

> When someone promotes a 996 work culture, we should push back

And like the author says, it just doesn’t make sense either.

It's biologically impossible to generate good long term results form 996 or 007.

At the moment I work 9-5, a few meetings per day, so maybe 5-6 hours focused work, and I’m mentally exhausted by the end.

Now, I'm seeing US companies demand that here. Like, hell no. My body and health isn't worth what you're paying, and the answer 996'ers aren't paying double, or even 1.5x the position.

Saner parts of the world are discussing 37.5h/weeks, and even going to 4 day workweeks.

I mean, hell, if I'm expected to work gross overtime, I expect overtime pay. Guess like I should get into electrician union.

I'm curious if this is a calculated move by startups to preserve equity and get some people going crazy pushing your product forward rapidly.

I'm sure the people in China who claim to work 996 and those who demand it all know that the truth of hard work is complicated. I'm certain they all work damned hard, and the results are there for the world to see with the amazing success their country is having at absolutely everything. The nature of hard work doesn't fit some silly schedule.

This sounds like the new generation's equivalent of 1980s bosses exhorting people to "give 110%"

plus the nature of a founder's day to day work is very different. 12 hours a day of management, pitches, meetings, and snap decisions is doable for a long time if you can endure the pain.

12 hours a day of complex technical work under sleep deprivation is just not possible, after a few weeks of this your cognitive function will decline to the point you can't do the job right.

Though poor management is pervasive, there are small pockets of sanity out there, in my experience.

"You Should Run Your Startup Like a Cult", by Peter Thiel (https://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/) (https://archive.is/h7iZl) (2014)

Work 30 hours a week, but make em count.

Working a 996, but you're playing Pokemon on the clock isn't doing much.

The job felt immersive and all-encompassing. My colleagues and I had a singular mission to make the kids' experience as spectacular as possible. It's hard for me to imagine another job replicating that, but maybe it could be done?

What if you like that culture? Should you still push back?

People defend it by saying “well, you can always leave.” True - in the same way a sharecropper could always leave one plantation for another. The ladders are pulled higher and higher, so the fantasy of becoming your own master is almost gone. Once capital realises you have no escape, it’s not even 996 anymore, it’s 007. And if you want to eat, you’ll comply.

Of course people will say: “But it’s just about intensity and output, not hours!” Exactly - and that’s the trap. That framing makes you think you’re optimising for craft, while what you’re actually optimising is obedience. You’ll argue about hours vs output forever, but the real divide is class: founder vs employee, owner vs owned.

If you’re a founder working 996 on your own company, that’s your gamble, your risk, your upside. Go for it. But glorifying 996 as a model for employees is essentially advocating wage slavery with a hip new logo.

Expecting someone else with far lesser incentives is not even sustainable. I remember putting in a lot of hours at my previous company, i enjoyed doing it and i was learning at my first job, there are weeks where i put in those hours but those are for myself and what i'm building and it's insanity to expect that even to myself.

The metric is the output, independent of time you put in; alot of startups need those hours at times it's important to get things done but setting it as a culture and take pride is so naive of a thought.

i love high performing individuals delivering more output, than subpar individuals working delivering much lesser value and not just working for sake of it.

Also, if you want to work 996, you'd better not have a family -- if you do, you're neglecting them whether or not you think you can "juggle things" just fine.

These startups want the best right?

Oh wait, I have my own company where I am the founder doing this for myself when it requires it.

If I had employees I wouldn't want them doing 996 work culture, but if you want to hire ME to do that, that is the price, minimum.

Or it is another way of saying "fuck off".

During my tenure at both companies, my higher-ups liked my performance so much that when it was time to select people for raises/promotions/rate increases etc, I was among the few selected. I took this as a sign that my half-performance was valued enough to earn me more money so I wanted to stay like this forever.

I interviewed at a company that hid the fact that they wanted 996 until my first day there. It was 6pm my time, I was done for the day, eating dinner, and I got a call from the east coast team to review a PR. PR got merged and he asked, "what are you working on for the rest of the night?" and I was blunt. "I'm done for the night. Bye." sent my resignation in that same night.

I'm convinced that no one can ever be productive for 8 hours a day, let alone 12 hours a day. And indeed, I certainly wasn't productive for 8 hours a day when working two jobs. But I got stuff done.

At what point do we as a society agree that putting more hours doesn't necessarily create more results? We are in an era of increased economic output, but it's not trickling down. People aren't being paid more, they're being asked to work more. It just seems like the bar just keeps arbitrarily getting higher and higher, for the same financial benefit.

In my idealized society, we'd have universal basic income. That way no one would HAVE to work. When people work because they WANT to, they get to be more creative. I believe work output would increase. To say nothing of the non-economic outputs that would result (arts, music, etc).

Yes, I know the system wouldn't be perfect, and blah blah blah socialism, but a flawed great system would be better than our current flawed shitty system.

I spent decades worked way more than 996, on ships, ashore, in medical school, in residency, on clinical staff while doing entirely uncompensated research. Now I'm a subspecialist physician living in the Valley. I have never worked this little and enjoyed such a high standard of living. One of my seniors said "You don't have to work 2.5 jobs anymore. Just work 1.25 jobs". I work with teams across the spectrum of businesses to figure out how to build the business lines and I see the challenges small companies have. I really do. Not least of which is how the big companies have stacked the deck against new entrants.

Now that I do have some free time I spend it helping my wife build her business, I'm essentially her cofounder. Been incorporated for 8 years now. We think about motivating employees, paying them fairly, the breath-taking amount of money consumed by SaaS, rent, health insurance, travel costs and how that makes it hard to pay employees more. We think about motivating customers and charging them fairly. We see the mind-reeling amounts the big companies charge and then give customer discounts that effectively curb the competition. I see how they get their employees to work harder.

There are two fundamental rules in business:

1) If you're not making money, you're losing money.

2) Don't run out of money.

We watch the end-of-month profit margin going up and down like a rollercoaster. Some months, yeah, "This is great". Some months "Oh, oh, we cannot keep doing this".

We had one employee who really took this whole "I don't have to work ... hard" to heart. She would charge an hour for filling out her timesheet. She consumed her annual sick leave and accumulated PTO in her first 6 weeks. She would bail on scheduled work. Customers loved her but she was literally a net cost to the company money. How? Fixed costs. Overhead is real. Had to let her go. Honestly wasn't a hard conversation with her (she actually never returned some equipment, flat out stole from the company). What was hard was figuring out how to cover those customers and explaining to them why their favorite face of the company was gone.

You want to live a happy, ethical life? Live within your means. But that also entails having the means needed. And everybody else gets a vote. If you live in the US: the whole world wants your quality of life. Even if it's just 10% of the rest of the world, that's still double the entire US population, who are working 996.

Creativity comes in bursts and can’t be scheduled. Happiness and health move with the seasons. Treating humans as divisible units of 1 hour blocks of factory farmed ROI will never yield amazing results.

It’s sad to see the more technology and automation we invent the more we become slaves to the cult of pseudo-productivity, virtue signalling hours at work in place of meaningful output or results.

The first comment on my post was "fuck off". I'm not trying to push my working style on anyone else, I simply like to work hard. What's wrong with that?

I’m not smart, but I worked 7 days a week for a decade. It takes me 40 hours just to warm up, so real work means 100-hour weeks. Yet I’ve built 3 startups, 2 unicorns. In both, I was the dumbest person in the room—but I outworked everyone.

So, if you see a SF start up founders started praising 996 schedule, keep a watchful eye, make sure those founders are not in similar desperation.

Also, Elon Musk loved China schedule, I don't really see Twitter improved much since.

For evil-aligned founders it's important to realize that exploiting workers is one of the best trod paths to success. If you can get away with it without causing a revolt you're almost certainly getting more for your money. So being up front with 996 is absolutely in your interests. Being hard-core, 10x, cracked (pick your generation's euphemism) is just good marketing. Be prepared to cut anyone who burns out, try to get people without any ties or those who can't afford to quit. Maybe even create a cult of personality around yourself.

Yea I don't think I've ever pulled an all-nighter that was "worth it" outside of school. School is temporary and you're probably only pulling all-nighters your last year.

But work is different. You are working for the majority of your life. If you set your standard of life to prioritize work over your mental AND physical health, you're not going to make it past retirement (if you haven't already burnt out).

If you love what you do (artist, self-employed, etc.) a 996 culture can be considered a good thing as a certain amount of "good" stress allows us to feel self-actualized.

As is a 996 culture that provides for work-life balance. For example, working from home with flex time for 12 hours where you get to take long breaks whenever you feel like it to run, walk the dog, eat, get coffee, etc., is quite enjoyable as well. Who cares if you're still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?

Added note: I find it very interesting that this was immediately downvoted. I'm interested in understanding why for those who wish to share their rationale and perspective.