I've been 12127 for years. Anybody else approach 996?

[Monerexia]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/tiktoks-toxic-culture-reviews-on-glassdoor-impact-hiring.html

[Salivanth]

I worked as a software engineer Amazon for my first job, and had a lot of Chinese coworkers, some of whom told me about the 996 culture in Chinese tech companies. It became obvious, in the end, why so many of Amazon's Australian software engineers were from China - they expected long hours, but not 72 hours a week, so for the Chinese engineers, it was like a holiday. Since they couldn't legally demand I work a ton of overtime, I dealt with this by simply not doing it. Eventually I was put on a performance improvement plan for failing to meet deadlines, so I jumped ship to a government job. Now I work 35-hour weeks and get flex days so I work 9-day fortnights. I went from the worst member of the team to a star performer once I was working the same hours as everyone else. I took a pay cut, but it was totally worth it - I still have more money than I can spend, and it only pushed back my retirement date by a year or two. Now I exercise more, learn life skills, contemplate my place in the world, cook more, and have time to spend with wonderful people that enrich my life. Best decision I ever made. I wouldn't work for a company like Tiktok either, even if they offered me twice what I'm making now.

[Freedomin5]

It’s quite common here. I think an employee died from exhaustion from overworking at one of these companies - can’t remember which company. It was big news recently. For a while, I was leaving the house at 6 am, returning at 8 pm, 6.5 days a week. It was unsustainable. Now I work 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a lot less pay but with much better work life balance.

[dcheesi]

So glad to have landed in a company that maintains a proper work/life balance. We're salaried, but expectations are tailored to a normal 40 hour schedule.

If I'd had to work anything like the aforementioned hours, I would have burned out in no time.

[MaybeBecca]

I don't think I could be paid enough to do something like that, unless it was $1m for a month, with lifetime benefits afterward, and then I could stop working forever once the month was up.  You'd otherwise have to threaten me with imminent death or untenable economic headaches to coerce me into it.

 I do my best to maintain 40hrs/week as my standard, which is the requirement I was hired under.  I am not being paid for anything greater than 40, so it is only to the benefit of my employers if I work more, which is not a good enough reason for me to give up my free time.

[nessness]

What does 12127 mean? Noon to midnight (or vice versa) seven days a week?

My job has pretty good work-life balance, at least in non-management positions. I'll occasionally work outside my normal hours, but I'm not going to do it weekly.

[bbqbonelesswing]

A senior artificial intelligence researcher, who asked to remain anonymous due to the nature of the discussion, turned down a job offer from TikTok even though the recruiter had told them the salary was likely to be over £100,000 ($139,000) a year plus options.

Around here, you could easily find a job in tech paying the same amount and NOT have to work 72 hours a week.

[Freedomin5]

In some companies, you have to work 996 if you want to get ahead/get a good review/not get fired. It’s the norm. I vaguely remember reading that the term was coined by Jack Ma (of Alibaba/Aliexpress/Alipay/Taobao fame). I have friends who work more slowly or stay at their desk with nothing to do just so they would not be the first to leave. And leaving before your boss is a definite no-no.

[Sid Hoffman]

In some companies, you have to work 996 if you want to get ahead/get a good review/not get fired. It’s the norm. I vaguely remember reading that the term was coined by Jack Ma (of Alibaba/Aliexpress/Alipay/Taobao fame). I have friends who work more slowly or stay at their desk with nothing to do just so they would not be the first to leave. And leaving before your boss is a definite no-no.

I see your location is listed as China. Is that Taiwan, or Hong Kong? I thought much of the internet was blocked from all other parts since it could be used to criticize the PRC? If your point is that it's common in China to work 70+ hours a week then I can understand that. It is certainly not common in the west though.

[Monerexia]

What does 12127 mean? Noon to midnight (or vice versa) seven days a week?

My job has pretty good work-life balance, at least in non-management positions. I'll occasionally work outside my normal hours, but I'm not going to do it weekly.

oh I meant 10107 haha. I work about 10a-10p seven days/week. Incrementally added hours over a couple years to find my top and I do have to say hrs worked top is in.

[Freedomin5]

In some companies, you have to work 996 if you want to get ahead/get a good review/not get fired. It’s the norm. I vaguely remember reading that the term was coined by Jack Ma (of Alibaba/Aliexpress/Alipay/Taobao fame). I have friends who work more slowly or stay at their desk with nothing to do just so they would not be the first to leave. And leaving before your boss is a definite no-no.

I see your location is listed as China. Is that Taiwan, or Hong Kong? I thought much of the internet was blocked from all other parts since it could be used to criticize the PRC? If your point is that it's common in China to work 70+ hours a week then I can understand that. It is certainly not common in the west though.

Mainland China.

[OtherJen]

So glad to have landed in a company that maintains a proper work/life balance. We're salaried, but expectations are tailored to a normal 40 hour schedule.

If I'd had to work anything like the aforementioned hours, I would have burned out in no time.

Same. My salary is based on a 40-hour week. Some weeks I work more than that, but those are balanced out by lighter weeks. Pay is decent, and I have 5.5 weeks of paid vacation time (and separated sick time as needed).

My postdoc employer expected 976 weeks and 24/7 on-call. I was expected to drop my out-of-town Thanksgiving travel plans with less than 24 hours notice (and a surprise 11-hour workday) because the boss decided that they wanted to try a new experimental setup on the holiday weekend (while enjoying dinner with their own family). The next week, I became ill, worked through it (if I didn’t, I got persistent calls and emails at home asking why things weren’t done yet), and eventually developed severe bronchitis. I quit 8 years ago and haven’t worked in research since. I burned out so badly that even the thought of applying for another research job set off panic attacks for a few years.

[Reynold]

Same. My salary is based on a 40-hour week. Some weeks I work more than that, but those are balanced out by lighter weeks. Pay is decent, and I have 5.5 weeks of paid vacation time (and separated sick time as needed).

My postdoc employer expected 976 weeks and 24/7 on-call. I was expected to drop my out-of-town Thanksgiving travel plans with less than 24 hours notice (and a surprise 11-hour workday) because the boss decided that they wanted to try a new experimental setup on the holiday weekend (while enjoying dinner with their own family). The next week, I became ill, worked through it (if I didn’t, I got persistent calls and emails at home asking why things weren’t done yet), and eventually developed severe bronchitis. I quit 8 years ago and haven’t worked in research since. I burned out so badly that even the thought of applying for another research job set off panic attacks for a few years.

Most research jobs, in my experience, are not that demanding, so anyone considering one should not panic.  Being a professor in academia can be tougher, as you are trying to do research + write publications + manage a group + write grant proposals + teach, but industry I've seen is more reasonable. 

[OtherJen]

Same. My salary is based on a 40-hour week. Some weeks I work more than that, but those are balanced out by lighter weeks. Pay is decent, and I have 5.5 weeks of paid vacation time (and separated sick time as needed).

My postdoc employer expected 976 weeks and 24/7 on-call. I was expected to drop my out-of-town Thanksgiving travel plans with less than 24 hours notice (and a surprise 11-hour workday) because the boss decided that they wanted to try a new experimental setup on the holiday weekend (while enjoying dinner with their own family). The next week, I became ill, worked through it (if I didn’t, I got persistent calls and emails at home asking why things weren’t done yet), and eventually developed severe bronchitis. I quit 8 years ago and haven’t worked in research since. I burned out so badly that even the thought of applying for another research job set off panic attacks for a few years.

Most research jobs, in my experience, are not that demanding, so anyone considering one should not panic.  Being a professor in academia can be tougher, as you are trying to do research + write publications + manage a group + write grant proposals + teach, but industry I've seen is more reasonable.

I worked in research for more than a decade. I now work in science publishing.

[CJ]

Although not in the engineering or research field, this was pretty standard watchkeeping for non-tactical positions while I was in the Navy. 6PM to 6AM was a standard watch for 2 of my deployments. Probably the worst I ever had was a tactical watch with a 7-on-5-off-5-on-7-off rotation. It was only for about a month and a half, and it was worth it, but it was rough. I couldn't imagine living that for years on end.

[markbike528CBX]

I've worked 13 hour days 7 days a week for 3 weeks.  Once.  A long time ago. When I was much younger.  It was an overseas job of limited duration.   12 hour shift plus turnover (handoff) to next shift time.

The bad? A one hour commute.
The good? Nice hotel, and no driving for me so I could nap during the commute.  I really didn't want to see the traffic in Taiwan anyway. 

Would I ever sign up for an ongoing schedule like that? Sure, at gunpoint.

I asked around the office and one guy had done a 35 day stint like that, so I got no sympathy.

[MilesTeg]

As a software dev, I generally work ~10-7,5, but then when releases are behind or the shit hits the fan with a production system, it can be 14-16 hour days for a couple weeks or even on rare occasion all nighters or in extreme situations several all nighters in a row (though I can't do that in my "advanced" age anymore, lol). But now that I hired a good project manager its very rarely the case.

No chance in hell I would work more than 50 hours a week or crazier on a regular basis though.

[Tigerpine]

Once upon a time I worked from 7:30am until anywhere between 8pm to 1am five days a week, and sometimes I'd put in another 4-8 hours on Saturday.

Now I work 40 hours a week.  I might put in overtime on occasion, but I don't plan to ever put in 60+ hours a week again working for someone else.

[scottish]

Man, does that ever bring back some bad memories.    We were doing a so called "death march" from about November 1994 to March 1995 on a 7 day a week schedule.    The person running the project was pretty inept and in the end it failed to deliver.    I left the company less than a year later and transitioned to a different industry.

I wouldn't put up with that sort of project management now.   One of us would be leaving...

[cerat0n1a]

Around here, you could easily find a job in tech paying the same amount and NOT have to work 72 hours a week.

Not in the UK though - that would be a very good salary (although Amazon, Facebook, Google etc. do pay at that level). I guess it's the share options that are the real clincher for these kind of jobs.

I'd be astonished if their UK workforce regularly works anything like 996 hours though. It's just not the way people here expect things to be, except maybe junior hospital doctors and junior Goldman Sachs employees, for whom it's a rite of passage. The EU has laws on working hours, minimum days of vacation and so on, and those laws still exist in the UK. Don't take enough days off and the company is potentially going to find itself in court. In my experience, the tech employee in Europe working 38-40 hrs per week and taking 30+ days a year of vacation will be every bit of productive as people elsewhere in the world, in any case. The fact that TikTok got a pretty high score on the "Great Place to Work" survey (which is independent and rigorous) makes me think it's actually a decent place to be.

[WhiteTrashCash]

The closest I’ve ever gotten to working a schedule like that is early in my working years on Hillbilly Mountain, when I worked swing shifts at a paper factory. I would work 7 am - 7 pm four days a week, then switch and work 7 pm - 7 am three days the next week and then switch. The hardest thing about it was changing my internal clock to sleep either at night or during the day and nobody would try doing that 7 days a week because it would cause health issues.

[Just Joe]

The military. We worked like that at times. There was one period where someone thought working us a week of days followed by a week of nights and repeat was a good idea. Everyone was a zombie.

[Hash Brown]

I'm 42.  I've worked 500+ 70-hour weeks. 

The most unusual job I had was working as a deckhand on tugboats.  That was 6 hours on/off (so 12 hours per day) for 28 days on the Mississippi/Ohio/Tennessee line tugs.  It was 21 days on 7 off on the Gulf Coast.  If you worked in the harbor it was 12 hours on/off for 5 days and then you got 5 days off, but I only did that in training. 

On land I have worked two jobs, continuously, going back to high school.  I have worked a day job and then at various restaurants at nights and on the weekends for 15+ years. 

It's funny getting tipped by these restaurant customers because they look down on me like I'm a loser living in my mom's basement when I've got a lot more money than most of them. 

[damyst]

There is a body of long-standing research to demonstrate that increased work hours do not increase productivity beyond a certain threshold, which is far below 996.

Technology is not just integrated circuits and AI and designer materials. Technology is also the systems and techniques we use to allow large groups of humans to achieve a desired goal by working together. It sounds like on this technological front China remains quite far behind. But they're catching up quickly, so I'm confident their industry will figure this out in the not too distant future.

[ketchup]

Don't tell my boss, but I swear I feel like I get more done working 24 hours a week vs the 40 I used to.

[Hash Brown]

There is a body of long-standing research to demonstrate that increased work hours do not increase productivity beyond a certain threshold, which is far below 996.

Working two jobs is completely different than working the same number of hours at one job.  10 minutes into working second shift, you completely forget that you already worked 8 hours somewhere else.