In the AI gold rush, tech firms are embracing 72-hour weeks
bbc.com49 points by yladiz 3 hours ago
49 points by yladiz 3 hours ago
This is clearly rage bait, given that it starts with one 120-person company doing this and then tries to pivot into “the tech industry” without any supporting evidence that it’s widespread.
> Each job ad contains a warning: "Please don't join if you're not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person
If a company is going to demand long weeks, this is the only way to do it: Be up front and explain it in the job listing so nobody is surprised or wastes time interviewing for a job they’re not compatible with.
You have a point. It does have the same vibe as 'quiet quitting' and other attempts at framing during attempts to RTO.
Modern day tech journalism is just lazy, you browse a bunch of HN and reddit threads, if you're feeling it, ask ChatGPT for some stats to support your propaganda piece and hit publish. Fact check, spell check and everything else is done by AI. It's not like you have to run around the streets with camera crew, interviewing real people, so...yeah. I doubt if even they write the articles themselves, I've seen models on Huggingface for "creative, human-like writing". So maybe it was just a prompt "write me some ragebait on AI companies as I'm having a slow news day and my job is hanging by a thread"
If anything, indeed, this company is an outlier because they openly communicate about it.
Rage bait seems to be working judging by the comments over here.
Hard to tell how widespread it is but it’s not just 1 company. https://www.webpronews.com/silicon-valleys-2025-ai-boom-revi...
Lets go the other way towards worker protections and living a healthy lifestyle instead.
You’re thinking about this wrong. Leadership says the gap between human and LLM performance on complex tasks is too big.
The easiest way to close it is to prevent the humans from sleeping.
Admittedly, while stunningly accurate portrayal of an executive mind, it is almost ridiculously hilarious on its face.
What's the gap between sleep-deprived humans and LLMs?
Extreme programming (XP) was all about going as fast as you could go. One of their rules was "never work more than 40 hours for more than one week in a row". Why? Because when you get tired, you slow down. The net effect is negative after the first week.
That requires having more work than workers, so that a bad deal is never the only option.
70 hour weeks are dumb - it's a red flag that the company leadership has no idea what they're doing. Those types of working hours are actually counter-productive to good work, and there is plenty of research to support that. This kind of thing is performative, not actually a good way to run a business.
Of course, critical deadlines occasionally require overtime to compensate for poor planning or acts of god, but it should be a last resort, not something to "embrace".
Exactly. After 4-5 five hours of focus you then mostly just typing on autopilot.
After twelve hours behind desk every day, your body starts to seriously hurt which makes concentration even harder. It is not the most productive way to create something, it is usually just about signalling dedication.
Same cringe like from so called internet grind culture. You usually do not need to sit behind computer till you smell yourself. It's ludicrous.
Job 7:1-6
“Is not life on earth a drudgery, its days like those of a hireling? Like a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits for wages, So I have been assigned months of futility, and troubled nights have been counted off for me. When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I arise?’ then the night drags on; I am filled with restlessness until the dawn. My flesh is clothed with worms and scabs, my skin cracks and festers; My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they come to an end without hope.”
I thought ClawdBot and an agent swarm fishing in a data lake were doing all the work while the developers were chilling and sipping coffee. Now it is 996? Which is it?
It is also interesting that a surveillance startup that abuses sales people thinks they are doing "incredible things".
It is 996. Delegating work to agents gives you more time to delegate work to other agents.
If there any indication that this is increasing, as opposed to AI stuff just being where the fanatics are being drawn to at the moment?
One would think the company is doing something state-of-the-art moonshot worthy. But, no.
“ Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients.”
Which idiots are giving away their lives for this.
Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks? I doubt my employer would.
For knowledge worker jobs, it's stupid to measure performance by number of hours spent in an office.
> Sometimes my work will give me problems which I'll continue to think about even outside of my customary working hours. Sometimes the solution will come to me as I'm doing something else. Does that mean I'm working 168-hour weeks?
If you are working on them for 168 hours per week, then yes it does.
> I doubt my employer would.
No, and nor should it. They can't and should not control what you do or think about outside of work hours. Presumably they aren't asking you to do any of that.
"But our brains can't just turn off" -- sure, and a lot of blue collar work has a significant cerebral component too and people think about what they've done or will do on their time off. Your body is also tired and worn down on your days off after hard manual labor. Working in public facing jobs can take a strain on mental health. Etc. None of that is explicitly accounted for as line items, it is just taken as a cost of the job and presumably implicitly factored in to cost of labor as part of supply and demand if nothing else.
I'm personally doing kind of the opposite. I'm getting way more done with less time, and spending the difference with family. But things like this do make me realize that my ability to do this might be short lived. So I'm enjoying it while I can.
Same on all accounts. If I found a tool or system that increases my productivity by 50% what incentive do I have to pass those gains on to leadership?
Because they'll figure it out eventually. While I can't predict the future, I think it's naive to think that as all this catches on and becomes more commonplace that those of us that still have jobs won't be expected to work the same hours with much greater output. So I'd say enjoy it for now as it might not last. Like, computers in general were supposed to do this for us ~30 years ago.
A lot of tech's current trends have a lot to do with its inability to see beyond the first order, like:
- How layoff culture backfires: companies that lean into this culture tend to underperform compared to those that do not.
- The deleterious effects of overwork on employees: work carries diminishing returns after a certain number of hours per week, and eventually the mistake rate from exhaustion outweighs the productivity from more hours. Not to mention, this causes burnout which leads to valuable people leaving.
- How AI removes flow: this is something I've seen in myself, but using agents means I do not achieve the cognitive engagement necessary for flow, which is one of the most pleasant states I can get into while working (and it often makes work feel worthwhile).
I'd also note: if you get hired at Rilla for their senior engineer position, and you're able to command the top of their stated band (300K), that is defacto ~165K for 40 hours worked / week.
Many people fought very hard for a long time to secure a 40 hour work week, and it's pretty silly how easily a lot of tech people will throw it away. Time is your most important asset, don't waste your life behind a screen not seeing your family or friends.
I'm glad they're up-front about it. Not a fan, but I think it makes sense for a startup to make unconventional choices and recruit accordingly.
Over 20 years ago I joined a startup that leaned way into Extreme Programming and it was a lot of fun. It helped a lot that everyone working there wanted to try working that way.
We worked sensible hours and went home feeling very productive. The startup failed, though, in part because "pivoting" wasn't really a thing yet.
Olympic athletes don’t exercise 72 hours a week, more like 20 to 40.
They are also, by definition, not professionals. They dont get paid.
Thats why the NBA doesnt present in the Olympics.
Is the suggestion they would work out more if they were paid? I think if obtaining Olympic medals was a function of training more then the avengers would be far higher.
There are many NBA players in the Summer Olympics. Literally the entire U.S. men's team...
Brain power vs muscle power.
Let us not be silly that these are the same.
But also, I'm on team "Its really hard to do the same mental job ~20 hours a week". I can do 2hr x 3 cycles x 5 days a week. But that means breaks.. When I did 12 hour days I was terrible at hours 9-12.
Last year a company reached out to me about an interesting job on their Developer Experience team. What the company is building is super interesting, and DevEx is something I love and am good at.
In our second conversation, the hiring manager mentioned that they all work ten hours a day, five days a week, in the office. I guess you could call it a 975 schedule.
I don't think of myself as "old", but that kind of in-office schedule sounded grueling. So I declined continuing with further interviews.
A 996 schedule sounds like a great way to say, "older developers need not apply."
I'll second this. An external recruiter was under the (incorrect) impression that we are a 996 company. We found out because she said that no senior people she talked to were willing to work those hours.
Ultimately you can make a lot of short-term progress with 23-year-olds who are willing to live 5 minutes away from the office, have no life outside of work, and work 72 hour weeks. But you also end up with a product that was built by people who have no idea what they're doing.
employers that demand long hours do so because they have no other way to appraise employee ability.
they cannot judge a brilliant insight from a slacker that would have saved thousands of man-hours rushing the wrong way.
do you really want to work for such a company?
Youth really is wasted on the young lol. If only I could get all those hours back and do pretty much anything else.
They will be fine. Big banks are doing it, consulting firms are doing it. They top it off with layoffs to show their deep appreciation to their overworked staff. People still apply.
In a bad market, there is always someone desperate enough to take any opportunity.
The only thing produced in hour 71 is poor judgment.
It’s not about productivity, it’s about making the company the only thing in your life.
I suggest the other way around: Don't work at all. Zero hours, seven days a week. I call it the 0 Model. It's a huge blessing.
Not surprised. It takes obsessive focus to make a startup successful, especially in an industry so saturated with talent.
Pretty sure it was claimed that using "AI" would mean people would need to work less. So they aren't practicing what they preach, and in fact the opposite.
As I recall it, the claim was that people would become less valuable, not that they would necessarily work less. The goal is to reduce the cost of hiring, not to give people freedom.
The value proposition for automation and industrialization is always along the lines that, as unskilled workers lose jobs and are displaced by machinery, more jobs will be created for skilled workers to design, supervise, and maintain that machinery.
So if you install kiosks at McDonald's and 3 cashiers lose their jobs, you've created 9 jobs in the R&D and maintenance industries for techies to manufacture and support those kiosks. Win/win, right?
We will work more and more, endlessly, until we render ourselves useless through our own efforts. That is the quest.
fwiw i think there's a balance here
at my current company i happen to work 70hrs/week but it doesn't feel like a ton of work, i'm having fun and let's be honest a chunk of the "work" is meetings & hanging out with my coworkers who are also my friends. the vast majority of people's productivity drops off after 4-6 hours of focused work. if i wanted to rest and vest there's plenty of companies to do that but your upside is capped hard
a company that 'requires' 996 doesn't understand why people work that hard in the first place.
This is prime HN rage bait. I expect to see every cynical tech trope, including the idea that ai doesn’t work
If anyone wants to sterotype the proper response to this thread, I'm down. I'll play:
Work from home made me more productive. AI Coding makes bad code that is harder to code. If we worked 10 hour days, I'd be more productive. Nuclear and Solar power... CEOs make bad code for everyone. If you spend little on programmers, you get bad quality.
Alright I lost a bit at the end. Maybe someone can ChatGPT this into the 4chan sniper meme. "What the ... did you just fucking say about me, you little ..."?
Now that Tech Oligarchs are a great leap closer to replacing programmers, are we any step closer to seeing the need to organizing and unionizing?
And I am sure there will be no overtime pay, but they get "perks".
Whats most amazing is that these people are putting in 12 hours a day 6 days a week for the goal of putting hundreds of millions of people out of a job, including themselves. The only people who will benefit in the end are their billionaire bosses they're slavishly working to make even wealthier and they'll all be hung out to dry in the end with everyone else.
16 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep - this is what it should be. no PTO. salary don't matter cause you have no time to spend any of it. need to put in 65 years like this before you get the pension. utopia!
Pension? Why should you get paid not to work just because your 80 and have given your whole life to the company? Geez some people have no work ethic.
The dot com bubble. The reboot of tech after (pre 2008) at the dawn of podcasting, Web 2.0, the "open web".
70 hour weeks weren't unheard of. Why... because the money was stupid and you had skin in the game.
Lots of people got wealthy, very wealthy. Fuck you money wealthy.
I know a lot of people who did that and then kept working. The large majority of them in fact.
If you're here and you're looking at one of these jobs, this is the critical sentence you need to ask when negotiating: "Can I see a cap table." If they say anything other than yes, then your response is "with out a cap table the value of the equity being offered is ZERO, I'm going to need a lot more cash".
Sounds pretty typical of the startup scene. Long hours for a chance at something great.
I hope they’re getting stock options and have negotiated themselves out of any bs repurchase rights.
"the end of the humans was an ironic one"
I'll probably be downvoted, I feel like the whole AI adoption and much of our technological progress over the centuries has been a prime Prisoner's Dilemma example.
We would get better results by collaborating, and because defecting (and using the thing in its unsafe, and unhealthy ways) is rewarded we defect.
Lots of useful idiots out there helping employers towards the goal of turning all white collar labor into fungible minimum wage AI operators.
Working on AI for a company he doesn't own is the stupidest thing a smart person can do.
The goal is his work is to literally reduce the value of his work. He gets finite reward (even if above market average), then is fired, while owners continue extracting value from the work indefinitely.
I think we need to come up with a third alternative to communism and capitalism. I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.
> I'd like to see a system which attempts to reward people for the full transitive value of their work as long as the work remains valuable.
To a degree, this is what copyright was supposed to do.
Whenever I say this, I am told the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation, not protect creators.
So it doesn't matter if every particular person is truly rewarded for their work or if the rewarded person is the one doing the actual work (employers own copyright even though employees do the work). What matters is the impression and the aggregate effect.
And of course if humans not necessary for innovation, it loses its meaning. Copyright is already pretty much dead since many people and organizations get away with running copyrighted work through ANNs and claiming it's not derivative work.
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But the bigger issue is copyright is only about creativity, not about the human time and effort put in. It doesn't protect most normal work.
Ultimately, every person has a limited time to be alive and that's one area where we're all roughly equal. Even taking skill differences into account, the difference in productivity between people is not that high.
Take a passenger jet and all the work, skill and knowledge that goes into building one. There's no way a single person could do all of that, even ignoring study time as if he magically started with the required knowledge at birth. Yet there are people rich enough to own one. That makes no sense.