I work with China and US tech scene and while the chinese scene is more 'hungry' these days US scene is just, if not even more, hardworking and certainly works 'smarter' quite often.
Saturday corporate card transactions for restaurant, delivery, and takeout by employees at San Francisco-based businesses are 0.4% more than last year.
Everything else in the article is guesswork.
The fact that most of these folks are going to fail doesn't especially bother me. After all, that was true for previous generations as well. What's different now is that a lot of these folks not only won't be coming away from these experiences having developed marketable skills, but many of them will have significant health problems that prevent them from doing so in the future.
I'm actually very bullish on the use of AI in software development overall. But when placed in the hands of folks who haven't yet had the time to develop hard skills, it both enables and incentivizes cutting corners to an alarming extent.
Just to take today's example: there's a npmjs supply chain attack. Dependabot & co are going to issue alerts. Most vibe coders aren't going to know what it's about, or even care. Which means that some of the users of vibe coded apps are going to lose their life savings over this ignorance.
Aka "Oh my god, I will pay you any amount of money to make this code that I don't have any idea about more secure."
This is what happens when some team sees "996" is trending and demands a blog post be made with any possible supporting data they can find.
Headline: SF tech workers are working Saturdays
> Change is equal to the difference between hourly share in 2024 and 2025 from January through August.
This article's domain (Ramp) is a SaaS company that tracks employee expenses for other companies.
Tracking employee credit-cards and reimbursements is part of their service that companies use:
you can literally buy purchase data from Mastercard, AMEX, and Discover and use this data for retargeting and advanced targeting w ads and run them on Facebook and other platforms.
A dog food purchase? Owner likely has pets, serve em a pet ad, etc.
edit: see azundos explanation
No sarcasm, no humor; 996 posts should be met with nothing but flat out ridicule and disgust. One's life isn't solely about work and this kind of behavior just makes everyone else's life worse in the long term because there's a chance for short term gain.
But this is plainly ridiculous. The Bay Area has been full of high achievers the entire time I've lived here (since the 20th century). All the startups I worked at, people would work Saturdays. Not all the time, of course, but it was quite common.
2. Payoffs if a startup does well.
3. Gets you in the entrepreneurship game. Out of the big tech trap. My first startup did not do well but a ton of us ended up starting companies, entering VC, etc.
"And many of them have CS degrees from good universities." --Me
It's not, though?
This is "hustle" seen through the eyes of an "economist".
This applies to Slack channels and such, if there's a Dungeons and Dragons channel on the company Slack, you can also make a channel about unionizing.
This is the law (NLRA).
What is preventing one of these 996 companies from doing that and taking the lead in their respective AI niche? If they really believe that an additional day is their competitive edge, that seems like a really easy moat to overcome for a competitor, and by that logic why stop there? Wouldn't you want to maximize your chances of success by requiring your employees work 7 days in the office?
Just have your employees work a full 7 days in the office. I'm not joking either. Would some CEO who has adopted this practice care to explain why they don't just make things simple and require their employees to report to the office 7 days per week? It's simple and will only select for the most hardcore of the hardcore. I'm actually surprised someone hasn't tried this yet.
The worst part is that you're going to have someone unironically come with this.
Completely unrelatedly, how are those family formation and birth rate statistics doing?
I’m perfectly content turning my phone off to go camping or whatever. I also don’t feel bad seeing what my coworkers are up to when I’m out of office.
And, to your point, if I did take PTO for vacation, the degree to which I'd be contactable or not was never a factor.
Funny seeing your user name. When I worked myself to get ultimately nowhere but money that spends so quickly, the first thing that went was my music creation time.
Having children later in life is much harder/different than having them younger. You don't get to go back.
Your children are only children for a very short time. You don't get to go back.
Much of life is tradeoffs.