Silicon Valley’s “996” Is About Power, not Productivity

“996” is, according to Wired, finding its way to Silicon Valley. It’s a term for a Chinese model of work: you start your labor at 9am, finish at 9pm, and do it six days a week. In other words, it’s basically being an associate in a big law firm, spread to other economic sectors.

The way this horrific work/life imbalance gets sold by the people selling it is under the flag of “productivity.” Whatever company it is they head is doing important work. World-changing work. Historically world-changing work. And if you want to be a part of that, you need to feel a drive towards all-in-ness. Which in turn means not being weak by wanting, say, time with your family or friends or the opportunity to relax.

But it’s not really about productivity, because nothing about 996 boosts productivity. Instead, its about the guys at the top, the ones telling the people below them to work 12 hours a day six days a week, wanting to feel important and powerful.

Take this from the Wired piece.

Companies aren’t having trouble finding willing employees, and some frame it as core to their work culture. Rilla, an AI startup that sells software designed for contractors (like plumbers) to record conversations with prospective clients and coach them on how to negotiate higher rates, says nearly all of its 80-person workforce adheres to the 996 schedule.

“There’s a really strong and growing subculture of people, especially in my generation—Gen Z—who grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies,” says Will Gao, the company’s head of growth. “Kobe Bryant dedicated all his waking hours to basketball, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying that Kobe Bryant shouldn’t have worked as hard as he did.”

Notice the disconnect between the people Will Gao compares himself to and the product his company actually builds. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, in a very real sense, forged (or the people working at their companies forged) the modern technological world. Kobe Bryant was one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived. Will Gao makes recording software to help plumbers eek out a bit more profit. This isn’t nothing, it’s good to help people figure out how to earn a better living, but it’s probably not going to be “life-changing” even for the plumbers, let alone world-historically.

But the other disconnect is that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant were all the guys at the top. Jobs wanted to build Apple, and he wanted to work long hours to do it. Gates wanted to build Microsoft and was driven to do so. They weren’t told to by a boss. Likewise, Kobe Bryant put in endless practice time toward becoming the best basketball player he could be because, to start with, he absolutely loved playing basketball.

What Will Gao and the other executives at Rilla are instead doing is demanding, in an exceptionally tight technology labor market, that anyone who wants a paycheck from them needs to give up their lives. Maybe some people do, and maybe some don’t feel they have much choice, but let’s not kid ourselves that this is about an existential drive towards world-historical impact à la Jobs, Gates, or Bryant.

Further, if the goal is actually productivity, well, 996 ain’t gonna do it. We have research on this. A lot. Long hours don’t make people more productive, because there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days a week, you can be at peak productivity. Instead, long hours burn you out. And as you burn out, as you become exhausted and stressed, your productivity (and creativity and everything else needed for a successful, world-historical start-up) declines. By a lot.

In my experience, though, the people who push this stuff aren’t terribly curious about the state of the research. They want to work long hours, because they believe in their company, or because they bought into the grind mindset false bill of sale. They’ve swallowed an image of what being serious about work looks like, and they’ve made that image so central to their identity that to admit it’s a mirage, that they’re instead just making their companies worse while making their workers miserable, would be to admit, well, that they’re maybe not as world-historically important as they imagine themselves to be.

But I think there’s something else going on, too, and it’s about power. Years ago, in a conversation with a CEO who proposed reconfiguring his organization’s headquarters from largely private offices with doors that could close to largely open-office floor plans and removing doors from the remaining private offices, I mentioned the research. I said, “You argue that this change will increase both productivity and collaboration. But there’s robust evidence that it will do precisely the opposite. Workers in open-offices are less productive, and they tend to shift to electronic communication rather than face-to-face just to carve out some degree of privacy.” And he screamed at me.

He screamed because he didn’t want to hear what the research said, because, like a lot of the guys calling for 996, this move wasn’t, I suspect, motivated by a genuine desire for greater productivity and collaboration. Or, if it was genuine, it was a thin genuineness, more of a “he’d convinced himself his pretext wasn’t pretextual, but authentic” than “he legitimately wanted to pursue whatever changes would maximize productivity and collaboration.”

No, the actual motivation is when you’re at the top, for many of these guys, the way you fell like you’re at the top is to see people beneath you. It’s why Trump wants his staff to genuflect, and why he likes parades. He’s the guy in charge, and being the guy in charge only really feels like it if you can see the people who aren’t in charge. In other words, you want to exercise your in-charge-ness, and witness those subject to it. Otherwise your in-charge-ness is as much a mirage as those open-office productivity gains. Or at least feels like it.

What 996 accomplishes, then, isn’t a more productive company than one where workers come to work each day feeling happy and refreshed. What 996 accomplishes is workers being in the office basically all the time the guy at the top would care to look out into the office and see his workers there. What taking doors off of offices and moving to an open-office floor plan accomplishes (if the goal isn’t merely some gain in how many people can be packed into limited square footage) is that if you’re the guy at the top, you can walk around the building and see the people who report to you. You can see them working for you. And not just individually, such as if you had online one-on-ones with them regularly, or if you swung by their (private) offices, but as a mass.

That doesn’t increase collaboration. It doesn’t increase productivity. The evidence for both is overwhelming. But it is a pretty powerful feeling. And if you get to feel it, it means you’re pretty important. Maybe even as important as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Kobe Bryant.