996 Just Means You Have No Leverage

The Performance of Work Is Not Work

Every time someone invokes “996” I think about how much it sounds like the last defense of the unarmed.

If you’ve spent any time at all on Twitter in the past 18 months, you know the term: 9am to 9pm, six days a week. It’s a schedule so common in parts of the tech industry that it’s been turned into a cultural shorthand.

The idea is simple: if you’re not winning with brilliance, win with hours. Work harder. Work longer. Work more. Work will set you free, etc. But when I hear someone talk about how they “just outworked everyone,” I wonder what else they had to offer…

My theory is this: the companies and individuals who embrace 996 as their primary strategy have already lost. They’re advertising their weakness, not their strength. Because the dirty secret of 996 culture is that it’s compensating for a lack of leverage elsewhere.

You won’t hear this at an SF happy hour, but the reason some people have to work twelve hours a day is because their ideas aren’t good enough to survive on eight.

I’ve done long hours.

As a tech writer, I did it just to keep up.

There were stretches where I thought working until midnight was proof that I cared. But over time…