In the AI gold rush, tech firms are embracing 72-hour weeks

20 minutes agoTheo LeggettInternational Business Correspondent

BBC

The recruitment website is jazzy, awash with pictures of happy young workers, and festooned with upbeat mini-slogans such as “insane speed”, “infinite curiosity” and “customer obsession”.

Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch.

Each job ad contains a warning: “Please don’t join if you’re not excited about… working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC.”

The website belongs to 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.

The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.

In simple terms, it puts a premium on long working hours, typically 9am to 9pm, six days a week (hence “996”).

For most of us, that would be gruelling. But according to Will Gao, head of growth at Rilla, its 120 employees simply don’t see it that way.

“We look for people who are like Olympian athletes, with characteristics of, you know, obsession, infinite ambition.

“It’s people who want to do incredible things and have a lot of fun while doing so,” he says.

Will Gao

He insists that while the hours are generally long, there’s no rigid structure.

“If I’m like, ‘Holy cow, I have a super idea I’m working on’, then I’ll just keep working until 2 or 3am, then I’ll just roll in the next day at noon or something”, he explains.

This kind of approach has become extremely popular in the technology sector over the past few years, and for good reason. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) has been taking place at a breakneck pace, and companies around the world are now working flat-out to develop ways in which it can be exploited and monetised.

Huge amounts of money are being ploughed into AI ventures, many of them start-ups. But for every ambitious company founder, the ever-present fear is that someone else will get there first. Speed is of the essence – and tech sector workers are under pressure to work harder, and longer, to get results quickly.

‘Slackers are not my brothers’

The 996 culture first came to the fore in China a decade ago. It was embraced by tech companies and start-ups at a time when the country was increasingly focused on transforming itself from the world’s workshop for cheap goods into a leader in advanced technologies.

It had some powerful advocates. They included Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of the retail behemoth Alibaba.com.

“I personally think that being able to work 996 is a huge blessing”, he wrote in one blog post for employees.

“It’s not just entrepreneurs; most successful or ambitious artists, scientists, athletes, officials, and politicians work 996 or more”, he said in another.

“It’s not because they have extraordinary perseverance, but because they are deeply passionate about their chosen careers”, he added.

Getty Images

Another enthusiast was Richard Liu, founder of the retail behemoth JD.com, who at one point railed against what he saw as the country’s declining work ethic.

“Slackers are not my brothers!”, he wrote in a controversial email to staff in 2019.

But such an attitude prompted a backlash, including a wave of online complaints that companies were ignoring labour laws and failing to pay overtime, while forcing employees to work excessive hours. By 2021 this chorus of disapproval had become too loud for the authorities to ignore – and prompted a legal crackdown.

In China, 996 has not disappeared, but its advocates have generally been a lot quieter. A notable exception was Baidu’s one-time head of public relations, Qu Jing, who posted a series of videos on social media in 2024, aggressively defending a hard-working culture. Her brusque dismissal of employees’ wellbeing, with the comment “I’m not your mother, I only care about results” provoked outrage. She later apologised, but it ultimately cost Qu her job.

Yet the culture still has fans elsewhere.

Last year, Narayana Murthy, the founder of Indian software giant Infosys, spoke admiringly about China’s use of 996. He remarked in a TV interview that “no individual, no community, no country has ever come up without hard work”.

The AI gold rush

So why has the US tech industry chosen to embrace the trend? A key factor appears to have been the headlong rush to develop ways of using AI.

“It’s mainly AI companies,” explains Adrian Kinnersley, who runs recruitment businesses in Europe and North America. “It’s those that have some funding from venture capitalists, that are in a race to develop their products and get them out to market before someone else beats them to it. That’s led them into the idea that, if you work longer hours, you win the race.”

One of those AI start-ups is run by Magnus Müller, a young German-born entrepreneur. He co-founded Browser-Use, a business that is developing tools to help AI applications interact with web browsers. He lives in a “hacker-house”, a shared living and workspace, where he and his colleagues continually swap ideas, and believes working long hours is just a fact of life.

Magnus Müller

“I think it’s hard, what we’re trying to build. I think it’s the problems we’re trying to solve, giving AI these extra capabilities. It’s super hard, and very competitive, and most often the returns come when you just immerse yourself very deeply into a problem… then suddenly fascinating things happen.”

Browser-Use currently has just seven staff, but it is recruiting more. Müller says he is looking for people with the same kind of mentality as himself. Anyone who wants to work a 40-hour week, he says, is unlikely to fit in.

“We really look for people who are just addicted, who love what they’re doing”, he emphasises. “It’s like gaming, OK? It’s like you’re addicted to gaming… for us, it doesn’t really feel like work. We just do what we love.”

Others disagree. Deedy Das is a partner at Menlo Ventures, a venture capital firm which has a near 50-year record of investing in technology businesses. He thinks the most common mistake young entrepreneurs make is insisting their employees work 996-style hours.

Deedy Das

“I think the thing young founders get wrong is they view hours worked in and of itself as necessary and sufficient to think of themselves as productive. And that’s where the fallacy lies”, he explains.

“Forcing your employees to come in, and hustle, is a downstream artefact of such a mindset.”

He thinks such an approach can alienate those with families, as well as experienced older workers who “can actually work far less and achieve much more because they know what they’re doing”. He adds that continual long hours will lead to long-term burnout.

However, he concedes that for company founders themselves, with skin in the game and the potential to become very wealthy if their business succeeds, different rules apply.

“Frankly, I would be shocked if a founder wasn’t working 70-80 hours per week. I can personally say… if I’m investing in an early-stage founder, if they’re not working 70-80 hours a week, it’s probably not a great investment.”

Academic and author on workplace culture, Tamara Myles, says hustle culture is unsustainable, especially if people feel compelled to be working at all times. But she concedes there are grey areas.

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“The nuance here is that a lot of these tech companies that are living this 996 culture are actually not hiding it, they’re advertising it. They’re selling it as a badge of honour, almost,” she says.

But that doesn’t mean everyone who agrees to work 996 actually wants to, she argues. “You might be staying because the job market is tough right now, or you might be here for a visa, and you depend on it. So there might be power dynamics at play.”

Health risks

Yet those who do choose to burn the midnight oil could end up paying a heavy price.

Concerns over the health impact of working long hours are certainly not new. In Japan, a country with a long-established hard-work culture, where so-called salarymen have notoriously supported the post-war economy with utter dedication to their employers, there is even a word for it: Karōshi.

It means death through overwork, and refers principally to strokes and heart attacks suffered by people working very long hours. Karōjisatsu,

Both are recognised in Japanese law, and families are in theory eligible for compensation from a government scheme, although in practice proving a death derives from overwork can be difficult.

More broadly, analysis published in 2021 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that long working hours – defined as more than 55 hours per week – had led to 745,000 deaths worldwide from stroke and heart disease in 2016.

It concluded that working 55 hours or more a week increased the risk of dying of heart disease by 17% compared to working 35-40 hours, and raised the risk of a stroke by 35%.

The productivity threshold

Then, there’s productivity – broadly speaking the amount that actually gets done for every hour worked.

Studies have shown that as hours go up, productivity initially increases – but once a threshold is reached it starts to decline again as physical and mental exhaustion sets in. The ‘sweet spot’ is widely recognised to be around 40 hours per week.

As one recent study put it: “At around 40h per five-day work week, workers seem to be able to maintain productivity fairly well, but when individuals exceed this threshold and engage in longer work hours, their job performance gradually weakens because of increased fatigue and underprivileged health conditions.”

In other words, once this threshold is reached, the extra output from every hour worked starts to decline.

Even so, there will always be a temptation for companies to employ fewer people and get them to work for longer. This is because each extra employee comes at a cost: they have to be recruited, trained if necessary, and paid.

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But research suggests this approach can backfire. According to Michigan State University, productivity can fall so sharply that “an employee working 70 hours per week has almost no difference in output than an employee working 50 hours per week”.

This isn’t a new concept. A century ago, Henry Ford set an example that other major industrialists would follow, when he cut working hours for staff in his car factories and adopted a 40-hour, five-day week.

100-hour weeks

Nevertheless, there are those who believe that British companies today could take a leaf out of the US tech sector’s book.

For example, the co-founder and former CEO of BrewDog, James Watt, posted a widely-shared video in which he said: “I think the whole concept of work-life balance was invented by people who hate the work they do. So if you love what you do, you don’t need work life balance, you need work-life integration.”

He subsequently pointed to a study by academics at King’s College London that showed people in the UK are among the least likely to believe work should always come first. He said it showed the UK to be “one of the world’s least work-oriented countries”.

In a BBC documentary in 2022, Watt himself was accused of inappropriate behaviour and abuse of power in the workplace. He apologised to anyone who felt uncomfortable because of his behaviour but hit out at “false rumours and misinformation”.

BrewDog’s new chief executive James Taylor said last year the business is “well past” its previous controversies.

HBO

For some in the UK, talk of 996 culture could feel rather familiar.

Jobs at large corporate law firms here pay high salaries, but many demand long hours in return. According to a survey carried out last year by the website Legal Cheek, it is not uncommon for average working days to be 12 hours or more.

Investment banking – the wheeling and dealing side of the financial industry, which looks after mergers, acquisitions and stock market launches – is also notorious for long hours. Industry sources suggest 65 to 70 hours a week are relatively common, and can extend up to 100 hours when a major deal is being finalised.

‘Working smarter’?

Is it legal here? UK law, under the working time regulations, states that most employees should not have to work more than 48 hours a week on average. But people can choose to opt out and work longer if they choose. So provided the employee gives their consent, 996 is allowed.

However Ben Wilmott, head of public policy at the human resources professionals’ association CIPD, thinks it is wrong to believe that long hours lead to better performance.

“There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all between working long hours and productivity”, he says. “There is quite good evidence which shows there’s a risk of ill health if you work long hours… there’s a higher risk of stroke and heart disease.

“So I think the focus should be on working smarter rather than longer… improving management capability, technology adoption, adoption of AI to improve productivity, rather than a focus on increasing working hours.”

Universal Images Group

Some campaigners believe the UK could actually benefit from a reduction in working hours, and the adoption of a four-day week.

They point to the results of a pilot project carried out in 2022, in which 61 organisations agreed to cut working hours for all staff for six months without any reduction in pay.

It concluded that this significantly reduced stress and illness in the workforce, and helped companies retain staff, without losing productivity.

Recruitment expert Adrian Kinnersley believes the current enthusiasm for 996 remains largely confined to the technology sector, and for a good reason.

“Whether you need to work 80 hours a week is debatable, but I think you would struggle in the current environment to compete with a relaxed 35-hour week culture,” he says.

For Browser-Use founder Magnus Müller meanwhile, the hours he and his peers work in Silicon Valley are really nothing remarkable.

“I’m from a tiny village in south Germany”, he says. “The farmers there, they get up at five every day and work more than 12 hours per day, seven days a week. And they don’t take any holidays, or maybe just two to three days when they can get someone to take care of their cows.

“So I think there are so many industries where people have so much harder jobs, and struggle so much harder, and work so much harder. I would say it’s more like kindergarten, what we are doing compared to them.”

Top image credit: Getty.

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