Number of the week: 996

Overtime to the max.

“Working 9 to 5 is a way to make a living,” wrote Lora Kelley in a September 28 article in the New York Times’s business section. (Gift link.) “But in Silicon Valley, amid the competitive artificial intelligence craze, grinding ‘996’ is the way to get ahead. Or at least to signal to those around you that you’re taking work seriously.”

The “996” label for a work schedule — the digits represent “9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week,” or 72 hours a week — originated in China in the 2000s and by 2019 had sparked an “anti-996” movement. “One or more anonymous activists,” Wired reported in April 2019, “launched a website called 996.ICU, detailing Chinese labor laws that a 996 schedule may violate, including provisions that generally limit work to 44 hours a week and require overtime pay.” (The movement’s motto: “Developers’ lives matter.”) Regardless, many Chinese companies, including TikTok parent ByteDance and the giant e-tailer Alibaba, made 996 a compulsory policy, at least until a 2021 Chinese high court barred the practice.¹

Generated by Gemini from my prompt “996 work culture.” Looks pretty grim to me.

But that hasn’t deterred a cadre of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech founders — especially in the metastasizing AI sector — from enthusiastically adopting an even more extreme version of the schedule that led to injuries and at least one death among Chinese workers.

As recently as 2022 — evidenced in this Reddit discussion — 996 was an anomaly in the Bay Area tech world. No longer. Alex Reibman, co-founder of the AI startup Agency, told the San Francisco Standard last December: “Working 80, 90 hours a week is no stretch of the imagination. It’s something that is basically required if you want to build here.”

For Cyril Gorlla, 23, cofounder and CEO of AI risk-mitigation startup CTGT, regular 14-hour-plus workdays are driven by a maniacal desire to build “bulletproof” AI. “This work culture is not unprecedented when you consider the stringent work cultures of the Manhattan Project and NASA’s missions,” said Gorlla. “We’re solving problems of a similar if not more important magnitude.”

“Burnout is a myth and a self-fulfilling prophecy,” another AI founder in his 20s, Adam Guild, declared to a gathering of tech interns in August. 996 advocate Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old founder of Greptile — yes, it’s another AI startup — tweeted in September (capitalization sic):

recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays. i emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work.

Greptile was originally named Onboard; the new name puns on grep, a command-line utility. But the Gr- of Greptile might just as well stand for grindcore, another way of describing 996 culture.

Here, for example, is “Sam Financial Samurai,” tweeting on September 19:

Grindcore culture is back and it’s grindier than ever in San Francisco. I’ve got to admit, I’m a fan. FIRE and grindcore go hand-in-hand: put in an intense 10–15 years of work, and you just might buy yourself freedom for the rest of your life. That’s a trade worth making. Just be careful listening to the privileged class preaching the virtues of work-life balance. They’ve already extracted their pound of flesh from the system and now want to look virtuous while reducing competition.

(FIRE is a popular financial-self-help acronym that stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.”)

And where did grindcore come from? Like many -cores — deathcore, thrashcore, easycore, Nintendocore — it was originally a musical genre: “a more noise-filled style of hardcore punk,” as Wikipedia puts it. It emerged in the mid-1980s. Tech-filled grindcore is much newer (although grind to describe “hard, tedious work” goes back to at least the mid-19th century); I haven’t yet found a reference that predates 2025. Not that workers weren’t grinding away before then: we just called it something else, like hustle.

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A century or so ago, the buzz in the business world was all about the five-day work week, a revolutionary concept when Henry Ford introduced it in his auto-assembly plants. In recent years, the four-day work week and “flextime” seemed to be the wave of the future. But as “996” (and so much else) shows us, every progressive action is likely to provoke an unequal and regressive reaction.

In an October 5 opinion piece for The Guardian, Emma Beddington lamented that “996 work culture is sad and inhumane”:

I don’t get it. Hadn’t we all fallen out of love with hustle culture? We’ve witnessed the overwhelming success of four-day week initiatives with almost all trial participants electing to continue. We’ve looked at other countries and realised more enlightened approaches to reconciling family, community, life and work don’t necessarily come at a productivity cost, and make for happier, healthier citizens. The average working week in the Netherlands is 32.1 hours, but the OECD’s economic survey says it has been “outperforming peers” economically; it ranks fifth in the newest World Happiness Report (the US is 24th).

Her conclusion:

My own work equation (equal parts scrolling, blank staring, hen husbandry and hot drinks) is too complex – and unsuccessful – to catch on. I’m tempted to suggest 0/0/0, but that requires a tireless 24/7/365 commitment to overthrowing capitalism. The majority of people I asked actually dream of working three-day weeks (not far off the economist John Maynard Keynes’ quixotic 15 hours), but I’m not sure that’s buzzy enough. How about a 1:12 ratio of Teams meetings to tea breaks? Or one day in the office, six days screaming into the void (make SIV the new WFH)? An hour’s work, an hour questioning your life choices, then a lifetime hiding in the woods? I reckon with a catchy name and a rumour it makes you immortal, any of these could be Silicon Valley’s next big thing.

Need another cautionary tale? Here’s a Vice video report, from 2021, on “the extreme 996 work culture in China”:

1. This is where I note that the “996” I’m talking about here is not the Porsche 996, which was the fifth generation of the 911 mode. The number was an internal factory code and had nothing to do with work schedules.