Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again called for longer working weeks has returned, this time with an emphasis on schedules like the 996-pattern used in parts of China.
Murthy’s comments revive a debate which began in 2024, when he argued that Indian employees should work 70 hours a week.
Oh fuck off, asshole… you need to be thrown in prison.
He needs to take a long walk, on a short pier.
Into the warm embrace of a hungry octopus…
Cthulu, we have our next offering for you…
Needs to be shot into the sun. Return his atoms to the foundry
There is a large body of research out there regarding 12h shift work in healthcare. I’m only linking 1 article, a quick search will yield more, easily.
A TLDR on it: 12h shifts decrease performance. Stacking them decreases safety and performance, cumulatively. Car accidents pick up significantly on day 4.
It’s utter madness that healthcare professionals are allowed to work (in many countries) longer than truck drivers. It’s even more ridiculous that many countries have a medical doctor internship program that is designed by an absolute cocaine fiend assigning 30 hour days - and see nothing wrong with it.
Capitalism protects the capital (goods, and equipment, on a truck), and values human lives at approx $3 million (based on financial cost for the company when a life is lost).
The value of the truck and the contents of the trailer are frequently greater than the value of the driver for a given trip, and therefore justify more caution and care than any given patient in a doctor’s office.
It’s almost like the collective bargaining of a union works.
There’s less errors overall in having consistency in who healthcare reports off to between shifts. The 17% is balanced out by that (math wise). The errors in having 3 people reporting around an 8hr clock are significantly higher than with the 12hr clock.
But a 4th shift? Staying over to 16hrs? The 36hr week, I feel, is the extent to which you can safely take the 12h shift.
Additional madness is in that, in 26 states, the administrators of hospitals can hold shift workers over into double shifts. I don’t know about you, but I lose the capacity to read words around hour 18. Yet, this practice is engaged routinely in health care, without regard to sleep patterns. Maybe it is an 8h shift. Maybe that person spent day shift in school then went to work for an evening shift. Now is being held on their license to stay a night shift. And expected to drive home after more than 24hrs awake. Maybe their babysitter leaves at midnight. How good and safe is that patient care going to be?
US: Truck driver crashing causes property damage, patients dieing causes the bed to open up for another paying customer.
Rest of the world: Shortages due to cost of education along with not enough spots available for said education.
probably the shortage problems, and unwillingness for the industry to alleviate the problem. and the pipeline from college to health professional is long and grueling. MD IS heavily gatekeeped by the license certification association.
Am I missing the article link?
Let’s try this one
It’s not showing on my client either, hopefully they edit their comment.
Yes, I failed to paste the copy. After a 12 hour shift.
Apparently it’s about reducing shift changes, which is when most mistakes happen. You would have to hope that someone has done research into mistakes caused by fatigue vs. mistakes caused by shift changes.
In the healthcare environment that is true. 12h shifts retain consistency between back and forth reporting, while with 8hr shifts things get lost or missed or misinterpreted in the handoff.
My point is that 3 is the sweet spot, it’s the 4th and fifth shifts that become cumulatively bad and result in increased car accidents on the commute.
Someone told me that the reason for 12 hour shifts is that most medical mistakes and accidents happen because of shift changes. Reducing the number of shift changes from 3 to 2 results in fewer mistakes, despite longer working hours.
This is true. It also results in less intershift rancor. But it doesn’t change the difficulties of 4th and 5th shifts in the same week.
I’m all for turning a 40hr/5day work week into a 36hr/3day work week. It works well in 24hr professions.
What I’m not for is this 996 nonsense.
Not really, a huge cocaine user came up with the system, and we use it since then because “it’s as we always have done it!!”
“You worked really hard this year. 60 hour weeks. Impressive but you can do more. See that rolls Royce in the parking lot? If you work 80 hour weeks next year and everything works out, I’ll be able to buy a second one.”
He doesn’t work that hard, so why the fuck should we?
He probably thinks he works 80 hour weeks because he is including schmoozing with clients and company paid lunches and dinners as “work”
“This is nothing. When I was young, I worked 80 hours a week”, Murthy probably
These are the little fuckwits that pretend waiting on a phone call back from someone is hard work. They have no concept of what real work is like; their “work” is just their ordinary greasy life made to benefit a shareholder in addition to themselves.
Oh, you want me to go play golf with this guy using the company card and then go for dinner and drinks? Do some soft sales, just having regular conversation? Sure, I’ll take that “work”. Man, it’s tough. Nobody works 80 hour weeks like me.
Pointing and telling someone what to do, isn’t work.
He has his own private chef to make him food, he has maids to take care of his house(s), he has assistants to do all his errands, if he has kids he has nannies to take care of them. So in his backwards ass head he can easily “work” more than 70+ hours a week and doesn’t understand why us lowly peons can’t do the same.
We pretend to work
They pretend to pay us
Crunching does not work!
Instead, it reduces productivity to a fraction (often 10% of normal), countering any time added.
You want to improve your productivity, you make your workers happy. Make sure they can eat, have good healthcare, have adequate family life, etc.
We now have studies that counter the crunching myths and time theft myths.
The cruelty is the point
They’re not invincible. We’re not our ancestors. Look at this little dweeb. Is anyone really intimidated by him?
So go get him, tiger.
I’m not in India. These dweebs almost always have personal security nonetheless.
Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
In actuality, yes, their job is to maximize productivity for the dollar spent, hence maximizing profits, and the best way to do that for most job pools is by improving the QoL of the workforce.
They likely do value control over productivity, but that’s not the job of upper management. A lot of jobs (the bullshit jobs ) are to fulfill a personal need for an entourage, the illusion of business activity. That is a – human – trait.
Our c-suite execs might believe it controlling the workforce is their job, though, if they’re inadequately educated about the current state of the art. Hopefully, their AI replacements will be more current and won’t be interfered with by the BoD or shareholders.
Imagine if every muscle cell in my biceps wanted to self-actualize. I want to grab a cup of coffee, but every muscle cell in my arms has their own ideas. Something that normally takes a second, now takes 10 years of negotiations. It would not do me a lick of good if I had the strongest muscle cells in existence if I could not control them.
Of course people should not be regarded as mere muscle cells, but the point here is to show how obviously valuable and vital control can be when you want to serve some ambition.
Should workers be controlled like they are soldiers?
Whose interests does the business prioritize? And how heavily?
In a worker cooperative workers are the owners. Workers hire and fire their managers at every level of management. All power flows are bottom up. The workers are the entourage. In this case workers are better positioned to self-actualize, because there is no capricious, lazy, ignorant, spoiled silky pants tyrant at the top.
But what about a more typical business? Well, there is either one owner or a tiny cabal of owners, and everyone else is just a resource, a means to an end. And you have to exert control over the means of labor to benefit the entourage at the top. If the entourage can figure out how to produce things without workers, they will get rid of them immedeately, why? Because the workers are just a means, they are incidental, they exist because slavery was deemed too toxic, and because no one figured out a way to get rid of the workers yet. That’s the only reason workers exist in capitalism.
Managers want to give orders and see those orders followed immediately. They don’t want debates, challenges, counter proposals, etc. If workers want to self-actualize, that’s a huge problem for a top down power flow. That’s why it is essential to beat the desire to self-actualize out of workers early. That way mindless servility is assured, which is good for control.
Also, if your workers work 80 hour weeks, they won’t start competing ventures in their spare time. Again, control.
I kinda feel sorry for all the workers out there, because self-actualization is a heavenly mandate for every sentient being, and yet they are plugged into and slotted into a structure where worker (out group) self-actualization is a huge obstacle for the (in group) entourage.
Getting everyone happy can be a slow and messy process. What if you make weapons and your workers decide it is unethical to make weapons? You are a manager of youtube and you order workers to censor channels for entourage’s benefit, but they have their own ideas, and they pretend to be censoring while actually not censoring? There is no end to such possibilities. Hence why the soul of many people MUST be crushed if the top down power flow is to be served in full measure.
Every so often there is an oddball manager like Ricardo Semler. But Ricardo Semler is the exception.
They actually think it’s more productive. They’re so good at gaslighting, they even do it to themselves.
If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.
The bosses win if winning is continuing to manage the company poorly.
The shareholders lose since cruel treatment reduces productivity and weakens profit margins. It depends on how seriously the business controllers want to actually do a capitalism and create a product and turn a profit.
If you pay low enough wages and workers are too exhausted to do anything about it, lower productivity is profitable. It’s about the bottom line.
Ok I’ll do 70 hour weeks as long as it promises I am also a billionaire by retirement. So that’ll be a salary of 21 million a year please.
Exactly, I’ll work my ass off for a year or two, but then I’m out
You won’t be out when your rent is a million per month and groceries are 100k.
that’s less than the ganis on a billion in investments
By retirement?
I’d expect majority shares in any company I worked that much for, AND a 7-figure salary.
And retirement would be in 5 years.
So 6 days of 12-hour shifts? Sounds like a pretty novel way to tank your economy because no one’ll have the time to spend money or raise a family.
“Why aren’t the proles making babies? I specifically requested it!”
Absolutely! The short sighted idiocy of this really points out the corporate thinking only about the next Q. This would get maybe a month before the economic crash
Which they will then solve with mass immigration they can control easier.
Japan has a habit of doing this. The birth rate cratered, productivity is not that great and economic growth is famously low. Most workers do a form of performance theater, an actual “we pretend to work”.
So stupid. Wasting potential personal time for such theatrics.
They should take inspiration from my coworkers, who don’t even bother to pretend.A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).
I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.
It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.
can someone kidnap this motherfucker and make him work normal labor job for 80 hours a week, for a year, and see how much he likes this stupid fucking pants on head idea after that
The pampered idiots that suggest these things would literally not survive a year of actual work at 40 hours let alone what they propose
still solves the problem.
That’s the thing, looking at the company they don’t work “normal labor” jobs. Infosys is into info tech, consulting, and outsourcing services and looking at their acquisition history I get the impression they buy up smaller companies and consolidate their work into their product. Basically they make websites and tools that your company buys for $100k to analyze and optimize workflow, but the site doesn’t work well and they never fix it. After 2 years enough time has passed that the higher ups don’t feel embarrassed retiring the software and buying something else. Also, rather than just coding themselves they code with AI or buy other companies that already wrote the code and put it into their own product.
At the end of the day they aren’t “working,” they are being available. They are the shitty guy who is answering a work call on a Saturday while they are supposed to be watching their kid’s ball game. They are the person who has to step out of the movie theater because they are getting an urgent work call at 10 pm on Friday. They are the person who flies back from their vacation two days early because the boss wants to ask about sales numbers. This is how Executive suite types say they work 16 hour days 7 days a week, they count every hour of the day as work because they are available, not because they were being productive that entire time.
Personally I’d make an exception to my moral stance that work as punishment is slavery, and would prefer to keep him around forcing him to work 70 hours a week, in addition to doing all the other chores required so that he can live - in prison - for the rest of his life.
Maybe we’ll make it 84 hours a week just for good measure, can’t be giving him a day off.
Seems more poetic
Looks very nicely built I would be pleased to have one of these in my home.
Far too nice. No need for the blade to be so sharp and free of rust.
There’s an awful lot of billionaires. Don’t want it to take too long or we’ll be hacking at necks all day.
they will mostly like concentrate in 1 place, like an enclave, let them collect there all at once, then you can make your move.
When the time is right, you squirt some acid on the blade. Any acid… Citric and acetic are pretty easy and they hurt like a beach on a small cut.
or do it the old fasioned way in , like with scimitar.
He should work himself to death alone and leave us with a better world
Fuck that! We should be aiming for 21-28 hours being the normal length of the employed week for everyone everywhere, and it not being necessary to work any more than that unless you want to for yourself. We can’t accelerate forever, we need to do less work hours and have good quality of life, otherwise what’s even the point of technology?
Technology is now used as a tool to perpetually force the working class to obey the ever increasing draconian rules. AI is one thing, highlighting that all it matters to them is a profit with no gratitude towards the workers.
This is essentially legal slavery, fuelled by big corp and the governmental bootlickers.
@oftenawake @throws_lemy starting with 4 working days per week would be an massive improvement already
Arguably we are already there. Depends how much you want to yourself. My house? No comrade, our house.
Share a house and you can do very little work. You could take it pretty far too. Think of those capsule hotels, could fit loads of capsules in my current bedroom even if you want to have your own capsule - sharing can further increase population. Less than 20 hours of work a month for static fees (mortgage, tax) per person. Food is about 4 hours of work a month. Heating wont change, though you will use more hot water for washing, probably 2-5 hours of work for energy and water.
All essentials covered, less than 30 hours of work a month required per person. Basing this on my expenses in the UK and minimum wage.
If you follow the standard 5 day business week, that is 70 hours worked for every 50 hours not worked. Account for 8 hours of sleep a night and you have 2 hours a day to commute to your job. Literally zero time for any other needs. And that’s ONLY if you are generous enough to give everyone the weekend to recharge.
For a 7 day work week with no days off, allowing for 8 hours of sleep per day and 2 hours of commute time, that is 4 hours a day to do anything else. I also would assume that part of the day would still be considered off hours for lunch. As well. Call it 3 hours a day for anything not work related.
This man should be hanged for even suggesting this as a reasonable productivity schedule for any living being.
No joke, I really do think in a just society he would be hanged.
Yeah - there is no way that you are able to raise children or even go to the dentist checkup with such a work schedule. And if such a schedule was implemented, that would be the collapse of everything else. Cinemas, theatres, bars, events, sport clubs and so on.
“Infosys co-founder suggested slavery could be brought back with updated terms and conditions”
This is how this news should be titled
I do not understand his logic.
Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
Someone working 70 hours is a mindless drone. This is how you get 13" iPads accidentally sold for 15€ “because the computer said so” (happened in a big box retailer in my country, no human involved in the process objected the price until WEEKS after the sale, when accounting noticed it, and they had to beg customers “pwease return our €1000 iPads and we give you a €25 gift card as a token of gratitude” and everyone just laughed about that)
Especially for developers, for the same price is better to get two that can do tasks with full attention rather than a single one that after 12 hours of job is just mindlessly clicking on “accept” on whatever a LLM is spitting out or half assing solutions because don’t have the right state of mind to think for a proper one.
Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
What he wants is to pay one person for 70hrs, the same as he’d pay one person for 35 hrs.
AND he will massively underpay that worker for their 35 hours.
Pay workers the bare minimum they need to survive, and have them spend all their waking hours working for you. That’s how you get rich, apparently.
And he wants person 2 to be desperate for person 1’s job
Paying someone 70 hours has the same cost as paying two persons 35 hours, right? (In my country technically no, because higher base taxation)
I mean it isn’t, but the difference is like marginal, but you get added costs like more hardware,more HR needed ( after a certain number of people) It support for those people etc.
But really it’s penny pinching.
That’s the thing. They wont pay you more. Maybe some people would get the extra money, but all new employees would get the same salary for more hours.
