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.
“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.”
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”.
MoFo wants 80 hour work week and pays 4,353 USD per year to Indian CS graduates.
When his stocks tank as people leave his company in droves, he would realise. Always hit them where it hurts - their wallets.
Talk about telling on yourself having no idea how to run a business.
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.
I am not an advocate of slavery generally speaking but I do think that it is a just and righteous thing to enslave someone like this and to use them for backbreaking labour for 20 hours per day.
Like. Make it pointless too. Dig this hole. Fill that hole. Dig it again.
Feed them stuff you find in dumpsters. Beat them if their hole digging is going to slow. Test cosmetics on them. Sell them to be used for sex.
That seems right to me.
You’re using the word “slavery” rhetorically, more or less, but in the eyes of a Sociopathic Oligarch, we are already living on literal slave wages. They couldn’t imagine living on the average annual income in this country, but they expect us to, and work harder on top of it.
They would pay us nothing, like the olden days, but then they’d have to cover our food and housing, and that would cost them more. So they pay us just barely enough to keep us from revolting.
We are already slaves.
No I’m not.
I mean we literally force people like this into irons and force them to work under threat of corporal punishment.
There’s what, maybe 10, 20,000 people like this the world over?
It would be a one time thing. If they managed to have kids before they died from exhaustion or the unforeseen results of pharmaceutical experiments their children would be given good homes and loving adoptive parents, so we didn’t risk reviving the institution of slavery. It would be a one time thing. Justice.
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Nah, just…make them work regular hours for a pay of an ordinary employee. They could take extra hours to earn more and demonstrate to everyone how to “work hard and earn big”. This will be cruelest punishment they can get.
Oh, and put them on a KPI and control their work productivity.
Good luck finding talent, dickhead
He should work himself to death alone and leave us with a better world
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.
We pretend to work
They pretend to pay us
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Am I missing the article link?
Let’s try this one
It’s not showing on my client either, hopefully they edit their comment.
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.
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
“Why aren’t the proles making babies? I specifically requested it!”
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.
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.
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.
Looks very nicely built I would be pleased to have one of these in my home.
or do it the old fasioned way in , like with scimitar.
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.
