I was often surprised by my colleagues claiming extra long work weeks, all while looking remarkable fresh. I couldn't work it out - I mean, if I worked a solid 14 hour day, you could see it clearly on my face, yet if they do it, they seem to develop a healthy glow. Turns out a lot of them were in the building, but not at their desk. Oftentimes they were in the gym/steam/sauna. That explained the healthy glow!
This includes an hour nap in his car, lunch for 2 hours, and running errands/personal things outside the office for a few more hours.
If he sat down and worked straight, we figured he would only need to be in the office no more than 8 hours
(Now if he claims he works 14-hour days, that's a bit dishonest.)
Suddenly my work hours were an issue. They started hard enforcing a department-wide policy where if you weren't seen at your desk, you're assumed to be not working. Under the threat of being fired, I was forced to sit at work from 9am to 7pm. I suspect managers also had "monitors" assigned to keep a watch over employees like me and hours we were at our desks.
It was a massive waste of my time as I was now spending a additional 20 hours a week at the office to do the same amount of work as before.
And then you are expected to be always online, even on rare vacations, and respond to emails very quickly. Plus work from remote desktop before bedtime and right after wake up to handle overnight emails and read news. So even if you are not in office you are constantly "ON" and the brain is always working, even on a treadmill in the gym... And then during IPO/initiation/reporting season it's actual 100-120 hours of actual office hours, but that are spikes, after which there is usually some relax time of only light 5x12 schedule. This is for research. Investment bankers in a narrow sense (IPOs, etc) just work in those spike/calm mode.
When I first saw the 996 story, my first reaction - given my background - was "whiner"... But in banking your monthly salary is just to cover your "costs of doing business" (but still high), only total annual compensation is a meaningful number, of which the fixed monthly part used to be less than half in good years. So in banking you kind of know why you are doing this. In programming bonuses are usually a much smaller fraction. Plus important thing - you could actually do 100 hours work if you do different work and are switching between tasks that load different parts of the brain. Financial modelling is comparable to programming (actually it is if we agree that Excel is the most used functional programming language) by cognitive load, but it takes a small share of total time. In the 996 case of constant coding it's very doubtful. I mostly do programming now and when I have 8 hours of uninterrupted clear mind spent on complex algos - that's a very productive lucky day. In the 6-8 hours range the focus and brain capacity usually drop so much that having good sleep & rest is much more important to have another good and deep 6-8 hours tomorrow.
But then you could write docs, add tests, do simple refactoring, setup backend & cloud, fight with configs - it takes hours and does not load brain as much as some concurrent lock-free data structure. Someone still needs to do that job and it could easily turn 6-8 hours into 10-14.
Rarely is this the routine for senior team members. Many of the most senior people I worked with only showed up if something bad had happened, or they knew their seniors were going to be around. One member of the board that I reported to only turned up for a day in the entire year, and that was for a meeting with FINMA! That also happened to be the only time I saw his boss in the office... It seems everyone's just taking the piss wherever possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX1P-gGqNjo
All of them seem tired, with strong dark circle under their eyes.
Maybe I'm being suggestible because you raised it, but they all seem to have that shell-shocked, thousand yard stare that only comes after months of crunch time and no rest.