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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

> 996 is just theater for investors.

Investors who have not heard of the research into productivity that says long hours have no significant benefit for skilled work? Who have not heard of diminishing returns? Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?

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The market for this is people who are convinced that the research only proved most people are lazy and unproductive. Surely these wiz kids we’re backing are too jazzed about their startup dreams to have their output decrease after the first 24 hours of constant caffeine and hacking.

12 hours max then the crash of undecipjerable gibberish. See? Your brain requires rest. My 12 hours days had two naps. While the rest of the team did not, in only a month, everyone but me literally crashed and burned...the first clue was them not finishing sentences. Next was searching for words, and then the pause while they stare off into space. All the Facebook prison experiment.

A lot of these VC types, ah, not the smartest, to put it mildly. See their twitters (or, well, their investments; remember WeWork?)

A lot of their investments are made on the basis of what they can sell it for before it all falls apart.

So in that context theatre in general makes sense. Not sure why long working hours would be - its not something people fund managers about with regard to an IPO, for example, so it probably does not hugely raise exit values.

You should see the code they crank out. All rated in characters per second/lines of code. And now with AI? Super crap. Ultra processed sterilized caca del Toro.

They seem, as a class, very susceptible to dumb trends. This _kind_ of works for them, because occasionally something that looks like a dumb trend turns out to work (remember Facebook games? Still amazed that became a thing), and VCs only require a rather low success rate to operate, but usually a dumb trend is just a dumb trend.

Irritatingly, every time, people use this to claim that the dumb trend is the next big thing. A few years ago, anyone sensible could see that NFTs were bloody ridiculous, but you’d have lots of people on here proclaiming a glorious new NFT-based future, because, after all, the VCs were pumping money into it.

It's easy to believe that on average longer hours may not have much marginal improvement to productivity but that for you specifically they do.

And being able to convince yourself that your team is special, not just average, is an ability that is more often found in people taking big crazy swings.

Especially if you have a history of working overtime in crunch time in your own career in the past and believe that you couldn't have finished certain projects on time if not. (Which could be different than working long hours every day for years, but then you're back to the potential for nuance around "on average" and "for me and my team, because we're exceptional.")

Everyone thinks that they are special and that their take on X is special.

Once in a while, they're right. Most of the time, by the definition of the law of averages, most of them are not.

Maybe I just have no ambition to become the next trillionaire because I'm lazy or whatever, but I am under no illusion that me or my team are exceptional. We're good. We get stuff done. We make money. Investors like us. Our customers like us. Our business partners like us. And many people here on HN are likely in a similar boat. Many without working 996.

It's not about that. The first thing any investor wants to know, and almost goes without saying in the venture world, is that the team is committed. 996 puts on the show that everyone's all-in. All things equal, those who work harder will win. Investors won't audit your code, in many cases won't use your product and this is a dumb and simple proxy metric for the kind of work you're putting in. Especially now that AI reset the field and has a ton of startups dashing to the finish line to establish category dominance, investors are the Coliseum crowds that want to see modern day gladiators (their founders and teams) giving it all or die trying.

Yes, sounds like investors to me.

Theres a lot of very dumb investors.

>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?

The majority of rich people do not work for their money. They inherit or "soft inherit" the money. They do investment stuff because it makes them feel big and powerful and important.

You can tell by their speech patterns. Meet some rich people in real life and pay attention to just how slow their patterns of speech and movement are on average. Most of them act like they don't have a care and all the time in the world. Because they do and they always have. Hustle is for the plebs.

Look back at some of the big scams like Wework, FTX, theranos. I've read the documentaries and its the same story. All the rich people they bilked say the same thing. "THEY PAID SO MUCH ATTENTION TO ME" more or less.

I went to a seminar a lot of years back. The grifter on stage was hawking a product on how to invest in venture capital or something. The pitch was "got no money? Use other people's money! Pay $300 to learn how"

I don't know how true it is, as I am not about to take this grifters sales pitch at face value, but given that the grifter exhibited a lot of traits that I see in some of these rich investor people, I suspect that some investors actually use other people's money to invest, in some way that my plebe mind just cannot fathom.

That’s what VC firms generally do.

The funny/sad thing is that the house always wins. Even if an investment deal goes south, _someone_ still comes up ahead, somehow. Again, something my plebe brain can't grok.

> "got no money? Use other people's money! Pay $300 to learn how"

Commendable that a grifter is actually following their own advice!

Haha! I once heard a saying that went, "the only way to get rich quick is to sell ways to get rich quick."

This was when I was deep in MLM land, which fortunately I have exited. But it seems like some VCs and grifters have the same mindset.

That is true, but the majority of rich people pay other people to manage their investments. They might manage the family business or similar but there are who industries and careers built around managing rich people's money (private banking, family offices, etc.).

I have met quite a lot of rich people in real life and I do not recognise your description. It is true hustle is for plebs, because hustle is born of desperation, but rich people act much the same as non-hustling plebs.

I worked at a large bank HQ office. I was young and the wealth management departments "darling" of tech because I would enthusiastically help them with their odd issues. Even though it was really not my job. (Free food and drinks there!)

I assure you that banks do not have huge luxury lounges with expensive drinks(like 1k+ bottle)and such for the employees of rich people. True rich people have lots of time and they do occasionally drop in to make face appearance and "Show face" as I've heard it described. As well as the very rich bank c-suite that would regularly drop into the department. Though they had their own private area on the top three floors. (which I also scavenged from lol)

That said due to my helping them I often got to see private info about the people that came to visit specifically to exactly how much money they had with us(and they would always say umm you are really not supposed to see this ok?). Anyway my point is I've probably met more verified rich people than most people so for what my opinions are worth thats how I got them. Even a couple of billionaires whom's name would not show up on any list because its private wealth.

Yes, those investors. There are more of them than the well-informed kind.

Yes, many such cases

We have thousands of such caches.

That these people have all the money is the surest evidence that we do not live in a meritocracy.

>Who have no experience of the reality of working long hours themselves?

The vast, vast majority of investors are nepo babies that inherited dad's company and his trust fund. The rest of them that may have worked have deluded themselves into thinking it was because of their "hard work" they got there

So uh, yeah, they're dumbasses. But even then: they don't care that long hours have no significant benefit: the people that will accept 996 will do it for the same salary as someone doing a 9-5. Don't anthropomophize investors, they never see people, they see numbers.

> The vast, vast majority of investors are nepo babies that inherited dad's company and his trust fund.

Citation needed.

This is incorrect for ‘investors’ in general (in many countries practically everyone’s an investor because that’s how pensions mostly work now) and _may_ even be incorrect for large investors as a class, but specifically for the type of investor who invests, either directly or through a VC fund, in startups, well, I don’t have numbers, but I’d be willing to bet it is correct for _them_.

Investors are dipshits more often than not. Just because someone has money to throw doesn’t mean they know much about many things.

They also have to be stupid enough not to hire someone why does know things to manage their money for them.

See the story of Theranos. Pretty much everyone who did basic due diligence declined to invest in Theranos; they apparently didn’t even have faked audited accounts for the purpose. But there were enough dumb rich people willing either not to ask the person who knew, or to ignore them, that Theranos had no trouble getting funding.

Now the average VC fund isn’t _as_ incompetent as the average Theranos investor, but it’s still a field where decisions by ‘visionaries’ are often valued over expertise.

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