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 could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don’t make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.
You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn’t poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.
So what I’m hearing from that headline alone is that he’s a psychopath who doesn’t work more than 5 hours a week, and what little “”“work”“” he does consists of getting drunk at lunch and moaning to other CEOs about how lazy his workers are.
It’s not just saturday morning cartoon villain evil.
It’s also incredibly fucking stupid.
Anything that you get better outcomes from by making people work longer, like assembly lines, can be done better by robots anyway, and of course you as capital owner don’t have to live life after your dominant hand gets crushed and amputated.
Anything that isn’t pure rote work, you get better results when people are not overworked and spending thirty hours a week sticking fucking pencils in your acoustic ceiling because nobody’s fucking brain works that long and hard.
Also automation is getting better and better all the damn time. The only reason why we haven’t hit 30 hour workweek is due to declining unions and and exploitation politics.
I learned that China had basically made this shit illegal years ago, but work hours in China are still insane. I am willing to bet that they will still have incredible growth and prosperity even if those workhours are strictly enforced.
People like this dipshit need to be stripped of all possessions and wealth and immured alive.
Yes they are illegal but companies will use workarounds to get people to put in more time. it’s a fake law basically
I guess even in authoritarian police states where the government will disappear or execute you for any opposition businesses still get away with being assholes.
if you do business in any authoritarian police state, you will see that laws are arbitrarily enforced. and you will regularly be paying fees that don’t exist.
Well, thank you for the warning. So you are saying people should avoid working for you at any cost.
🖕
Why, so they can write even more shitty software?
Higher taxes on the rich don’t go far enough, because they can just leverage their assets to corrupt democracies and roll everything back.
Corporations need to be banned.
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.
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.
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.
