The technology will liberate us from work. To accelerate the liberation, please be available on Saturday.
An August Hacker News discussion asked whether readers were working a 996 schedule: nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week. Responses included resistance to such hours and accounts of voluntarily combining a job with startup work. It is a small, self-selected discussion, not a survey of Silicon Valley employment practices.1
The thread leaves the prevalence question unanswered. It does raise a workplace negotiation: when a task gets faster, does the person doing it get the hour back?
Productivity has more than one destination
Doing a task faster creates options. An organization can produce the same output with less effort, produce more with the same effort, improve quality, lower prices, or attempt work that was previously impractical.
Leisure requires somebody to leave the saved hour unassigned. The productivity software has no authority to do that.
There may be good reasons for a company to choose increased output. A young business may be fighting to survive or trying to capture an opportunity. The issue is clarity: do not advertise liberation as the social destination while treating every saved hour as available for reassignment.
The voluntary part deserves precision
A founder choosing to work intensely on a company has a particular relationship to the risk and potential reward. An employee may have a different relationship. The same number of hours does not make the arrangements identical.
Even among founders, circumstances differ. Some have savings, support, or few outside obligations. Others have care responsibilities, health constraints, or a day job that finances the experiment.
A culture that uses visible hours as a universal measure of seriousness can mistake circumstances for character. It can also reward the performance of work over the quality of decisions.
The evening has become a proof point
There is a social appeal to being seen working late. It is legible. The customer conversation that changed the product may be invisible; the green status light remains available for inspection.
AI tools can make this performance more elaborate. A person can supervise several streams of activity and feel responsible for staying present because something is always running.
But a system operating continuously does not establish that a human should be continuously available to it. Delegation that requires permanent attendance is an unusual interpretation of relief.
The office does not own every efficiency gain by nature
Ask why the new tool requires longer hours. A transition, a deadline, a staffing shortage, and a permanent expectation need different answers, even if all four arrive under the heading “moving fast.”
Measure the result, then discuss the time
An intense period should have terms the people involved can understand, including a point at which the terms can be revisited.
The four-day week should not require a seventh day to recover from the demonstration.