Workaholism is Back

This sentiment is everywhere recently:

Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life) on Threads

The idea that employee well being is important to companies is well and truly dead. This article documents this shift in employee relations where even companies with a reputation for pampering employees, like Google, are asking for 60 hour work weeks in the office or else.

Threads

That post links to a Financial Post article written a random tool saying things like "That era is over. [Work-life balance] was always a fantasy designed to placate mediocrity. But this morning's NYT Morning newsletter is along the same lines, and a clip of Obama saying the same sort of thing went viral recently too. And it's reflecting a real phenomenon: I haven't been laid off (yet), but we're now expected to take up an extra 20% of work, in order to demonstrate AI-efficiency (or the willingness to work on the weekend if you're not able to make the AI boost pencil out). So I have some thoughts:

1. A great thing about America, and capitalism more generally, is that if you want to work like crazy and make a lot of money, no one is stopping you from doing that.
2. If you're 20 and have a ton of energy, are a workaholic, have an idea that will change the world, go for it! Make all the money.
3. A natural consequence of #1 is that the higher levels of most companies are populated by workaholics. Which is fine, it just means that the people deciding what counts as the ideal work week, and the importance of work-life balance, are people who find it natural to grind 60 hours a week (at least) and tend to think that other people are lazy.
4. As an old tweet that I can't find put it, this also means that the people who keep asking workers to put in longer hours, and saying "if I can put in 70 hours a week so can you," tend to be extremely well paid, such that they're not personally going grocery shopping, running errands, or shuttling their kids to school.
5. None of this is new. What is new:
   1. The labor market has tightened, so CEOs and their C-suite workaholic friends have more power to insist on this
   2. As the NYT article mentions, especially at big tech companies the easy returns from SAAS are burned out, and everyone's trying to squeeze out extra juice in order to justify and make room for the gargantuan investments they're making in AI infra.
6. One of the funniest things to come out of the tech industry in the past years was Gary from Chicago, the guy who got on camera at a Meta all-hands call to ask why they hadn't shifted to 4-day work weeks. At the time Zuck couldn't do much about this, but within a few months the market had turned and Gary was gone, along with ~30% of Meta's staff.
7. The lack of data is striking here. I remember reading that worker per-hour productivity declines after 4o hours per week; that may be out of date or incorrect, but no one on the 996 wagon is showing any data at all.
8. You only live once.
9. This cuts both ways: on the one hand, for most people their job is their best chance to leverage their skills to make some sort of change in the world. If work/life balance means extra time for scrolling social media I'm not sure you want more balance.
10. On the other hand, "I raised ARR by 15% through a successful marketing campaign" or "I launched 10 B2B products" are not the sort of enduring marks most of us would like to be remembered by. I've never heard of the author of the Financial Post piece before: I'm sure he's respected in his field and the vacation house must be nice, but despite all the 100 hour weeks he'll be utterly forgotten the minute he's in the ground.
11. If your name is Roger Federer (who was famously blasé about training in his early years), then going from normal work to grinding 70 hours a week will allow you to realize your full potential, become a global celebrity, and earn tens of millions of dollars. If you're a junior engineer at Stripe the return on that same investment is...not quite as high.
12. IMO a better framing for this came from Lyman Stone on X a while ago, who (half joking and half trolling) said that if you have an hour every night to spend on your hobby, you need to work a few more hours or have more kids.
13. The kids part is important: the fertility rate may or may not end up being a "crisis", and global population will keep growing for a few decades yet, but there's no way you can look at the current trend lines, in America or the world, and think "People need to stop having so many kids and get back to work".
14. These are not unrelated! The developed world is getting super rich, and per capita income is inversely correlated with the birth rate.
15. Telling workers at large to grind harder–assuming they listen to you–is either going to reduce the number of kids they have or else make them shittier parents. Neither of these options is good!
16. I'm tempted to say that if you're driven and talented and young, then go for broke, but then we're in a weird situation where the most gifted people aren't having kids, a kind of dumb reverse eugenics which seems to defeat the point of this exercise.
17. So it's tough, which brings me back to Lyman Stone, whose framing seems much healthier. If you're scrolling your phone from 8-10pm daily, you really do have something left in the tank and you ought to push yourself harder; but having another kid totally counts. So does volunteering, running for office, mentoring someone, or whatever else.