The notorious rise of so-called 996 work culture – 12-hour days, six days a week – has sparked a wave of strong reactions from Independent readers.
Many shared personal experiences of excessive workloads, particularly in social work or corporate roles, describing relentless crisis management, late nights, and catching up on admin during annual leave.
Some noted that even working full contracted hours leaves employees perpetually behind, leading to public shaming in performance meetings.
Others reflected on past experiences, explaining how witnessing managerial complacency or office gossip made them prioritise a standard 9-to-5 schedule for their own wellbeing.
A number of commenters criticised the culture of overwork, highlighting its toll on mental and physical health, productivity, and output quality.
Some acknowledged short-term financial gains or career progression for those who endure gruelling schedules, but most warned against the long-term cost of burnout.
Here’s what you had to say:
It’s wrong
It’s wrong, but at least they’re being open about it is all I can say. I’m in social work, and the caseloads have got to a stage where the only people on top of their work regularly work late into the night and on “days off”. The relentless crisis management means I’ve known people take annual leave in order to catch up on their admin. Management naturally enquires in soothing tones about your work/life balance, but you still have performance meetings where the whole team gets to know who’s up to date and who isn’t – basically public shaming. The ones who work their contracted hours never are, and never could be, close to anything but failing.
What do you think? Have you ever experienced extreme work hours, or seen them in your workplace? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Short term pain
It depends, doesn’t it?
If you work like that for a couple of years or so and are paid accordingly – and crucially save it – you can move to a better job later.
At one point, due to my then employer’s incompetence, I was working seven days a week over the winter, double time Saturday/Sunday and cashing in flexi time to boot. As a result, I paid off the mortgage on my house in a little over three years. That was the 90s though, so you couldn’t do it today.
Now, I couldn’t have done this forever, but for a few years I managed it.
The bigger problem
I wouldn’t advocate working 996, but a far bigger problem is the number of people (particularly the young) who are neither in work nor training. Measures are urgently needed to tackle this problem. Provided someone is in good health, there can be no excuse for such inactivity.
The last time I ever did anything other than 9 to 5
I’m retired now, but about 15 years ago I worked for a company and, because of the end-of-year accounting, we were working very hard on the day before Good Friday, trying to get customer orders processed and dispatched. I’d skipped lunch that day – quite a rarity for me. At one point, I went into the marketing manager’s office to ask her something and found her gossiping on the phone with a friend. That was the last time I ever did anything other than 9 to 5, five days a week.
Money over people
Are we enjoying all that additional leisure time that increased reliance on technology in the workplace was supposed to gift us?
Einstein once said, “Everything has changed… except the way we think.” Although he was talking about the nature of human thought, the same applies to human nature.
There will always be a class of people who will seek their wealth not from work but by the sweated labour of those beneath them, and who will compete with each other to see who can extract the most sweat. There will always be an army of drones who will willingly subject themselves to enslavement in pursuit of the dangled carrot of “success”, and will never stop to think whose pockets they are actually filling in the process.
So long as we continue to measure a nation’s performance using money rather than people as the primary index, it will be ever thus.
Do it for yourself
I think it’s people dreaming of becoming tech billionaires – they don’t get that life’s too short to enjoy it.
If you’re going to work that hard, do it for your own company.
But I don’t think it works – your brain works less well without breaks.
Working long hours doesn’t make you more productive
It goes a long way towards explaining the poor quality of output and the delusions that AI is approaching the singularity.
Working long hours doesn’t make you more productive; it just leads to poor-quality work and rapid burnout, which in turn leads to high levels of employee turnover – which isn’t good for the productivity of the company. Nobody can concentrate for 12 hours at a time, and sitting hunched over a keyboard and staring at a screen is bad for both physical and mental health.
Watch your business fail
Where do they get these managerial geniuses from? Bring in a 996 regime and watch your business fail. Anything done after 40 hours will be poor value, needing redoing or, worse still, missed and sent to a client.
The employer must be upfront
If the employer is upfront about their demands, and the employee accepts those terms, along with the compensation that goes with it, I do not see how it is anyone else’s business.
Some of the comments have been edited for this article for brevity and clarity.
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