Sarah, a 28-year-old employee at one of San Francisco’s hottest startups, is beyond burned out. She’s working a 996 schedule—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—a phenomenon that’s swept Silicon Valley over the past year amid the AI boom.
Sarah, whose asked that we refer to her by a pseudonym to avoid backlash from her employer, is trapped in a cycle of working from breakfast to bedtime. Meanwhile, her personal to-do list is spiraling out of control as her wife bears nearly the full burden of household chores. Her friends, many of whom work similar hours, often reschedule dinner in the group chat “literally 14 times, since one of us always has something come up,” she says. “We basically never hang out.”
The practice of 996 originated in China over a decade ago, where it has since been ruled illegal (although it still persists quietly). In Silicon Valley, tech workers like Sarah and others we spoke with are working longer hours and taking on more shifts for less pay in the hopes of securing valuable early equity. However, experts warn that this schedule can have a detrimental impact on the mind and body, raising questions about whether 996 is merely a performative trend or a genuinely effective way to stay ahead of the competition.
“What we’re all thinking is, ‘When does this level out?’” Sarah says of herself and others in the AI industry who work 996. “We’re putting this time in with the understanding that it’s not going to be like this forever, right? Or is that just a dream?”
Inside 996: Silicon Valley’s Hype-Fueled Obsession With Overworking | Tech Today
A ‘Work Hard, Play Hard’ Culture
Sarah was an Ivy League athlete and subsequently worked as a trader on Wall Street, another industry with a long history of brutal hours. Her current 996 schedule is a continuation of a lifestyle of hard work and high performance. She describes herself as very “focused” and “introverted,” but less “extremely type A” than other 996ers, many of whom she says are business school graduates and former consultants with a “work hard, play hard” mentality.
“They’ll go out every night, to a concert and then the club, and then they’re back at work,” she says. “I’m like, ‘How do you do that?’ It’s a really fast-paced culture within the office, too. But then there are the normal people, like me. I need to actually sleep for eight hours.”
Sarah, who previously worked at another tech company in San Francisco, joined her current employer last year after speaking with friends who worked at Anthropic and OpenAI. “They were like, ‘You wouldn’t believe the scale and the slope of these companies right now,’” she says. “So I was like, ‘What am I doing here when I could be over there?’”
AI Company Recruiters Hold the Power
When Sarah interviewed for her current role, the recruiter did not use the term 996. “I just remember how many times they reiterated that they work hard in the interview process,” she says. Meanwhile, Haley, a fellow San Francisco AI worker who also asked that her real name not be used, says that her recruiter made it clear that she would need to give “500%,” and on some nights, sent her emails after 10 p.m.
The expectation of working 996 is usually implied, they tell us, although we found at least one example of an AI company that is up-front, listing 70-hour workweeks—just shy of the full 72—on a current job description.
Sarah landed exactly where she wanted, at an AI company with over $1 billion in funding that has expanded from 60 to 200 employees in under a year. More established Big Tech firms, such as Google or Meta, would pay her a higher salary for fewer hours, she figures, but they lack the novelty and early stock options that her current company offers.
When Haley tried to negotiate for a higher salary, the recruiter told her that the move was a “red flag,” so she backed down.
Haley also took a pay cut to work 996 at a company with a similar upward trajectory. Not only that, she now has a longer commute and more days in the office. When she tried to negotiate for a higher salary, the recruiter told her the move was a “red flag”—implying that she wasn’t fully committed to the company’s mission—so she backed down.
Even Intel CTO Sachin Katti relinquished his C-suite status last fall for a more minor position at OpenAI in “compute infrastructure.” Two of our sources confirm that several teams at OpenAI work 996 schedules. The company is planning an IPO with a valuation of up to $1 trillion, which would be the largest in history, according to Reuters.
What in the bubble is going on here? To gain a sense of how the 996 trend might unfold in the US, we must start with its origins—7,000 miles away from San Francisco.
Illegal in China, But Not Enforced
“The term [996] emerged in the 2010s, after China’s tech industry really took off—exploded, in fact,” says Lijia Zhang, a former Chinese factory worker. “It became part of the so-called ‘struggle culture’ or ‘wolf spirit’ common in China’s private sector.” 996 is also practiced in Taiwan at TSMC, the world’s leading chip manufacturer, author Stephen Witt writes in The Thinking Machine.
Zhang performed repetitive tasks, such as greasing machine parts and testing tire pressure, from the ages of 16 to 26. It bored her “to death,” she says, so in her spare time, she learned English, and in 1990, quit her job to move to England. She’s been speaking out about China’s social and economic changes ever since, including in her book, “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China and a 2021 op-ed on the “overwork culture” of 996.
Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma (Credit: Wang HE / Contributor / Getty Images News via Getty Images)
A white-collar backlash against 996 quickly mounted in China, and in 2019, a group of programmers started a support group on GitHub called 996.ICU, a reference to the possibility that working such hours could put someone in the intensive care unit (ICU). At the same time, their CEOs were “openly promoting” 996, and even bragging about it, Zhang says. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, called 996 “a huge blessing.” Richard Liu of JD.com said, “Slackers are not my brothers!”
But by 2021, a string of deaths linked to the schedule forced China’s high court to act, and it ruled 996 illegal, NPR reports. The fiercest public outcry centered on a 22-year-old woman who worked 996 at the e-commerce giant Pinduoduo. During the winter, she collapsed on the street while walking home from the office, and later died in the hospital.
“996 has caused physical and mental suffering to millions of young people across China and has put enormous stress on society as a whole.”
However, many private tech companies in China still require 996 schedules due to “poor enforcement of labor laws,” Zhang says. “It has caused physical and mental suffering to millions of young people across China and has put enormous stress on society as a whole. I had expected that America, as a democracy of sorts, would do better.”
Baidu, one of China’s most well-known tech companies, still asks its employees to work 996 during intense periods and for high-profile projects. “Everyone hates it,” a marketing manager at the company tells me. The upside is that employees receive extra pay for every hour worked, which is not the case for the US-based tech workers we spoke to.
Silicon Valley has adopted a work-harder attitude amid increasing competition, both domestically and internationally—especially with China. Former President Biden and President Trump have both flagged AI investments as key to helping the US win the latest cyber war. People like Sarah and Haley are the soldiers on the front lines.
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The Pro-996 Stance
“Let me know if you find someone who actually likes working 996,” Sarah challenges us. We did. Meet Justin Lee, a 21-year-old founder from Australia, who sets his own hours, and tells us he is proud to work beyond 996. Lee dropped out of college when his pitch was accepted by Y Combinator, which offers $500,000 to seed new startups. During the three-month-long program in San Francisco, he was working up to 18 hours a day, a feat he documented in a time-lapse video he posted to LinkedIn.
Lee admits that 996 is “one of those terms that you can’t really say without your skin crawling a bit,” but ultimately he finds it to be a positive: “If you find yourself working that much, it means you’ve found something you genuinely care about.” He thinks being able to work this hard is a “privilege,” with big payout potential, and that it’s not just happening in San Francisco.
He first heard of 996 in relation to Airwallex, one of Australia’s biggest tech companies. Across the globe, UK-based venture capitalist Harry Stebbings has gained a following by arguing that European tech founders need to adopt the 996 work model to compete globally in the AI sector. Clearly, the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught on to what the Chinese (and researchers) already know.
How Overwork Affects Our Brains
Overworking degrades your cognitive and emotional health and biologically alters your brain, according to a May 2025 study by Korean researchers. The team analyzed brain activity in individuals working more than 52 hours a week and found “significant changes in brain regions associated with executive function and emotional regulation.”
Results of voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis showing significant voxels for the contrast between overworked and non-overworked groups. (Jang, Wonpil & Kim, Sungmin & Kim, Youjin & Lee, Seunghyun & Choi, Joon Yul & Lee, Wanhyung. (2025). Overwork and changes in brain structure: a pilot study. Occupational and environmental medicine. 82. 10.1136/oemed-2025-110057.)
For more context, we reached out to stress expert Daniela Kaufer, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Neuro-AI Center for the Study of Resilience.
“There is a big difference between acute, energizing stress and chronic, unrelenting stress,” she says. “A 996 schedule falls squarely into the chronic category.” Working so much does not leave room for adequate brain recovery, and keeps the mind’s stress-response systems activated “far longer than they’re designed for,” she says.
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Over time, this can impair decision-making and memory, weaken metabolic function, cause inflammation, increase the risk of cardiovascular issues, and slow recovery from illness and injury. It can also make you grumpy (or, as Kaufer puts it, increase the risk of “mood disorders”), less effective at work, and more likely to burn out.
“This isn’t hypothetical—these changes are visible in both human and animal studies of chronic stress,” Kaufer says. She wishes tech companies understood that “stress is not a badge of honor, and it’s not fuel.”
The Naysayers: 996 Is Performative, Even Discriminatory
Some tech industry veterans have observed this firsthand. Andrios Robert, founder of AI database company hoop.dev and a current San Francisco resident, worked a 996 schedule during the pandemic, when he was founding his first company. He’ll never go back after realizing that way of working is unproductive and caused him to drift away from friends and family.
“I would work for 12 hours, but after eight, your brain just stops working,” he says. “I would waste four hours in front of the computer being stuck, just to get some sleep and then wake up and solve the problem in 10 minutes. That would happen to me all the time.”
Such ineffectiveness is one reason many people think 996 is mostly performative. The debate surrounding it is “just the latest Silicon Valley culture war,” and working that much is “a complete waste of time,” as one founder puts it on Medium. Sarah thinks it’s partially a “flex” for companies.
(Credit: Zooey Liao/PCMag Composite; Getty Images)
Others go further, calling it discriminatory, given that the inflexible hours are nearly impossible for most parents and caretakers to accommodate.
“I think 996 is just a legal way to engage in employment discrimination, because if you say really loudly that people have to be in-office 996, you’re basically saying that parents can’t work at your company,” says Steve Hind, a San Francisco-based co-founder of AI startup Lorikeet. “You’re probably also disproportionately discouraging women from joining, because they tend to end up carrying a greater load at home.”
Sarah estimates three of her company’s 200 employees are parents. Haley, who has two small children, had to seriously consider the demanding schedule before accepting the job. She’s giving herself some time to see how it goes, and if she can’t swing it, she’ll quit.
Brutal, In-Office Culture—Even on Sunday Morning
Sarah doesn’t have kids, but her schedule is still grinding her down. “I just can’t do Sundays right now,” she says. That’s her company’s preferred sixth day, with butts-in-seats at 9 a.m., although others choose Saturday. At the same time, she feels pressure to be there because of a “culture that if you don’t go into the office on Sundays, you’re not fully bought in.”
She has crafted her own schedule to stay afloat. Monday through Friday, she works more than the expected 12 hours a day. She uses this to justify doing just five hours on Sunday instead of a full 12. Notably, she still considers this not working a full Sunday—at least not to the same extent as her coworkers.
Her job consists of constant meetings and delivering projects as fast as possible, while enduring constant, blunt feedback on her performance. “This is Thick Skin University for me,” she says. “I’m like, ‘I’m doing bad at this and this and this and this and this.’” But she takes it as proof she’s learning, and a sign that she’s “making huge strides” in her career.
Sarah claims to be happy where she is now and is actively hiring more “high-caliber” candidates for her team, all of whom will be expected to work 996. But how much longer can she work herself this hard, I wonder? “I ask myself that every single day of my life,” she says with a sigh.
About Our Expert
Emily Forlini
Senior Reporter
Experience
As a news and features writer at PCMag, I cover the biggest tech trends that shape the way we live and work. I specialize in on-the-ground reporting, uncovering stories from the people who are at the center of change—whether that’s the CEO of a high-valued startup or an everyday person taking on Big Tech. I also cover daily tech news and breaking stories, contextualizing them so you get the full picture.
I came to journalism from a previous career working in Big Tech on the West Coast. That experience gave me an up-close view of how software works and how business strategies shift over time. Now that I have my master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, I couple my insider knowledge and reporting chops to help answer the big question: Where is this all going?
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