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.
Oh fuck off, asshole… you need to be thrown in prison.
He needs to take a long walk, on a short pier.
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?
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
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.
We pretend to work
They pretend to pay us
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.
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.
can someone kidnap this motherfucker and make him work normal labor job for 80 hours a week, for a year, and see how much he likes this stupid fucking pants on head idea after that
The pampered idiots that suggest these things would literally not survive a year of actual work at 40 hours let alone what they propose
still solves the problem.
That’s the thing, looking at the company they don’t work “normal labor” jobs. Infosys is into info tech, consulting, and outsourcing services and looking at their acquisition history I get the impression they buy up smaller companies and consolidate their work into their product. Basically they make websites and tools that your company buys for $100k to analyze and optimize workflow, but the site doesn’t work well and they never fix it. After 2 years enough time has passed that the higher ups don’t feel embarrassed retiring the software and buying something else. Also, rather than just coding themselves they code with AI or buy other companies that already wrote the code and put it into their own product.
At the end of the day they aren’t “working,” they are being available. They are the shitty guy who is answering a work call on a Saturday while they are supposed to be watching their kid’s ball game. They are the person who has to step out of the movie theater because they are getting an urgent work call at 10 pm on Friday. They are the person who flies back from their vacation two days early because the boss wants to ask about sales numbers. This is how Executive suite types say they work 16 hour days 7 days a week, they count every hour of the day as work because they are available, not because they were being productive that entire time.

Personally I’d make an exception to my moral stance that work as punishment is slavery, and would prefer to keep him around forcing him to work 70 hours a week, in addition to doing all the other chores required so that he can live - in prison - for the rest of his life.
Maybe we’ll make it 84 hours a week just for good measure, can’t be giving him a day off.
Seems more poetic
Fuck that! We should be aiming for 21-28 hours being the normal length of the employed week for everyone everywhere, and it not being necessary to work any more than that unless you want to for yourself. We can’t accelerate forever, we need to do less work hours and have good quality of life, otherwise what’s even the point of technology?
deleted by creator
Arguably we are already there. Depends how much you want to yourself. My house? No comrade, our house.
Share a house and you can do very little work. You could take it pretty far too. Think of those capsule hotels, could fit loads of capsules in my current bedroom even if you want to have your own capsule - sharing can further increase population. Less than 20 hours of work a month for static fees (mortgage, tax) per person. Food is about 4 hours of work a month. Heating wont change, though you will use more hot water for washing, probably 2-5 hours of work for energy and water.
All essentials covered, less than 30 hours of work a month required per person. Basing this on my expenses in the UK and minimum wage.
He should work himself to death alone and leave us with a better world
“Infosys co-founder suggested slavery could be brought back with updated terms and conditions”
This is how this news should be titled
MoFo wants 80 hour work week and pays 4,353 USD per year to Indian CS graduates.
If you follow the standard 5 day business week, that is 70 hours worked for every 50 hours not worked. Account for 8 hours of sleep a night and you have 2 hours a day to commute to your job. Literally zero time for any other needs. And that’s ONLY if you are generous enough to give everyone the weekend to recharge.
For a 7 day work week with no days off, allowing for 8 hours of sleep per day and 2 hours of commute time, that is 4 hours a day to do anything else. I also would assume that part of the day would still be considered off hours for lunch. As well. Call it 3 hours a day for anything not work related.
This man should be hanged for even suggesting this as a reasonable productivity schedule for any living being.
No joke, I really do think in a just society he would be hanged.
Yeah - there is no way that you are able to raise children or even go to the dentist checkup with such a work schedule. And if such a schedule was implemented, that would be the collapse of everything else. Cinemas, theatres, bars, events, sport clubs and so on.
Shit like this should be shown to people who argue against unionization.
Remember, the parasites will take everything they can, even if it means their eventual demise.
The ultimate goal of capitalism is to have an infinite pool of workers, working infinite hours, for $0.
Don’t forget each worker also has to simultaniously spend $∞ on goods and services.
And who will buy the results of their labour?
The priviledged class will trade among themselves.
You can have a society with 7.5 billion people that are fed, clothed, sheltered enough to stave off early death, and 500 mil people with property rights trading among themselves.
Nothing says economies must collapse if not everyone is enfranchised. There is no such law.
I could see a black mirror 15 million merits type of society. Pointless work for pointless pay. But gotta keep the poors in a position that they get something they want from their meaningless work even if it’s got no real value but they want the shiny.
But then what happens to the individuals that reject consumerism? It clearly shown the main character racked up a shitload of cash by doing that. Couldn’t you then do very little work?
You can’t get cash rewards for consuming less. Spending is the least important variable in the accumulation game. All else being equal, spending less means you can spend more at other times. So if I penny pinch all year, I can splurge on New Year’s eve, that sort of thing. That doesn’t make you rich. That doesn’t elevate your status in societies where all the needed and useful resources are paywalled.
Income and time is what matters. And if you can get income while keeping all your time to yourself, that’s what elevates status. In other words you don’t trade your own time for income. That means there must be some slaves or extremely poor people that are constantly exploited to enable the elite living conditions.
A society doesn’t need parasitic elites. But if you want a better society you will have to pry it from the elites’ cold hands, because they won’t go along with a scheme that makes the world a happy and healthy place at their expense.
If I have 400 billion, but in a happy and healthy world I can only have 100mil max, which is 3 orders of magnitude less, I would rather burn down the whole planet than lose 1 cent. My interests are everything to me. My personal condition is what I experience first hand, while the rest of the world is just a theory, a story on a newspaper page, an image on TV, etc. I won’t accept tangible personally felt losses for gains which to me are theoretical.
Of course if I inhabit a worker instead of a billionaire, things are different, the calculus is different, but crumbs are always crumbs. Whether I am a worker or billionaire, man or woman, I refuse to crumb myself. I want a 10 course dinner, with hookers and blow to boot, with every trimming. Always. I’d rather have food I can’t eat than not have enough. No matter who I inhabit, the previous statement is true.
If what you want is in a tree, you have to shake that fucking tree. If you want fish you have to catch it.
Some assholes wanted to exploit people, so they killed, threatened, organized and propagandized and accomplished it. We need to understand this and take notes. Know yourself and know your enemy and you will always win.
If we want something else, if we want a different system, there will always be people that are super happy with how things are now. These folks have done very well under the present system. These folks will block our way. They are the tree, the fish, they are the soil that we have to plow and sometimes pave, to get to where we need to go. It will be ugly. It will not be without struggle.
If we just remain passive, and modestly undemanding, and we just politely wave our slogans on street corners, we know exactly what happens next.
I wasn’t talking about getting rich, my point was working less. If work doesn’t pay, there is no reason to work.
Slaves got no pay. They still worked.
The sooner we start eating these motherfuckers the faster things will improve.
Billionaire is a mental illness that isn’t compatible with civil society,















