Alibaba CEO Jack Ma made headlines around the world recently when he talked about the “996 ethic” that he says is required in order to do well within his company:

To survive at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. you need to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. That’s what billionaire Jack Ma demands of his staff at China’s biggest e-commerce platform.

Ma told an internal meeting that Alibaba doesn’t need people who look forward to a typical eight-hour office lifestyle, according to a post on Alibaba’s official Weibo account. Instead, he endorsed the industry’s notorious 996 work culture — that is, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

“To be able to work 996 is a huge bliss,” China’s richest man said. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why even bother joining.”

China’s tech industry is littered with tales of programmers and startup founders dying unexpectedly due to long hours and grueling stress. The comments from Ma elicited some intense reaction.

There was a bit more to this, actually. Chinese state-run media took up the torch for this, uh, “lifestyle” – there is neither “life” nor “style” in such an environment – and decided to lecture their rivals and neighbours across the border in India about the need to adopt such an ethic:

How did China establish its competitiveness in the manufacturing sector during previous decades? This achievement can be partly attributed to the hard-working spirit of Chinese employees in labor-intensive industries, as well as research and development personnel and entrepreneurs.

[Yeah, I’m sure predatory pricing, massive barriers to domestic competition, managed capitalism, an obstinate refusal to let state-run enterprises fail, and massive state subsidies to favoured corporations, had absolutely NOTHING to do with it, right?]

Many Chinese workers have embraced the “996” culture, while many billionaires in China work even longer hours.

The wave of heated discussion on the “996” culture implies how common the schedule has become in China. But in India, foreign investors often complain about the relatively short working hours and high levels of social welfare enjoyed by local workers.

[This is actually a valid complaint. For all that Indians love to talk up their supposed supremacy in IT fields, the reality is that most Indians are unemployable by Western standards. They just aren’t very good. They don’t have the education, the training, or the work ethic to be good enough to hold a candle to your average Russian or Ukrainian programmer – never mind a well-trained white American tech worker. They get work because they are cheap. But the results always reflect that cheapness. Ya gets what ya pays for, after all.]

Adopting the “996” schedule can help India further improve its business environment, attract foreign investment and eventually enhance India’s competitiveness in the manufacturing sector. If inbound manufacturing investment from countries including China can help India produce goods with a high performance-price ratio, India will have a chance to win a victory over the campaign against made-in-China products.

A tough challenge lies ahead of India. Without the “996” schedule and the spirit of hard work, India can hardly catch up with China.

It goes without saying that the response from many Indians who saw that, involved an expanded (and considerably saltier) version of the phrase, “… and the horse you rode in on!”

Now, I’m not running this idea down just because it sounds stupid. I’m doing so based on personal experience.

I did live something like the 996 ethic for a while during my career. It wasn’t fun and I wouldn’t want to repeat it ever again unless I had absolutely no choice.

Back in spring of 2012, I was working absolutely crazy hours for my banking employer at the time. Fourteen-hour days were the norm, five days a week. It was absolutely miserable, and unfortunately it was simply unavoidable because of the extremely pathetic state of the infrastructure of the bank at the time. It was normal for me to walk into work at 8am every morning for the entirety of April 2012, thinking to myself, “if I have to leave after 9pm one more time, I’m going to resign” – only to work another 13- or 14-hour day, and of course repeat the whole process all over again the next morning.

I was working in product control at the time. This basically involves being responsible for the daily P&L calculations of a trading desk’s portfolio of positions. In theory, it’s not very difficult to do. All you have to do is calculate the change in the value of every position, using mark-to-market methods – i.e. you take the current market closing data, remeasure the value of every instrument in your portfolio, and the compare that value against the previous value.

You then have to calculate the “attributions” that generated these changes. This simply means that you figure out what caused the changes in value. And, again, if you know what you’re doing, this is not difficult. The mathematics involved are no more difficult than about second-year college calculus.

And yet, closing the books back then was all but impossible.

The reasons were many and complex. One reason was sky-high turnover. I joined the company in late 2011 as part of a team of 4; three months later, I was the only one left. And three months after that, I had a team of my own to manage – but I was the de facto manager, not the de jure one, because my corporate title was way too low to manage anyone.

Add to that the fact that our systems, processes, and procedures were absolutely shit, and you can imagine, dimly, just what a mess the place was at the time.

Somebody had to fix it all. There was nobody to do it. So I had to. And that involved working every Saturday, more or less, during an absolutely sweltering summer, to build out new processes and fix existing pricing schemas and create spreadsheets designed to make everybody’s lives much easier.

And it worked. But I had absolutely no life outside of work, and was miserable for much of the time.

Did I get rewarded for it?

Nope. Not in any meaningful sense.

And therein lies the problem with the entire 996 idea. It simply does not work for the vast majority of workers.

The hard reality of being some peon in a company is that you will never amount to anything much. You will never be given real responsibility if you work harder than everyone else. You will simply burn yourself out. You will not get promoted based on raw talent or results. You will not get rewarded with more money.

Instead, you’ll just be given a pat on the head and told, “nicely done, there, chump – uh, I mean, champ, now work even harder next year and we might consider giving you that promotion/raise/title that you’ve been hankering for!”

You get the idea. You’re running in a hamster’s wheel, chasing after a reward that you never get.

The 996 approach forces the kinds of hours worked by junior investment bankers and lawyers at really big firms like Skadden Arps, not by senior partners and managing directors. There is a reason why those industries have massive turnover at the junior levels, and it has to do with the fact that young kids are simply killing themselves for jobs that pay them huge amounts of money (in some cases, anyway) but destroy their lives.

And that is, again, at the very top of the food chain for jobs that produce, and consume, vast amounts of paperwork but produce very little of actual tangible value in return. (I should know. I worked on the capital markets side of banking for years and saw firsthand how little value the bankers really generated.) The reality is that junior workers at tech companies like Amazon or Alibaba, working those kinds of hours, will not be making $250K a year for a starting salary – which was the base salary for an i-banking Associate back in 2010. Nowadays the banks pay even more, but deliver ever less, because everything depends on M&A and capital structuring flows.

Now, let me make one thing perfectly clear:

I am NOT criticising anyone who owns his own business and puts in crazy hours to make it succeed. I believe that several of my readers are in that position. It is normal for such people to put in 60, 70, or even 80 hours – or more – per week to get their businesses off the ground, stable, and ready to go. One of my own relatives is an entrepreneur running a successful restaurant business, and he barely has any time to himself.

For such people, the crazy hours aren’t really “work” as you and I would define it. For them, it is their very life. They do not notice it as “work”, they simply accept it as “the cost of doing business”. For them it is a lot like raising a baby to adulthood – in a time-compression field.

Nor am I criticising those who simply have no choice but to work those kinds of hours in order to survive. A lot of people, especially in the less developed parts of the world, simply have to work 6 or even 7 days a week in order to make ends meet. Days off are precious and valuable and they don’t happen very often. To them, weekends are a luxury that the rest of us take for granted.

I take my hat off to any man with the guts and courage to put his money, his reputation, and his very balls on the line to build out his own business. Jack Ma certainly did that with Alibaba, and congratulations to him for becoming a billionaire in the process.

I have absolutely no problem with what he did and I do not for one moment envy him his wealth. I have no doubt that he sacrificed A LOT to get to where he is now. I have seen firsthand what that kind of frenetic 24/7 workaholic style does to marriages, families, and children, and it is not pretty.

What I do have a problem with is his insistence that the only way to get ahead in China, Japan, or any other East Asian country with an insane work ethic, is to work oneself to death.

That doesn’t work out very well for those who do it. You end up missing huge parts of the more vital aspects of life – such as, y’know, living.

And it certainly should not be elevated into a governing principle for corporations. What Jack Ma and others like him are doing is essentially glorifying indentured servitude.

One of the hardest and most painful lessons that I learned when I lost my previous job last year, is that these “old-school values” of hard work, a can-do attitude, and a willingness to go the extra mile, are utterly useless in a corporate environment.

All they do is get you marked out as a greasy grind, a reliable dunce who can be shat upon at will and given the worst and most menial assignments.

I should know. I was that gopher for a long time.

I struggled and slaved away for two years and was passed over for two consecutive promotion rounds because of a single black mark on my record, which happened due to my rather black sense of humour, back in mid-2012, and resulted in a formal reprimand being placed in my employee file at the time. That was the end of it, but I had developed something of a reputation of being “difficult to work with”, because my tolerance for idiots is very, very low – and that is a highly charitable description.

I was, in effect, a wage-slave. And although the bank “rewarded” me eventually with a promotion and a hefty pay raise, it was only because the higher-ups knew damned well that if I was passed over for a third time, I would leave, and they would lose a tremendous amount of built-up knowledge, skills, and potential value.

They started me up on the same treadmill from 2015 onward, looking to chase the next rank – which, given my level of responsibility and the value generated by my work, is where I should have been. That wasn’t what I thought, that was what most of my colleagues and superiors thought. But I never achieved it. I was let go in March 2018 because my boss at the time, and his boss, didn’t much care for my rather stubborn attitude (which I will readily concede was, and is, true) and almost total lack of interest in their plans for the future.

Ultimately, they held all of the cards, because I was there on a work visa. My leverage was limited, and they knew it. That is a big part of the reason why they eventually let me go – they could afford to take the short-term, and massive, hit to team productivity and performance for the long-term benefit of finding some other underpaid gopher and saddling him with all of the maintenance jobs that I used to do.

That is not a position to which a self-respecting man should yoke himself. The hard and unpalatable truth is that most big corporations view rank-and-file employees as nothing more than disposable cogs in their big machines, and that you are very unlikely to make your way up the career ladder if you stay at such places.

So my advice to young men today is to do the bare minimum required to skate by. Don’t bother trying to build a career in a traditional 9-to-5 job, because those don’t really exist anymore. You will not be able to create a life for yourself and a future wife that way, never mind having money left over to raise kids.

Your corporate overlords these days will demand the same sort of nonsense that Jack Ma does of his employees. They will demand every last drop of blood that you have – and give you peanuts in return.

Instead, put in just enough effort not to get fired, and not to stand out from the crowd. Use the time that you have to slowly and steadily build yourself into a better and more interesting man.

Lift weights. Learn martial arts. Approach women – not online, but in real life. Travel the world. Start your own side business – and grow it into something stable and real. Grow and develop in faith. Read books. Listen to music. Spend time in museums.

At every turn, become the kind of man that makes even billionaires like Jack Ma look status-obsessed and weak by comparison, because that kind of man is worldly, wise, experienced, and above all interesting.

Finally, take a word of advice from an older comrade and learn from my biggest mistake: ensure that you have legal residency in whatever country you choose to live, so that when – not if – the axe falls at some point in the future, you will not have to nuke your entire life and start all over again from zero.

After all, remember, the 9-9-6 model simply demands: