Tech's Polarizing “996” Work Life & The “Low-Hire, Low-Fire” Job Market

0:28Being hangry gives you tunnel vision. slash MBD to get yours. That's davidprotein.com slash MBD.

0:38Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today is the grind set back. And where has workplace loyalty gone? On a special episode, we chat with Morning Brew's resident workplace experts. It's Monday, October 13th. Let's ride.

1:00I really hope you all remember to turn off your Monday through Friday alarm because today is Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day in the United States, meaning most of you are getting the day off of work. We did, kinda, but still have an awesome special episode out this morning. We're talking everything work and jobs with Kayla and Kyle from the Brews Per My Last Email podcast. We dug into some of the biggest storylines dominating the labor market right now. How many hours should you be working? Is the labor market frozen? If it is frozen, What does that mean if you do or don't have a job? All the stuff that Neil and I briefly touch on during MBD shows, but don't get to do a deep dive on, that's what this episode is for.

1:40But first, a word from our sponsor, Remarkable. Neil, are you writing in a notebook right now? Yes. Ugh, yuck, gross. It's like I'm sitting next to a caveman. You gotta get the Remarkable Paper Pro. It's the third generation paper tablet from Remarkable. It features the all-new canvas color display, built-in reading light, and class-leading responsiveness. This thin, minimalist tablet is designed to feel and sound just like writing on actual paper. But you can also turn your handwriting into typed text, use the reading light to work anytime, and structure your work with dozens of built-in templates.

2:14And most importantly, Remarkable's mission is about helping you think better. That means no apps, social media, or any other distractions, just you and your thoughts. Whether you're in a meeting or deep in a creative session, this paper tablet helps you think better. You can try Remarkable Paper Pro for 100 days for free. If it's not what you're looking for, get your money back. Visit Remarkable.com to learn more and get your paper tablet today. That's Remarkable.com. And without further ado, here's Kayla and Kyle. Kayla and Kyle, welcome back to Morning Brew Daily. Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here.

2:49All right. To kick things off, I want to talk about three numbers. Nine, nine, six. It refers to the grueling work schedule sweeping Silicon Valley this year, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, adding up to 72 hours of work per week. The concept of 996 began in China, where tech giants like Alibaba required these hours from their employees to stay ahead of cutthroat competition. But thanks to the AI frenzy, 996 has moved across the Pacific to San Francisco, where young tech workers are embracing the grind to capitalize on what they believe is a once-in-a-century technological revolution. It's a pretty remarkable 180 from just five years ago during the pandemic when work-life balance was championed and the corporate world was moving away from the hustle culture of the 2010s.

3:35So Kyle and Kayla, why do you think 996 is the talk of the tech world? What does it say about our current moment that some workers are openly boasting about being on the grind set? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is necessarily like new or newsy because I think it's just like a nice way to call the grind. You know, it's always been expected in many sectors, especially in Silicon Valley, that you're kind of working really hard to get something out, especially if you work at a startup. So, yeah, I mean, I think it is definitely new that we're talking about it again and that we're kind of a little bit more open about the grind set or whatever it is.

4:14But I don't think it's new behavior. Yeah, I think whenever we talked about work-life balance, you know, that you brought up like that was for corporate America. I don't think anyone was joining a startup saying, I'm really excited for work-life balance to be the third employee at this SF startup. Like, you have to work very hard to be in a startup. And so I also think, like, all things being equal, the person that works more is going to get more done. And when you're a startup, like, the truth is you're disrupting. You're trying to bring down an incumbent. You have to put in a ton of effort. You're also, like, rewarded very differently where if you have a job in corporate America, typically you're paid a salary and you don't have any equity.

4:51So if the value of the company goes up, like you don't see as much upside in Silicon Valley. If you're working for a startup, you see the upside. So the incentive to go above and beyond is there. And I think that's always been the case in Silicon Valley. I think 996 is a new marketing way to talk about it. So I'm a little deep in startup and founder, Twitter, or I guess X now. and some of the backlash that I've seen in those circles is that more people spend time tweeting about 996 and actually fulfilling the duties of 996. So do you think there's a performative angle to this? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think we grew up with like worshiping the Steve Jobs of the world, watching Silicon Valley.

5:32It's kind of this like dream as someone who wants to get into tech to go to San Francisco and work very, very hard. And I think messaging that to the world maybe has become more important than doing the actual work. So I definitely think that's the case. I don't think it's a flex to tell everyone you're working hard, particularly if you're miserable. But I do think it's... Have you ever gone on the internet, Kyle? This is the only thing people do on the internet is they flex about how hard they're working. Exactly. I don't think it's cool. That incentive is definitely there. And I don't think it was in the past, which is why I think people are talking about it more and making it seem like a bigger deal than it is.

6:07I've also seen some people that are basically like, you're only working from nine to nine, six days a week. Like I'm doing eight, 12, seven. Yeah. Like those are baby hours. Toby does 007 is midnight to midnight, seven days a week. So you're just, there's, you're always on. I'm always on. It incorporates multiple people. I do think though, just to play, I mean, devil's advocate a little bit too. Young people in general, a trend that we've talked about is how they don't drink as much anymore. Like drinking's declining for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. They are not going to party as much because of the lack of drinking.

6:45So maybe it is a cultural shift that people are prioritizing the 996 lifestyle because what else is going to fill the gaps of socializing is probably going to be work in some regard. So do you think that maybe this is a generational thing or again, just a branding exercise. I think it's a young person thing. I think young people have forever just like, you know, invested in something. And sometimes that's spending crazy hours at work. Young people, you mean like across generations, just every generation of young people. I mean, we had the same thing, right? We had the girl boss era. Like there's, there's always been those expectations for right out of college.

7:19You have to like work really, really hard in order to make a name for yourself, whether you're in corporate America or in startups. I think it's startups that like those long hours and that high output is more expected than in corporate America. But I think that's always been a thing for younger people. And I feel like there's a good and a bad version of 996. The bad version is you don't actually like what you're doing. You're not inspired by the mission and you're doing this to fulfill this like thing you see on Twitter. Like we're talking about where working hard just for the sake of working hard is celebrated.

7:46I think you're going to end up miserable. But if you have a job you're really passionate about, you're excited about the company. And Toby, to your point, you're not drinking as much. you're not going out as much and you're fulfilled by the work, then I think 996 just becomes a natural extension of work-life harmony where you want to be doing the work. So you're doing more of it. I think one name we really haven't mentioned in the 996 discussions is Elon Musk. And I know a lot of people just rolled their eyes, but I do think he was a huge factor in driving this quote, hard tech era of Silicon Valley.

8:19And I'm talking about when he purchased Twitter or X, He went into the headquarters in downtown San Francisco, cut 80 percent of staff and said, the rest of you, 20 percent, you're essentially sleeping at the office with me. We are working extremely hard. And then Mark Zuckerberg down in Silicon Valley, 45 minutes away, is looking at what Elon Musk did up there and saying, you know what, maybe I should drive a similar culture here at Meta because they look like they're being a more efficient business. And so he wrote out this huge year of efficiency memo. And then all of the other Silicon Valley CEOs kind of hopped on that particular trend.

8:54And so I think when you see these young people moving to San Francisco, yes, they're thinking about Mark Zuckerberg leaving Harvard and going to San Francisco or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates working hard. But I also think they're looking at what happened with Elon Musk and Twitter and all of his other companies and that really hard driving culture that he demands of his workers and saying, well, Elon Musk is worth$500 billion. And if I want to be worth something remotely close to that, I got to work like this guy. Neil, or they might be trying to model their behavior after you because you actually were an early employee at Morning Brew.

9:28Were you all doing 9-9-6 in the early days? We were doing 9-9-6. We were doing 10-10-6. 11-11-7. Yeah, we were working hard. But it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in this discussion, which is that we were all 25, 24 through 27 years old. No other responsibilities in the world. We were very invested in this product. And this is what we did. And we were even at the WeWork during WeWork prime days of 2017 when there was beer flowing. There was free beer. You know what? We didn't drink any of it because we were working till 2 a.m. So I completely sympathize with these people who are working hard on a startup.

10:04For sure. They did not put the brew in morning brew. They put the coffee brew in morning brew. All right. The next workplace trend I want to talk to you all about is work slop. Work slop is a new term coined by researchers from Stanford that refers to AI-generated content that appears polished but lacks substance and ultimately ends up creating more work for others. The example I gave on our podcast when we talked about work slop was this. I send a message to Neil with a list of topics I think we should cover on the show, but I used an LLM to suggest the stories, and some of them are a week out of date.

10:37Neil is left with a few options, none of them good. He can call me out about it, but that's awkward because we're co-hosts. He can ask someone else to look for stories like our producer Ray, but then that's just more work for Ray, or he can do it himself, which is more work for poor Neil. So when I take a shortcut and use AI poorly in the workplace, what I'm really doing is transferring effort downstream from mean to my colleagues. And Harvard Business Review put a dollar amount on this and found that based on salary data, time wasted on WorkSlop costs big organizations, 10 ,000 person organizations, up to$9 million a year.

11:11So this is not only a time waster, it's a money waster too. Now, Kayla and Kyle, I won't ask if you've come into contact with WorkSlop because we all work together at the same company. But have you heard other people complain about this before? Toby, I'll be honest. I'm a master of the WorkSlop. This is my domain. I've been WorkSlopping for years. One of the founders of this trend. Personally, I have not come across it at Morning Brew yet. I'm sure Kayla's going to hit me with a WorkSlop one of these days. what I think this is doing is AI usage is up from 21 % to 40 % of employees say they're using AI at least a few times a year, which that number is probably even out of date at this point.

11:50I think that's even going up. What I get from this is there's now employees who have been encouraged to use AI. Not just encouraged, demanded. There might be a mandate to use AI, exactly, and they're not really sure how to use it yet. They haven't been trained. So what they're doing is like very low effort AI usage. type into ChatGBT, make me a report, and then sending the report without even checking anything. And so it's creating, as Toby said, a ton of extra work for people. If you encounter work slop, you're spending an average of one hour and 56 minutes decoding and fixing it. And so I do think this is an issue that needs to be addressed with more training about how to properly use these tools.

12:30What if I'm an employee at a company and the CEO sends out an email to all of us? Maybe he or she wrote it themselves and said, you all need to use AI. You need to put your emails into AI to make them 50 percent shorter during your self-reflections. You need to also put those into AI. You need to use AI or else you won't be at this company anymore. And I'm a person who's sitting there thinking like, wow, I really don't need this or I'm not exactly how to use this in my workflow. How do you guys think they should approach this? How to approach it is a challenge, right? Because it's like, yeah, there's this big promise of AI, and the expectation is that it can handle all these things, and it can make you more efficient.

13:12So, of course, if you're asking for an email from ChatGPT, and it puts out an email, you're like, great, I just saved 45 minutes. I'm going to just send this out. I think what we need to do is really think critically about the actual possible output of current AI capabilities. So, yeah, if you're being asked to use AI and you don't know what you're doing and you're not being properly trained, I would use it as a brainstorm tool as like a first draft. But I would not ever use that as the final output. It might, you know, instead of saving you 45 minutes, it might save you 15 minutes to use AI as a thought starter instead of the final draft.

13:52But I think where you can, making sure that you're not eroding trust with your coworkers by sending out garbage will only help in the long run. I want to dive deeper into that idea of eroding trust because this Harvard Business Review report found that 50 % see senders of WorkSop as less creative, capable, and reliable. 42 % see them as less trustworthy. And 37 % see them as less intelligent. So to Neil's point, a lot of leaders are setting their employees up for failure, but they're setting their organizations up for failure because an organization with less trust and you looking at your fellow coworker as less intelligent is not going to be one that is performing at a high level.

14:32So how do you think it can infiltrate an organization and what are the trickle-down effects when that lack of trust starts to rear its ugly head? Yeah, I think people have to be very clear that your work product you own, whether you use AI to like help you create it. At the end of the day, you're responsible for your work product. And if it sucks, you can't just say, well, you know, it's kind of Sam Altman's fault. You didn't build ChatGBT good enough. Like you are responsible. And so an example from my own life, I use this tool called Gamma to make presentations. And I have to I had to give a presentation external to Morning Brew.

15:06If I would have just typed in the prompt and like got a presentation and not looked at it, it would have been shit. But I like spent a lot of time then going through and manually creating it. It produced a better outcome than I could have done on Google Slides just myself. But it took just as much time. But the quality of the work went up. So I think thinking that AI is just going to save you so much time, you're never going to have to think again is wrong. If you're doing that, like your work is terrible. You still have to think critically, but if you do think critically and use the tools responsibly, I do think it can increase the effectiveness of your work.

15:41We're going to take a quick break, but come back with more Kyle and Kayla right after this. What's the key to tapping into your ideal audience? First, it's knowing that with Disney Campaign Manager, your audience isn't just a segment, it's a fandom. Then it's about sending that fandom the right message at the right time. Uh, actually, yes, that's exactly it. Reaching high value audiences at scale. And if you want to couple that with a massive reach, Disney campaign manager delivers advanced multi-layered audience reach by leveraging Disney select segments to reach fans and markets by geography, device, interest, content genres, and more.

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16:53Get started at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com. Toby, the modern workplace is a digital mess. Is my laptop dusty again? Yes, but that's not what I'm talking about. Teams are scattered across locations using a chaotic mix of apps and devices. It's a logistical nightmare that creates security risks and eats up valuable time. Well, it's a good thing there's JumpCloud and Air in a Can for that matter. JumpCloud is a unified IT management platform that securely manages all employee identities and devices from a single place, cutting through the chaos. By consolidating IT tools, JumpCloud helps businesses save money and avoid the complexity of managing multiple systems.

17:35Its AI-powered platform helps you protect, manage, and monitor your entire workforce so you can stay one step ahead. This isn't just about making IT easier. It's about giving your business a strategic advantage. JumpCloud frees you up to be more productive, flexible, and innovative, allowing you to work smarter and grow faster. Toby, you should really keep some screen wipes around. As for the rest of us, clean up the digital mess. Learn more at jumpcloud.com slash brew. That's jumpcloud.com slash brew. All right, let's move on to the big picture of the jobs market. We don't know the latest numbers on unemployment and jobs growth because of the government shutdown.

18:13But economists generally agree that A, the labor market is slowing down and B, we are in what's called a low hire, low fire environment. Employers aren't hiring much at all, but at the same time, they're not doing layoffs in any substantial way. So we're essentially in a frozen state. People aren't leaving their jobs, but they're also finding it hard to get one if they aren't currently employed. And I didn't even mention AI, which throws a whole new variable into this equation, with some studies showing it's starting to reduce the number of entry-level jobs on the market. So, guys, what are you seeing?

18:47What are you hearing about the current job situation? Yeah, I think low hire, low fire is a perfect way to put it. And my perspective now is that your best opportunity to grow in your career because of this job market is to actually excel in your current role. And think about, like, if I had to stay at my company, what would I do to grow there? Because I think job hopping is down. The wage premium you get from job hopping has actually decreased. So you're not making as much money to job hop as you used to in the past. And so I think the best opportunity in this current job market is to really lean in on your current role.

19:22and figure out how to grow at your current workplace. But so what do you do if you are a new entry into the job market? If you just graduated college, you don't have a role yet. And if it's a very stuck, a very frozen job market, what do you say to those people? Because I've been on some Reddit forums where people are posting these articles from the Financial Times, from the Bloomberg, about this low hire, low fire environment and going, well, we're screwed, we're doomed. There's nothing we can do because no one is moving jobs. I would say if you are an early career, you just graduated and you got a job, like, pray up.

19:54Like, thank God you somehow pulled it off. I think you're fine if you're in. It's getting in as an early graduate that I think is really hard in this environment. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say there's a few things here. Like, first, it's more important than ever to have a good network because of we're talking about AI work. So like that applies to the job application process as well. One single job can have thousands of applications and they're all AI slop or many of them are. So waiting through and getting noticed is very challenging. So I think if your early career or you've been affected by layoffs and you're having trouble finding a job, it sounds kind of obvious.

20:31But using those in-person network connections that you have is going to be more important than ever before. Because people want to know that you are real, you're legit, you're qualified for a position. And I think it's only going to get harder for those people. But I would also say that like we've the job market shifts. It's not forever. If you have a hard time right now finding a job, it does not mean that you will never have a job for the rest of your life. The market's going to change. The economy is going to change. It can become an employee market just like, you know, a few years ago when we as employees had all the power.

21:07So it'll change, I promise. Eventually. Yeah. Let's go back to the person that Kyle was talking about a few minutes ago, which is the person who has a job and they are understanding the labor market dynamics right now that they're probably not going to go anywhere. So they have this house that maybe has a few holes in it. They're not totally in love with it, but they've unpacked everything. They bought all the furniture. They're going to stay for a while. What is the mindset there to be able to grow with the understanding that job hopping isn't necessarily in their immediate future? Yeah, I mean, there's so many tips and tricks to accelerate your career and your current role.

21:46I mean, the first step is to listen to Per My Last Email pretty much every week. It comes out on Monday. I mean, the number one piece of advice I would have is to get a really good relationship with your manager. I think having a great manager that can give you feedback that's been in the job World a lot longer than you and understands how to navigate these ups and downs is really really important And I've seen a lot of people grow in their career by basically riding the tailwinds of their manager and that manager growing and bringing you along So the closer you can get to your manager. I think it's a really good strategy and Hathaway and Emily Blunt is that a double word product i was like who's i was like wait a minute is this what i think it is no one coming out yeah i also think that when you're talking about like you're kind of at a place that you're not super happy with it's like maybe your boss isn't that great and in those situations how to make the most of it is to like really find the things that you are excelling at that you find is meaningful for you and leaning into those things.

22:50And I think if you're in a situation where you're not super happy with the day-to-day of your job, you're not super happy with your boss or the quality of leadership at the company, but you want to stick around because there's not a lot of other options, this is where you start to look elsewhere besides the direct line of management for fulfillment. So whether that's building, you know, relationships with coworkers or other, you know, higher level individuals on different teams, like do what you can to build that network. And I would say like we just covered work slop. So if I'm an early career professional, I see a massive opportunity to actually learn how to use AI.

23:25Most people are not going to put in the work to do that. And they're just going to be slopping their work around. And it's going to be terrible. If you actually can understand how to use these tools, one, you're going to be more personally effective. but two, you could probably tell executive leadership how to actually train, how to actually use these because those people, it is a brand new technology for all of us. Those people are also a little behind. And so I think there's a massive opportunity to actually learn how to use AI. I like how you turned slop from an adjective there into a verb.

23:53Slop is a noun, a verb, and an adjective, Toby. It's everything. Finally, even as everything feels stuck in the labor market right now, an interesting force bubbling beneath everything is the death of workplace loyalty, The big shift that set it off was when AT &T CEO John Stanky sent a memo to employees saying that the company had consciously shifted away from a loyalty-based employment, essentially announcing that the old-school contract between worker and employer is dead. It was shocking to hear him say almost the quiet part out loud without a lot of remorse either. AT &T is no longer your family.