Overtime is considered a norm of life here.
The recruitment website looks eye-catching: photos of happy young employees, upbeat slogans — "crazy speed", "endless curiosity", "customer obsession". Workers are promised numerous bonuses: competitive salaries, free meals, gym memberships, free medical and dental care. But there is a catch behind all this.
In every job advertisement, there is a warning: "Please do not apply if you are not inspired by... in-person work of about 70 hours a week alongside some of the most ambitious people in New York City."
This site belongs to the New York technology company Rilla, which sells AI systems that allow employers to track the work of sales representatives when they are out of the office and interacting with clients.
The company vividly demonstrates an example of a work culture known as "996". Sometimes it is referred to as hustle culture or grindcore. It implies an intense work schedule: from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week (hence the 996), totaling 72 hours.
Will Gao, the growth director at Rilla, assures that the company’s 120 employees do not find such a regime exhausting.
"We are looking for people who are like Olympic athletes — with qualities such as, you know, obsession and boundless ambition. These are people who want to do incredible things and enjoy doing them immensely," he says.
"If I think, 'Wow, that’s a cool idea, I need to work on it' — I just work on it until two or three in the morning, and the next day I come in, say, around noon," he explains.
Such an approach has become popular in the IT sector in recent years — and not without reason. The development of artificial intelligence is progressing at a dizzying pace, and companies around the world are now operating at full capacity, trying to find ways to apply and monetize it.
Huge sums of money are being invested in AI projects (many of which are startups). But every ambitious company founder is constantly haunted by the fear that someone else will get there first. Speed is everything here — and employees are forced to work both harder and longer to achieve results as quickly as possible.
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