I've always wondered, do these work? As in - is the production of the 996 workers more, less, or equal to those working 40 hour weeks?
Did it arise out of some data-driven research, or is it mostly just the result of cargo-culting, where one successful company had such hours/schedule, and the other companies just followed suit?
From my experience working in the US for companies that wanted to emulate that culture. 996 was nothing more than a result of poor management, lack of planning, and the attitude that employees are disposable and could be easily replaced.
The phrase I associate with and cringe at is "all hands on deck". Oh, you didn't know that project A's deployment will wipe out project B's testing in the lower environment? All hands on deck. Oh, you didn't realize your novel idea of deploying 40000 processes to update the databases will result in a denial of service attack on our own servers? All hands on deck. Oh, you didn't get knowledge transfer from the last bunch of contractors who were let go and now you can't figure out how they deployed A into abstraction layer B which has a dependency on C and no documentation exists? All hands on deck.
My understanding is that it does work, for the period that they work in the company, because few work actually needs intensive brain activity.
But it's bad for the employee, and bad for the companies down in the line because the employees would already been drained. That's why there is an implicit or explicit 35-yrs old deadline in the industry.
Did it arise out of some data-driven research, or is it mostly just the result of cargo-culting, where one successful company had such hours/schedule, and the other companies just followed suit?