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Framing matters more than hours
Mercor recently raised $100m at a $2B valuation, and its culture has been reported as 9-9-6: 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
Hearing 9-9-6, most people think that sounds intense. The founder sees a team that loves the work so much it cannot wait until Monday to make progress, so guardrails had to be put in place to make them take a break. In that version, the team has to be forced to rest on Sunday.
The same schedule can be told two ways. The hours and schedule matter less than the framing the founder provides, and that framing shows how the founder's brain and their culture work.
Where did the 9-9-6 schedule come from?
The 996 schedule became associated with China's technology industry. In 2019, developers started a GitHub project called 996.ICU to protest it, and the project quickly became one of the most starred on the platform. In August 2021, China's Supreme People's Court and its Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly issued guidance saying overtime beyond legal limits was unlawful. The guidance cited the 996 pattern as an example.
How does framing change what people choose?
In 1981, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman gave people a choice between two programs to fight a disease expected to kill 600 people. When the programs were described in terms of lives saved, 72 percent picked the certain option. When the identical programs were described in terms of deaths, 78 percent picked the risky option. The outcomes in the two versions were mathematically the same.
Why does output flatten as work hours climb?
Economist John Pencavel of Stanford studied British munitions workers during World War I, when factories recorded hours and output closely. His 2014 analysis found that output per hour fell once weekly hours passed roughly 50. Workers putting in 70 hours produced barely more in total than workers putting in 56. The records came from the government's Health of Munition Workers Committee.
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