A founder who embraces 996 often believes long hours will buy speed, commitment, and the kind of legend that attracts capital and talent. The schedule looks like momentum because everyone is present, keyboards are loud, and the lights are still on when most offices are dark. The trouble is that human beings do not convert hours into value in a straight line. The bill for chronic overwork does not arrive as a neat line item, it shows up as a slow erosion of judgment, a breakdown in trust between functions, and a quiet flight of the very people who hold the company together. The impact begins in the mind, then spreads into the workflow, and eventually becomes culture. Once it becomes culture, it is expensive to reverse.
Decision quality is the first place where cost hides. A 996 rhythm keeps people in a persistent stress state. Cortisol stays elevated, sleep shortens, and the parts of the brain that handle nuance and long horizon planning lose power. Under those conditions teams still move, yet they lose discrimination. Features ship because the calendar says ship rather than because the evidence supports the release. Every alert looks urgent after the third night of partial sleep. Fires are fought in the order they appear rather than in the order that protects the system. What looks like discipline from the outside is often reactive motion inside. A startup wins on the strength of its decisions, not on the number of actions taken. When stress narrows attention, the business produces more motion and fewer correct calls.
The next cost appears at the seams between teams. Chronic load makes people protect themselves by narrowing what they feel responsible for. Handoffs grow ritualistic. Meetings become negotiation sessions about scope and risk rather than joint design. Context that should ride along with a task is dropped to save time, then reclaimed later at a higher cost through escalations and hotfixes. Tired people do not close loops, they forward them. Over time the backlog fills with half finished work that no one truly owns. This is not a talent problem and it is not a character problem. It is the predictable outcome of running people at a pace that treats vigilance as infinite.
Hiring math gets distorted as well. A leader who wears 996 as a badge imagines that the schedule will screen for grit. It does screen, just not in the way intended. The company selects for individuals who can tolerate strain and who have fewer anchors outside work. That can look efficient for a while because these people will accept the premise without debate. Across a year the team skews toward contributors who optimize for effort rather than for systems. Integrators, tool builders, and steady operators who turn chaos into infrastructure learn to keep their heads down or simply decline the offer to join. A culture begins to celebrate pain tolerance as if it were mastery. Pain tolerance has some value during emergencies. It is not a strategy, and it is not a moat.
False positives in the dashboard keep the overwork story alive. Lines of code increase. Tickets close faster. Announcements multiply. These numbers wear the shape of speed but they do not measure value. The numbers that matter are quieter. Time to clarity on a new problem stretches. The interval between recognizing an issue and committing to a direction expands. The proportion of defects that originate from miscommunication rather than from technical complexity grows. None of this looks dramatic in a weekly report. It appears in private conversations, in late night messages that try to make sense of what slipped, and in the tone of the next sprint plan, which usually promises more of the same.
Mental health is not a side plot in this story. It is the foundation that determines how much thinking a company can do per unit of time. Anxiety narrows time horizons and pushes teams toward choices that feel safe in the next twenty four hours, choices like hardcoding a rule rather than running a small experiment that would expand understanding. Depression lowers initiation energy and shrinks the appetite for ownership. People still show up, yet they stop proposing redesigns, and they stop making the case for better primitives because they cannot afford one more uphill conversation. Burnout confuses significance and urgency. Trivial tasks swell to fill the day, while foundational work ages quietly on the backlog since no one has the bandwidth to argue for it. Slogans and pep talks cannot correct for these effects. Only a system that protects recovery can.
There is a way to diagnose whether a team is paying this hidden tax. Look at repeat value creation within each user segment rather than at total output. If the company is sprinting and yet repeat value per segment is flat or falling, the activity is not compounding. Examine decision freshness by tracking how long it takes to move from recognition to commitment on the top problems in flight. If that interval is rising while hours are rising, effort is being used as a substitute for clarity. Audit the defect mix. If a growing share of issues come from context gaps and incomplete handoffs, the system is overstrained rather than under skilled. These measures are not perfect, yet they reveal whether the machine is learning or simply spinning faster.
The practical antidote begins with boundaries that are mechanical rather than motivational. A single protected evening each week where no one ships, no one escalates, and no one checks the dashboard resets stress chemistry and restores prefrontal bandwidth. Put the senior leadership review on that day and resist the impulse to move it for emergencies that are only urgent in the story. When leaders are the first beneficiaries and the first enforcers, the organization learns that clear thinking is the scarce resource, not visible sacrifice. This is not a wellness perk. It is the quickest way to buy back compound judgment.
A second lever is the collapse of status work. Overwork produces meetings that allow people to feel useful without making decisions. Replace live status with short written updates that answer only what changed in the user’s world, what the team shipped that changed behavior, what was learned that will alter the plan, and what remains blocked by leadership. If a review does not change a decision or remove a block, cut it. The hours reclaimed here are the same hours that used to be stolen from sleep.
On call and escalation deserve product level design. If the same ten percent of people carry ninety percent of late night pages, the company is not running a culture of grit, it is centralizing knowledge and power through exhaustion. Pair every significant page with a follow up that changes code, tooling, or ownership to reduce repeat exposure. Rotate cleanly. Reward the reduction of pages more than the drama of answering them. A healthy pager becomes a retention tool for senior staff and a learning ladder for mid level engineers. An unhealthy pager becomes a quiet exit plan for the very people the company most needs to keep.
Language is a lever too. The story a company tells about time becomes the behavior it scales. If the narrative celebrates weekends in the office, the firm recruits people who need that story to feel valuable. If the narrative celebrates customers who start the week unblocked and a release train that needs fewer hotfixes by Friday, the firm recruits people who see time as a design variable. Founders set tone through what they praise, what they ask in one on ones, and what they ignore in public. It is not affectation to say out loud that the company chooses systems that create clarity over displays that create applause.
Advocates of 996 will point to giants that grew under intense schedules and to moments in every startup where a surge was required. Constraints are useful when they sharpen focus. They are destructive when they strip away signal. The 996 equation does not fail because people are weak. It fails because the cognitive load of chronic overwork depletes the scarce asset a company actually sells, which is clear thinking applied to the right problem at the right time. A business does not win by producing more motion than its competitor. It wins by producing more correct decisions per unit of time. Correct decisions require recovery.
Even if the pattern is already entrenched, it can be unwound without losing pace. A six week trial that locks a weekly no ship window, replaces status theater with concise written updates, and limits each function to two simultaneous high stakes initiatives will tell the truth quickly. Measure decision freshness and repeat value per user segment for the duration. If both trend in the right direction, the company has proof that intensity theater is not a prerequisite for velocity. If both fail to improve, the problem is not time, it is strategy, and that truth is worth knowing.
A startup is a judgment engine that feeds a learning loop. Judgment degrades under chronic stress, and learning slows when people stop proposing better ways to work. A culture that confuses endurance with excellence will run hot, appear busy, and quietly lose to teams that protect thinking. There is no virtue in borrowing strength from the future by taxing the very system that must remain sharp. Build an organization that gets clearer the longer it runs. That is durability. That is the only kind of speed that compounds.
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