Why China’s 996 model won’t shape the future of work

For more than a decade, China’s 996 work culture—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—has been the unspoken benchmark for what hypergrowth ambition looks like. Many of the country’s most celebrated tech giants were forged in its intensity: long hours, relentless delivery cycles, and an unwavering belief that personal sacrifice fuels market dominance. In its heyday, 996 wasn’t just a schedule. It was a badge of honor, worn proudly by founders and employees alike as proof of resilience and commitment.

But if you strip away the bravado, 996 is less a productivity system and more a dependency loop. It creates a company whose capacity is measured by the stamina of its people, not by the strength of its structure. And when you depend on stamina, you’re building on a resource that is both finite and fragile.

The tension here isn’t about whether working hard is bad. Early-stage founders know that long weeks can be unavoidable in critical moments. The real issue is whether those hours are compounding into capability—or simply masking the absence of it.

Most founders who default to 996 aren’t doing it because they believe people should suffer for the sake of the business. They’re doing it because speed feels like the only competitive edge they have. In crowded, high-stakes markets—especially in China’s hyper-competitive tech scene—speed can make or break early momentum. But speed achieved by stretching hours is fundamentally different from speed achieved by designing scalable decision-making systems.

In 996 cultures, founders often equate “more time spent” with “more control retained.” Having the team in the office for twelve hours a day means you can intervene quickly, approve work instantly, and keep multiple initiatives moving at once. It feels like operational mastery. In reality, it’s a subtle form of centralization that makes the founder the default decision-maker for almost everything.

This is the system mistake: the hours give the illusion of organizational muscle, but the actual operating capacity resides in one person—or at best, a small group of senior leaders. That’s not scale. That’s a choke point.

This pattern usually starts innocently enough. In the earliest stages, everyone is hands-on, roles are fluid, and the founder is deeply involved in every decision. When the business is small, this works because decisions are high-impact and the founder has the context to make them quickly.

Then, growth accelerates. Investors push for aggressive timelines. Competitors launch copycat features in weeks, not months. The founder responds by pushing the team harder, knowing that more hours today can mean hitting a critical launch or securing a market foothold tomorrow.

Hiring under these conditions focuses on speed of execution over clarity of ownership. New team members are expected to “jump in and figure it out” with minimal ramp time. That can attract ambitious doers—but without clear boundaries, those doers become dependent on the founder for approvals, direction, and course corrections. And because everyone is in the same room for such long stretches, there’s little incentive to formalize processes. Why bother documenting decisions when the decision-maker is right there?

The cracks don’t appear immediately. For a while, the system hums. Deadlines are met. Output looks impressive. The culture even feels energizing—shared struggle can be bonding in the short term. But as the team grows, those early habits become liabilities.

Velocity stalls. With more people and more projects in motion, the founder’s bandwidth becomes the bottleneck. Decisions queue up, and initiatives slow down, even as the hours stay long.

Trust erodes. High performers notice that authority doesn’t match responsibility. They may own a project in name, but final decisions are still routed through the founder. Over time, this undermines their confidence and commitment.

Retention suffers. Contrary to popular belief, people don’t leave 996 environments just because of the hours. They leave because the hours stop feeling purposeful. Without autonomy or visible career progression, the grind turns from energizing to exhausting.

Systems debt accumulates. The longer a company operates without distributed decision-making, the harder it becomes to implement later. Habits of dependency calcify, and any attempt to decentralize feels like a loss of control.

To understand why 996 persists despite its flaws, you have to look at its cultural and economic context. In China, the rise of 996 was fueled by a combination of factors: intense market competition, the prestige of rapid scaling, a labor pool willing to trade hours for career advancement, and the visibility of founder-martyr archetypes like Jack Ma, who openly praised the schedule. It was a model that matched the national narrative of economic ascent—fast, ambitious, relentless.

But this context doesn’t easily translate globally. In markets where labor protections, work-life balance norms, or talent mobility are stronger, 996 quickly runs into resistance. Western teams, especially in tech, expect autonomy and flexibility as markers of respect and trust. In Southeast Asia and the Gulf, talent retention hinges on career development pathways and inclusive culture—neither of which thrive under a pure endurance model.

Even in China, the model is showing cracks. Younger workers are increasingly vocal about rejecting “involution”—the endless cycle of working harder for diminishing returns. Government scrutiny of labor practices is rising. And global competition now values adaptability and creativity as much as raw output.

Replacing 996 doesn’t mean replacing urgency. It means designing a system that can deliver speed without burning through your people—or your own capacity.

Start with ownership mapping. Write down every recurring decision in your business. Next to each, note two things: who actually makes the call, and who believes they make the call. The gap between those two answers is where dependency lives. Closing that gap means transferring not just tasks, but authority.

Apply the rule of three for delegation: if the same decision crosses your desk three times, it should live elsewhere. This forces you to identify and train owners for specific domains, reducing the constant need for your intervention.

Run a span-of-control audit. Count your direct reports and the number of domains you actively approve work for. If you’re involved in more than seven to eight areas at once, you’re operating beyond sustainable capacity. Narrowing your span forces clarity into the structure and accelerates decision-making.

Finally, formalize process before crisis. Many founders only document workflows when they’re preparing for a handover—or when something has already gone wrong. Building lightweight documentation early means decisions and actions don’t vanish when the person who made them steps away.

Reflective questions to ask:

• If I stepped away for two weeks, which functions would slow down or stop entirely?
• Which team members believe they own decisions but still need my approval?
• How many of my “urgent” tasks are the result of unclear ownership upstream?
• Are we measuring speed by delivery times—or by how little the founder needs to intervene?

These aren’t just thought exercises. The answers reveal whether your current pace is the product of good design or borrowed stamina.

The reason 996-type dependencies take root so easily in young companies is that pre-seed and seed-stage teams often conflate function with role. Someone may be “Head of Product” in title, but in practice, they’re still waiting for the founder’s sign-off before making significant calls. This works when the team is tiny and aligned by proximity. But as headcount grows, the lack of true role clarity becomes a drag on performance.

In early teams, culture is often defined as “how we work together.” But without structural support—clear decision rights, scalable processes, consistent communication rhythms—culture is just mood. And moods don’t scale.

The next competitive frontier won’t be won by who can keep the lights on the longest. It will be won by teams that can adapt quickly to change, move decision-making closer to the point of action, and scale without burning out their most valuable resource: trust.

996 may deliver impressive short-term results, especially in environments primed for rapid execution. But it’s a brittle foundation for sustained success. Founders who rely on it are essentially betting that their own endurance—and that of their team—will outlast every competitor’s. History suggests otherwise.

The question worth asking isn’t whether your team can work 996. It’s whether your company can work when you can’t. If the answer is no, the problem isn’t effort—it’s architecture. And architecture, not adrenaline, will decide who wins the future of work.