Week 5: 996 and Its Discontents

Presenteeism and performative overtime — the 9am-9pm, six-day culture that turns "working hard" into a signal rather than an output

22 March 2027

Outline#

• the 996 schedule and the 2019 developer-led backlash that shipped as a GitHub repo, 996.ICU — itself a piece of unpaid overtime
• presenteeism as a key performance indicator by proxy: hours logged standing in for output, until the proxy becomes common knowledge
• performative overtime as a visibility strategy — optimising for who’s in the room, not what gets shipped
• mapping this back onto Geertz: labour trending up, output flat, one KPI at a time