OPINION

Billionaires like Musk, Brin, and Bezos want us to work 60+ hour workweeks while teams of nannies raise their children.

It's time we said ‘enough’.

The New York Times reported that Google co-founder Sergey Brin told employees working on their Gemini AI product that to "win" the race to AGI, "I recommend being in the office at least every weekday ... 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity."

I'm done with this garbage.

How much longer must we listen to billionaire male leaders with teams of home help tell the rank and file that they're not “hardcore” enough?

That what is required is sacrificing even more of the limited time we have with our families?

How often have you heard men—and sorry, but it's almost always men—say "I'm doing this for my family" to justify grinding away at 60-hour weeks?

There's a reason this keeps happening.

It's got little to do with "work-life balance" and much more to do with ego and how society defines success for men.


Work 60+ hours a week to prop up someone else's business? No thanks. Photo: Shutterstock

I saw it firsthand, getting passed over for career advancement because I was "leaving whenever I pleased" to be home for bedtime with my newborn daughter—before inevitably returning to emails and pings from the US that went long beyond midnight.

The real barriers to innovation at tech giants aren't "lazy" engineers or empty chairs.

They're labyrinthine approval processes, where simple decisions require sign-offs from 12 different teams with conflicting objectives and key results (OKRs).

There are meetings about meetings about meetings to amend yet another internal deck.

They're promotion systems that reward individual heroics over collaboration.

When tech leaders like Musk demand "extremely hardcore" work conditions, I wonder if they've forgotten what it means to be human.

With his 13 children in various states of abandonment, he’s asking us to cast aside our own families to prop up his companies' stock price.

The irony would be comical if it weren't so damaging.

I've seen both worlds. A well-rested worker with four focused hours accomplishes more than a sleep-deprived one with 14 distracted hours.

The research backs this up:

📉 Stanford: Productivity sharply declines after 50 hours, with virtually no output after 55

🧠 Nature: Cognitive function declines ~25% after the 9th hour of work

🔄 Microsoft Japan's 4-day workweek experiment increased productivity by 40%

💡 Gothenburg's 6-hour workday study showed nurses were 64% more productive, took fewer sick days, and reported higher job satisfaction

So to every leader demanding we sacrifice our humanity on the altar of productivity, I have just one question: When you're 80 and look back on your life, will you wish you'd spent more time with your family or more time in the office?

Those 60+ hours in the office?

That's over half the hours we spend awake during our lifetime: missed bedtimes and dinnertimes, huge chunks of our kids’ lives when we should be by their side.

I know my answer.

What's yours?


This post originally appeared on LinkedIn and is reproduced here with permission of the author.