Companies declaring 996 is good in a way -- helps you filter them out (or in) depending on your preference. I think companies pitching "work life balance" but not subscribing to it in reality are worse. Better to know the deal upfront.
FWIW, early in my career I would welcome 996 as long as it came with rewards. Now I prefer high intensity, constrained 9-6, but with high scale.
Unless in China, unfortunately, if people filter out "996" companies there are not many decent options left.
In reality, companies in tech sectors don't declare themselves as "996", because they're by default "996". Companies that work 40 hours per week would declare themselves as "965" or "955" because it's rare and attractive.
Let's have a glance at how bad it is:
As an example, the work schedules for "FANG" companies are relatively sane. The counterparts in China would be "BATJ" (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, JD), and Uber-like counterparts (Bytedance, Meituan, Didi), their work schedule all largely exceeded 40 hours. The worse of them all is Pinduoduo, the very successful competitor to Alibaba's Taobao, they work 13 days before they get one day off (6 days on one week and 7 days on the other).
It's even uglier if we dig down to the rabbit holes:
1. Job with lower pay doesn't mean less working time, it's often the opposite.
2. "996" doesn't mean it stops are 9 pm. If a recruiter is being "honest" and says they're a "996" company, be prepared to work till 11pm for most of the days, and over midnight sometimes.
3. More often than not, the salary package IS the amount people get. There is no extra pay for overworking. People are working overtime because the deadlines are ridiculous and they don't want to lose their job, because most jobs are the same anyway and they have to go through the fierce competition process again.
4. The most toxic one: overwork for nothing. The leader of the team wanted to show his/her competency to the boss by letting everybody just sit there and overwork, even though there's no real task to be done at all!
At the bottom line, there are still a few decent options that like Google and Microsoft in China, but the competition is even more fierce.
I have one response to all that.. fuck that noise.
On that basis I work 864, but I guess in China people are just another natural resource from which to extract value, once all the value is extracted (burned out) they dump that person and take the next one off the heap. Its a sad state of affairs that the Chinese think that this work ethic sets them apart from the rest of the world. It does in a way, but what it really allows is for the chinese government and chinese companies to make them work longer for less and to feel like they are special for doing so.
There is a reason that the west has labour/employment laws that protect people from this sort of exploitation. Sad to see that the chinese people have fallen for this sort of bullshit.
It's the sad irony of collectivism. When you remove all concept of individual ownership and accountability in the name of universal equality, you've effectively destroyed the individual as a unit and just turned them into another resource to be taken advantage of, nominally for the good of the whole, but in reality for the good of the ruling party.
I don't think collectivism is at fault here. There are many places that are far more collectivist than the US but have extremely sane work schedules.
Germany comes to mind, in particular, as an example of how collectivism can actually help allow for sane work hours. I worked there for a few months. One of the things I deeply respected is that my co-workers were completely okay with the bakeries closing at 3:30pm, supermarkets closing at 6:30pm, being open for only 2 hours on Saturday, and completely closed on Sunday because "the supermarket employees also have families and need time to rest", words which you would almost never hear in the US. (In larger cities of Germany, supermarkets have longer hours, but rarely past 8pm or 9pm, and definitely never 24 hours like you often find in the US.)
What is at fault is rampant, extreme capitalism, which at that extreme milks humans of every last drop at the expense of their health, because their health is not a part of the financial optimization function at all. If you can profit by driving your employees to insanity, you profit, and that is deemed optimal by an extreme capitalist system.
(And before some social media flamewar-instigators accuse me of advocating for extreme communism, no, I'm advocating some balance between mostly captalism and some strong labor laws that everyone must abide by to maintain the physical and mental health of the country.)
Well let's not saddle up the high horse so quickly. The same sort of issues apply to the US where collectivism/socialism is certainly not the norm. There the individual is powerless in the face of corporations and they are similarly exploited, except now instead of the ruling party doing the exploitation it's the ultra rich who take advantage of the individual.
FWIW, early in my career I would welcome 996 as long as it came with rewards. Now I prefer high intensity, constrained 9-6, but with high scale.