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So a guy that married 2 times and divorced 2 times, has 3 children, recommends that the sweet spot for productivity is 60 hours per week, which would mean about 12h/day if you work 5 days or 10h/day if you work 6 days. This means, if you start your work at 8, you finish either at 20:00 or 18:00 + 30-60min lunch break. With such a packed day I can only imagine what a stellar childhood will his kids get assuming he wants to be involved in rising them...
I’m pretty sure he’s not the one working 60 hours a week.
This is pretty much 996, which is illegal even in China (though apparently a sizable share of companies are still practicing it).
Just pay for a nanny, bro. /s
I'm sure most people wouldn't outright say that, but I have no doubt that many corporate leadership types think that way. After all, the C-suite has higher incidences of NPD and ASPD so it shouldn't be surprising. Along with being out of touch, some of them probably think their peons should have the means to do the same.
The other part of the recommendation is "at the office 5 days a week". Working more than 40 hours and spending meaningful time with your kids is very possible, if you aren't wasting 2 hours a day commuting and you have a flexible schedule and you have a partner who can also spend time with the kids.
For an exec, it is, and he is 100% correct.
There's a reason why execs get perks - free housing, transportation, personal assistants, etc are all common things at the VP and up level for these large corportations. The whole reason for that is to free up time so they can work 60 hour weeks.
For a standard IC, that's not the case. Life takes time. You can do it, but it will be at the cost of those around you. I spent the last ~2 years working 60-80 hour weeks at Figma. At one point my boss asked me to work from my honeymoon. My life, health, and relationships suffered because of the pressure I was putting on others as a result of that.
If Google wants and expects that out of their ICs, they need to provide the same level of accomidation they do for execs, otherwise it just comes off as an exec being out of touch with the needs of every day life.
I would disagree that it's a sweet spot for execs.
Essentially no one should be working 60 hours a week, the human mind needs breaks to unconsciously work on problems.
I would posit unless someone is doing pure labor, anything involving creativity / problem solving actually has worse returns past 30 hrs a week of intense work.
Anyone in exec positions claiming otherwise likely would hesitate to let someone actually see what they do all day / week. No doubt they "work" all day in some cases, but that day is filled with lots of non work / downtime.
I’d like to understand what you were doing at figma that was so damn important for your boss to ask this of you. I’ve used figma, it’s definitely not critical software product that people place their lives on.
These are the same execs who count their flight time as working hours but refuse to do the same for their run-of-the-mill employees commute time.
But Sergey Brin has never been an exec. He is someone who got really, really lucky, and then just plays around on the side.
What does a CEO actually do for 60 hours a week?
I seriously doubt they’re working harder than the average SWE in the trenches, even though they probably think they are.
From my vantage point, C-suite jobs are basically hired nobility.
It sounds like youre not helping.
Doing that amount of hours is what makes execs think they can ask that of other people too
Capitalism sucks everything out of people, most people nowadays can’t even make friends, find a partner, have a child, just work-sleep-a little time for a hobby at best, and then they wonder how come we have a demographic catastrophe? Capitalism is just another form of slavery
Where actually went all the productivity gains of the last decades? Isn't that supposed to decrease the amount of labor we humans have to do eventually?
Most frequent answer to this is: "But look we have all the high tech everyone of us can afford easily". But that cannot be the answer, because even if I choose to live like a luddite hermit while working 40h a week, I'm still not becoming super rich or can afford a house, which people my age could do 50 years ago.
So the productivity gains went elsewhere. The question is, into whose pocket? I guess into the pockets of those people who demand we should work even more than 40h a week.
> Where actually went all the productivity gains of the last decades?
Productivity gains by design go primarily to the investor class, the owners of corporations. There’s no mechanism for those gains to go to laborers. If a company performs 10x better, you don’t get a 10x raise, but the equity might be 10x higher.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
In addition to that, the monetary policy of money printing has severely diluted the dollar since 1971, with an extreme surge that happened during COVID. This policy effectively reduces the wealth of the labor class and increases the wealth of the investor class. If there’s 100x more dollars and the same amount of Tesla stock or houses, the Tesla stock and houses are suddenly worth way more in dollar terms and whoever only had dollars has effectively 1/100 of what they used to have. So any productivity gains the labor class received have been getting leeched away for decades.
On top of this, the investor class has the entire system rigged in their favor. They're protected from their bad investments like in the 2008 financial crisis or the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco. The tax code allows many of the investor class to get away with paying little to no taxes. There are restrictions on building new housing because the current owners don't want to see their homes devalued. It's basically easier to make money the more money you already have.
Now, these aren't really strict "classes." If you own a retirement fund, you are at least partially in the investor class. But there are many people who don't own any assets, and because of this dynamic where it's easier to make money the more you already have, the people at the top of this pyramid scheme are always extracting the most out of any gains that society achieves.
Part of the productivity gains did go to workers. Depending on the country that's somewhere between 0% (Japan) and ~70%. The US seems to sit at 10-20%. The remainder is pocketed by others.
>Where actually went all the productivity gains of the last decades?
Most productivity gains went into enterprise value because most of the productivity gains of the last decades are the result of capital investments.
As a salaried worker the only stable way to increase your wage is to upskill yourself (99% of companies don't do that anymore).
There is a book, called "The Price of Tomorrow".
Talking about this specific problem.
TLDR: Inflation
How many hours per week was he working when having an affair with the Google Glass marketing manager? [1]
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
Remember when Google used to be considered one of the cushier places to work?
Not a fan of how big tech has become the parable of the frog in slowly boiling water.
Our heros fought and died for 8-hour working days and when we stop fighting, we go back to 12-hour working days! That is why you need to search for theinternationalism.org
He is just a rich guy with an opinion. What do studys say?
A four-day working week improves mental and physical health: https://www.ukri.org/who-we-are/how-we-are-doing/research-ou...
Work time reduction via a 4-day workweek finds improvements in workers’ well-being https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
So to not feel starved for time, aim for a 7.6 hour workday. That would equate to a 38-hour workweek. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/this-is-how-many...
New Study Finds the 'Optimal' Length of a Workweek and found that the "optimal" workweek is 37 hours. https://money.com/optimal-workweek-length-hours/
60 hours, hmm. Does he pay overtime? Does he increase stock options, ideally grants? Is the project horribly behind time or features? Or, is he just an asshole who feels he can replace workers as needed?
Obviously ageist, probably anti-partner. Does this include commute time, or is this gratis?
Oh I easily do work 60 hours a week. Just not all of them for my employer, because I have kids I want to raise and I have chores to do. Which people like Sergey Brin likely don't have. That's the big difference.
My sweet spot is not far from this 60, but in the way of side projects for work. Let me explain, I cram work directed by my employer into a 10h x 4 day work week. Followed by 10-16h on self-directed projects over my 3-day weekend. Projects with no supervision or direction (which is key).
It’s a pattern that has produced great results and satisfaction. Though, when your self-directed work falls-off it can be difficult to get it going again. Life being so full of challenges.
Modern take on slavery creeping up on us closer and closer... "Work will set you free..." - I've heard this one before, didn't end up well...
August 2025 OP? February even. How's it working out for them?
Some discussion then:
And he is absolutely right!
If, like Brin, you're the boss and you can delegate all the unpleasant parts of work to your minions then why not work 60 hours only in the pleasant parts (including having sex with a marketing manager) and, still, cash billions?
What an arsehole.
Multi-billionaire says to work harder to make him richer faster. The sooner this attitude is recognised as a sickness the better.
His investment in time is guaranteed to pay off for him, and the investment in time of the people who work for him is guaranteed to pay off for him.
The rest of us have no guarantees, and have learned the trade-offs are less and less likely to be worthwhile.
> In an internal memo to employees who work on Gemini, Google cofounder Sergey Brin recommended being in the office at least every weekday and said 60 hours is the “sweet spot” for productivity, according to the New York Times.
Dated August 2025
The sweet spot to me is time and a half at 100 USD per hour. Adjusted for inflation.
That works out to 7000 per week. He will not listen to me so why should I listen to him.
Okay, so if Google wins AGI first, who is to say that AGI isn’t so disruptive, the government just nationalizes Google?
Looking on the bright side: I guess based on the google 20% rule this mean 12 hours for opensource every week!
Didn't he retire not so long ago?
I work to live and not to make a billionaire even richer off my back. The rank and file who are clued in don't spew this dross but those with most to gain do. You can always tell those with skin in the game.
I mean but AI is replacing humans, so they should be able to work less hours.
Sweat spot
[2025]
And they’ll be compensated more than fairly for the 60 hours, including double overtime, right? Right?
This is capitalism, my dude, people don’t work at your company, because it’ll cure cancer or something, they do it for the compensation.
And for those that do work there 60 h/week out of blind loyalty - you deserve the thousands of layoffs they’ve had the past years.
Fuck you, Sergey.
Directed at the team working on gemini it seems. I'd work 60 hours a week for the compensation they're getting, without hesitation. I already work close to that for far less.