Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys Ltd., speaks at the Infosys 40th anniversary event at the company’s headquarters in Bengaluru, India, on December 14, 2022. Aparna Jayakumar – Bloomberg via Getty Images
Initially, Alibaba founder Jack Ma asked tech workers to stick to “996,” a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule, six days a week. Then Elon Musk asked Twitter workers – now X – to commit to long, “high-intensity” work hours. And late last year, Tencent CEO Pony Ma complained that his employees were taking it easy on weekends while the company as a whole was struggling.
Now another technology founder is weighing in against allegedly lazy workers. Narayana Murthy, founder of IT consultancy Infosys, believes employees need to work a 70-hour week – and should do so out of pride for their country.
“Our youth need to say, ‘This is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week,'” Murthy said in an interview with Indian venture capital firm 3one4 Capital published on Thursday. The tech founder pointed out that low productivity was holding India back from its potential and argued that young Indians should follow the example of post-war reconstruction in Germany and Japan.
“For the first time, India has received some respect. This is the time for us to consolidate and accelerate progress and for this we have to work very hard,” Murthy said.
Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 with six engineers for $250, leveraging Western technology companies in the hope of outsourcing IT operations to lower-cost India. In 2002, he stepped down as the company’s CEO.
Infosys currently has a market capitalization of around $68 billion. The company generated revenue of about $18 billion last year, an increase of 14.6% from the previous year.
Indian workers spend about 43% of their time on “performative work,” the highest among markets studied by Slack and research firm Qualtrics. According to the report, employees worldwide spend an average of about 32% of their time looking busy instead of working.
Murthy’s comments sparked an online debate among both his business colleagues and ordinary Indians. Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Indian ride-sharing company Ola, expressed his support for a long work week. Post on X that he “put in the hours. Not just 70, but more like 140.”
Tech founders have long tried to encourage their employees to work longer and later hours, but those arguments fall apart amid new conversations about work-life balance.
The push for “996,” which equates to a 72-hour week, helped spark the Chinese idea of “laying flat,” the rejection of a culture of long hours of doing the bare minimum to make ends meet get. This is part of a larger trend of younger workers in China pushing back against the idea that hard work leads to personal and professional success.
Younger workers in the US and Europe are also rejecting the idea of “hustle culture,” leading to new trending terms on social media like “quiet quitting” and “bare minimum on Monday.”