60-hour week: Enshittification for big tech jobs

Google, Facebook, Apple and co – Silicon Valley as a whole used to be a kind of place of longing for people interested in technology. That's where exciting products came from. It was the pulse of the times. And working for one of the big tech companies in Germany was probably very appealing to many people for a long time. Once upon a time. Now it's the year 2025, AI is making us all more efficient – and taking over all the tedious tasks for us, which is why we have to work a lot more and go back to the office.

At least that's what Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who has been back at the company since fall 2024, thinks. His internal memo, in which he talks about the benefits of a 60-hour working week and calls for a return to the office on weekdays – at least: you can work at home at weekends –, reads like a page from the Silicon Valley playbook from 20 years ago. But the wind has long since changed, even in the Valley.

An opinion by Eva-Maria Weiß

Eva-Maria Weiß studied communication science at the University of Vienna, specializing in media psychology, and has worked as a journalist ever since.

60 hours in the office without guard rails

For a long time, Big Tech shone as an employer with chic offices, a good location in the Valley, a free fruit basket and shared workstations. That sounded promising and modern. Not only did the diversity departments grow, but overhiring also made the workplace quite relaxed for many people. The big tech companies were virtually collecting specialists. Social media is full of videos of tech employees sitting on the roof sipping smoothies – during working hours, of course – and going to the company gym afterwards. There simply weren't enough tasks for the large number of employees.

Now thousands of employees are also being fired at Big Tech. Diversity departments are being closed, woke is no longer in fashion. Meta is abolishing fact checkers in the USA and moderating less. Brin also wants fewer "nanny products", meaning fewer guard rails. Elon Musk has long been in favor of unleashing everything possible on humanity – from limitless image generators to phone sex voice assistants. X employees have probably had the most unpleasant round of redundancies.

Big Tech breaks its deal

What you don't necessarily hear now as a reaction: Yeah, I want to work really hard and slip straight into burnout to make Brin, Zuckerberg or Musk even richer. Who would be surprised? Investor Marc Andreessen, for example, who himself became rich with Netscape. He believes that the old contract between politics, society and the tech industry has been terminated. This deal was as follows: tech companies start up, make great products, become rich and admired in the process, pay their taxes and give some of their wealth back to society. However, the Valley giants and their companies are now facing increasing criticism.

What Andreessen doesn't say is that Big Tech has long since stopped keeping its end of the deal. The products are becoming junk in order to maximize profits. Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" for this: online services are getting worse and worse because the operators are less and less interested in users and more interested in shareholders.

The glamor of hip headquarters with sustainable catering and flexible home offices were also part of this deal. A specially built cycle path leads to the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, and Apple Park in Cupertino is a sight to behold. But now it's 60 hours a week in the office. That's 12 hours a day and work at the weekend on top of that. And in your private life, you have to ask yourself who you are actually working for. Because society is certainly not currently benefiting from algorithms that prefer extremes.

The self-image of Big Tech is becoming less and less in line with society's perception. Brin is not doing himself any favors with his out-of-time writing. Zuckerberg may be able to entice investors with the Year of Efficiency, but I doubt whether this will work in the long term. People's frustration can be seen in Tesla's poor sales figures, for example, and it doesn't stop at the job market. Increasing efficiency thanks to AI is all well and good, but not with new slave labor. This takes the Valley to a whole new level of enshittification.

(emw)