70-Hour Work Week is Unsustainable but…

The 70-hour work week debate is interesting! On one side I understand the need to not soften up and rather treat the decade as an opportunity for India. Meanwhile, it’s not sustainable to push boundaries for a prolonged period of time.

It’s a bit similar to a portfolio strategy I believe in … which is to double down when you get a portfolio-worthy project in your career. Which basically follows the philosophy of taking advantage of the rare opportunity. But that’s 1 project, this 70-hour thing is a decade we are talking about! I don’t think it’s sustainable.

Also, the narrative is not strong! Desh ka GDP badha denge type desh bhakti narrative is not going to appeal to youth IMO. I don’t know what will work, but nationalism will be a hard sell for new gen corporate employees.

I agree with opportunity-grabbing part, but instead of 70, what we can work toward is

1. Less distracted 40 hours of work, with less unproductive use of time like commute and unproductive meetings. Probably a faster approval process in larger corporate structures.

2. Make more youth employable and if you need 15 hours of manpower then employ more people in shifts.

3. Could be totally off but I don’t personally think our ability to export cheap IT service is going to take us from here to the next step. We need product companies. We are in the right cultural shift where entrepreneurship is airing on prime-time TV.

I think more and more people who are interested in starting something, but are in doubt … should just start anyway… we should make taking-calculated-risk sexy. That’s how we would stand a chance to build exportable-scalable products instead of IT-man-hours.

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