By ByteBot
L&T chairman SN Subrahmanyan’s January 2025 call for 90-hour workweeks—including Sundays—sparked outrage across India’s tech sector. His advice to employees? “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? Get to the office and start working.” The backlash was swift, with business leaders mocking the idea and social media erupting in criticism. But the real story isn’t the controversy. It’s the economic suicide disguised as ambition.
With 83% of Indian IT workers already burned out and 25% working 70+ hours weekly, executives pushing longer hours aren’t building competitive advantage—they’re destroying it. And the data proves it.
The Productivity Myth Executives Refuse to Accept
Stanford economist John Pencavel’s research is unambiguous: productivity per hour declines sharply after 50 hours per week. After 55 hours, putting in more time becomes “pointless.” For knowledge work like software development, the relationship between hours and output isn’t linear—it’s an inverted U-curve that plummets past a certain point.
Here’s what executives miss: productivity doesn’t just flatten after 50-55 hours—it can go negative. Fatigued developers make mistakes that take longer to fix than the additional hours worked. Mental clarity, creativity, and problem-solving all degrade rapidly with exhaustion. You’re not getting more work; you’re getting more bugs, bad architecture, and technical debt.
Manufacturing assembly lines can benefit from longer shifts up to a point. But coding isn’t widget production. It requires mental sharpness that evaporates under sustained overwork. The executives pushing 90-hour weeks are applying 1950s manufacturing logic to 2025 knowledge work. It’s economically illiterate.
India’s Burnout Crisis Is Already Catastrophic
The numbers are stark. A March 2025 Blind survey of 1,450 verified IT professionals found that 72% work more than 48 hours per week—exceeding legal limits. At companies like Cisco, Amazon, ServiceNow, Walmart, and VMware, up to 42% of employees clock 70+ hours weekly. And 75% report feeling pressured to exceed standard hours.
The result? Code quality collapse. Pull requests get sloppier. Functions become clunky, variable names lazy. Developers skip tests they used to insist on. Bug rates climb. Between 73% and 83% of developers have experienced burnout in their careers, according to JetBrains data. India’s burnout rate—62% according to CII-MediBuddy—is triple the global average of 20%.
Companies think they’re buying 90 hours of productivity. They’re getting maybe 40 hours of useful work and 50 hours of mistake-prone slog that generates future rework. Stack Overflow put it bluntly: “Companies that foster burnout by insisting on constant overtime are not just abusive, they’re self-defeating.”
Brain Drain Accelerates, Not Slows
The 90-hour push will drive away India’s best developers, not make them more productive. India already loses $50 billion annually to brain drain, with 3.12 million highly educated migrants representing 65% of the global share. One-third of IIT graduates leave every year. Sixty-two percent of top IIT students migrate. Between 60,000 and 75,000 engineers emigrate annually.
Where does that talent go? Indian tech workers add $198 billion to the U.S. economy—not India’s. Forty-two of the 2025 Forbes ‘AI50’ startups were founded by Indian immigrants. India ranks seventh globally in talent shortage, with 81% of employers struggling to find skilled workers. Despite having a massive developer population, India faces a predicted shortage of 1.4 to 1.9 million tech professionals by 2026.
The paradox is brutal: push developers too hard, and the best ones leave. The mediocre ones stay and burn out. Remote work means Indian developers no longer need to emigrate to work for Western companies—they can command global salaries from home. In a global talent market, brutal working conditions are a competitive disadvantage, not an edge.
The Post-War Comparison Is a False Analogy
Both SN Subrahmanyan and Infosys founder Narayana Murthy cite post-war Japan and Germany as examples. Murthy recently escalated his 70-hour proposal to 72 hours, praising China’s 996 culture (9am-9pm, six days a week). But this comparison is fundamentally broken.
Post-war Japan and West Germany achieved 9-10% GDP growth in the 1950s and 1960s by rebuilding physical infrastructure—factories, roads, manufacturing. They were producing cars and steel, not writing code. More hours on an assembly line can yield more widgets. More hours debugging a React component yields brain fog, not features.
Knowledge work degrades with fatigue in ways manufacturing doesn’t. The executives pushing this narrative are using outdated mental models from a different era and industry. India needs to compete on quality and innovation, not grinding hours. The post-war playbook doesn’t apply here.
What India Should Do Instead
The 90-hour push isn’t a competitive strategy—it’s a symptom of management failure. Real productivity comes from tools, processes, and smart work, not brute-force hours. India should be investing in developer tooling—AI assistants, automation, DevOps infrastructure. Productivity per hour matters far more than total hours worked.
While India grinds developers into the ground, competitors invest in AI coding tools that multiply output without multiplying burnout. India’s R&D investment sits at 0.64% of GDP, compared to 3.47% in the U.S., 2.41% in China, and 5.71% in Israel. The gap isn’t work ethic—it’s infrastructure, tooling, and strategy.
To attract returning talent and retain top developers, India needs better work conditions, not longer hours. The country’s reputation as a desirable place to work is eroding. When the best developers can command Western salaries remotely or emigrate entirely, why would they choose 90-hour burnout culture?
The Vicious Cycle
Burnout creates a doom loop. Tight deadlines drive excessive overtime. Developers overwork to ensure quality. Exhaustion causes mistakes. More pressure mounts to fix problems. Even more overtime follows. Even worse burnout results. Even lower quality emerges. Eventually, developers quit.
GitLab’s survey identified code reviews as the third-biggest burnout contributor, right after long hours and tight deadlines. When deadlines loom, developers cut corners—quality becomes the only available shortcut. Companies end up with the same damage control costs developers worked so hard to avoid. The cycle compounds until attrition solves the problem by losing burned-out developers entirely.
Economic Suicide, Not Ambition
The 90-hour workweek push will destroy the competitive advantage it claims to protect. It drives brain drain, collapses code quality, and reveals management incompetence. The real question isn’t whether Indian developers can work harder. It’s why Indian tech executives are so bad at management they still think hours equal output in 2025.
Stanford research, global burnout data, and India’s own talent exodus all point to the same conclusion: this strategy fails on every metric. India’s tech sector can compete globally—but not by burning out the people who build the actual software. Sustainable productivity, smart tooling, and treating developers like the knowledge workers they are will win. Grinding 90-hour weeks will just drive the best talent to competitors who figured this out years ago.
