Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

IT’S THE GREAT Lock-In, haven’t you heard? Well, if you work in the high-pressure tech world, your boss certainly has, and to make that happen some are — consciously or unconsciously — importing China’s famed ‘996’ schedule (that is, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) to make sure that everyone is, indeed, locked in.

It started earlier this year at Google, when co-founder Sergey Brin told engineers at the company they should be putting in 60-hour weeks, which he called “the sweet spot of productivity.” Last week, the ex-CEO of Google said it more explicitly, stating that tech workers would need to match that 12-hour day schedule in order for North American tech to be competitive.

Many of these folks are talking figuratively and aren’t explicitly suggesting a 996 schedule. But on the ground, there are signs workers are literally trending in that direction. In San Francisco, often the tip of the spear for things that filter down through the broader startup environment, 996 is becoming a more common arrangement. “The current vibe is no drinking, no drugs, 9-9-6, lift heavy, run far, marry early, track sleep, eat steak and eggs,” said one 23-year-old founder in San Francisco.

But others are trying to stop this from becoming a North American reality. (It’s not even a Chinese reality anymore, either; the country officially bans the 996 schedule, though it is reportedly still common.) Ex-Google staffer Chris DiBona recently wrote a piece arguing against importing this kind of grind culture — after all, isn’t all this AI stuff supposed to relieve us of this? “If you want to rebuild an esprit de corps around a shared mission it will take years of consistent guidance and leadership,” he said, “not drive by micromanagement and plaintive memos that only make people roll their eyes.”

In fact, if North America is importing anything from Chinese work culture right now, many would like to see us emulate the backlash against 996.

“Younger workers in China have already begun rejecting this model, treating it as outdated and exploitative,” wrote consultant Jamie Raul Zepeda. “If the birthplace of 996 is walking it back, adopting it would be more than misguided — it would be self-sabotage.”

WORKFORCE

The human edge

In the modern workplace, mastering soft skills like communication and critical thinking may be even more crucial than technical know-how

WE’RE IN AN age of skills. Recruiters are increasingly turning to skills-based hiring, and candidates are now urged to develop skills rather than just pursuing credentials. Layer that over a tech-obsessed market, and it might be easy to assume that the pathway to a fulfilling career is by focusing on cold, hard skills.

But don’t count out those soft skills, new research reveals. A group of researchers led by Letian Zhang from the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management found that in modern economies, it’s not necessarily the hard skills you have, but the soft skills on which you can build that correlate strongest with lifetime earnings.

The researchers used large data sets, looking at 70 million job transitions, and categorized skills into those that are foundational (e.g., reading, math, teamwork, communication) and more specialized (e.g., blockchain, or computer coding), and tried to analyze the relationship between their skills and their careers. “We found that those who scored highly on basic skills were more likely to earn higher wages throughout their careers, move into more advanced roles, learn specialized skills more quickly and were more resilient to industry changes,” the researchers wrote.

They argue that workplaces might be better to source talent by thinking like a pro basketball team. “Teams don’t always pick the top college scorers. Instead, they look for players with high potential. These players may not shine on day one, but they often develop into stars.”

But that’s not always what happens. Hard skills dazzle at the top of résumés, and often the candidates with the rock-solid soft skills get bypassed. This, the researchers suggest, is an oversight — firms are functionally overlooking what they call “nested human capital,” and found that the hidden nature soft skills often contribute can also lead to wage and hiring disparities across different demographics.

Companies say they place a high value on soft skills — 91 per cent of employers in a survey in 2023 said they value things like communication and adaptability — however those skills are stubbornly hard for those doing the hiring to identify, much less value.

But especially in 2025, with a labour market that is volatile and uncertain, the researchers suggest this stuff matters more than ever.

“As technical complexity rises, the glue that keeps talent productive is social skill — communication, empathy, conflict resolution and the ability to coordinate diverse expertise,” the researchers wrote. “Our work finds that, in the long-run, candidates with a base of foundational skills will prove more valuable than those who have hyper-specialized and specific knowledge but lack soft skills.”

CYBERSECURITY

How effective is your company’s anti-phishing training? Not very, it seems

A new study suggests that employees fall for phishing scams at about the same rate, whether they’ve had training or not

PHISHING SCAMS — EMAILS that trick you into clicking a nefarious link, often by making it look like it’s a legitimate one — have become a major, and growing, problem for Canadian businesses over the last 20 years. In Canada alone, the average phishing scam in 2025 costs organizations $7.91 million per breach, up from a measly $6.38 million in 2024, according to IBM Canada, and a government report pegged phishing as “one of the most reported types of fraud in Canada,” and one that is only growing harder to combat in the age of AI.

Many readers will be well aware of this, in part because of the high likelihood that their employer has conducted anti-phishing training, often by engaging in both instructional sessions and simulated phishing emails, designed to see if employees are vulnerable to being tricked.

New research, however, suggests businesses are failing to actually make inroads against the problem. A research team from UC San Diego published a study that “suggest[s] that anti-phishing training programs, in their current and commonly deployed forms, are unlikely to offer significant practical value in reducing phishing risks.” In particular, the researchers found there was no correlation between formal training sessions and how likely an employee was to click a phishing link, and that simulated links aren’t doing much to teach people, either.

“Phishing simulations fail to deliver appreciable training for two reasons,” they wrote. “First, only a small fraction of users fail in any given simulation, and thus in any exercise the vast majority of users receive no training. Second, those users who receive training typically fail to engage with training materials.” When presented with embedded training materials (the pages that pop up when you click one of the simulated links), they found that half of employees close the page (likely annoyed or embarrassed) within 10 seconds.

Instead of these common methods, the researchers suggest a better alternative: hire better cybersecurity departments and implement two-factor authentication. But what they’re saying when you read between the lines is businesses need to be proactive in this and not assume that what they’re doing is working.

“The problem with cybersecurity is that most don’t feel the pain. They think it’s going to happen to others, but not to them,” said Ali Ghorbani, a cybersecurity professor at the University of New Brunswick. “I’m telling them — it will happen. It’s just a matter of time. It will happen to everyone who is not careful enough. This is not a joke.”

TECHNOLOGY

Is AI actually stealing jobs

A new study says that AI isn’t taking jobs (at least, not yet), but it is probably preventing job creation

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