'We're Humans, Not Machines': Hyderabad Engineer's 6-Day Work Week Cry

A Viral Cry From Hyderabad's IT Trenches

In a country where hustle culture gets celebrated by corporate titans and politicians alike, one anonymous software engineer from Hyderabad has cut through the noise with a bluntly human message: "We're humans, not machines." The engineer earns Rs 23,000 per month — well below the national average for technology sector employees — and works six days a week with no meaningful respite. His account, shared in mid-2025 across Reddit's r/india community and X (formerly Twitter), drew a torrent of responses from workers across India who said his words mirrored their own daily reality. The post has since become a flashpoint in one of India's most urgent and unresolved social debates: the right of workers to rest, and the responsibility of corporations to honour it.

Background: A Debate Decades in the Making

India's conversation about working hours is neither new nor simple. The Factories Act of 1948 set a legal ceiling of 48 working hours per week — a framework built for an industrial economy that a sprawling, largely unregulated services sector has since overtaken. As India's technology industry boomed through the 1990s and 2000s, so did the culture of long hours, weekend work, and the unspoken understanding that career advancement demanded personal sacrifice.

The debate sharpened dramatically in October 2023 when Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy publicly called on young Indians to work 70 hours per week, framing relentless labour as a patriotic duty essential to India's global competitiveness. His remarks drew fierce criticism and vocal support in equal measure, exposing a generational and class fault line within Indian society. Larsen & Toubro chairman S. N. Subrahmanyan escalated the controversy in early 2024 by suggesting employees should work 90 hours per week, Sundays included — a statement that provoked widespread outrage and renewed calls for stronger labour protections. Against that backdrop, the Hyderabad engineer's post is not an isolated complaint. It is the latest, and most personal, chapter in a long-running national reckoning.

What Is Happening Now

The engineer describes a schedule that leaves him only Sundays off — and even that single day, he says, is frequently swallowed by work-related demands. On Rs 23,000 a month, he cannot afford meaningful leisure, self-improvement courses, or adequate rest. The six-day week compounds financial stress with physical and mental exhaustion. Social media users and labour advocates have described his situation as emblematic of India's "invisible workforce" — the vast tier of technology and services workers who occupy none of the high-salary roles that dominate media narratives about the Indian IT sector.

Labour rights organisations have pointed to the post as evidence that existing legal protections are inadequately enforced. Advocacy groups note that while the law technically limits working hours, the practical reality for millions of workers — particularly those in smaller firms, outsourcing companies, and contractual roles — involves sustained pressure to comply with schedules that exceed legal thresholds. India's Ministry of Labour and Employment has not issued a specific public response to the viral post, though the ministry has previously indicated it is reviewing frameworks for gig and platform workers as part of broader labour code reforms that have been pending full implementation since 2020.

Key Players

At the centre of this story is the Hyderabad engineer himself — anonymous, but representative of a demographic that rarely receives media attention: the lower-wage, non-managerial technology worker in India's Tier-1 cities. His willingness to speak publicly about his salary and working conditions broke a cultural taboo that keeps many workers silent for fear of professional repercussions.

On one side of the broader debate stand India's most prominent industrialists, including Narayana Murthy and Subrahmanyan, who argue that long working hours are necessary for India to compete with economies such as China and the United States. They represent a school of thought that treats worker endurance as national virtue.

Ranged against them is a growing coalition of labour rights activists, mental health advocates, opposition politicians, and a younger generation of Indian workers who are increasingly vocal about burnout, work-life balance, and the psychological costs of chronic overwork. Organisations such as the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) have long pushed for stricter enforcement of existing labour laws and have called on the government to resist any legislative moves that would formally extend permissible working hours. Nasscom, India's technology industry body, occupies an ambiguous middle ground — publicly endorsing employee wellbeing initiatives while simultaneously lobbying for flexible labour regulations that critics argue benefit employers over workers.

Regional and Global Implications

India's working-hours debate does not exist in isolation. Across Asia, a parallel reckoning is underway. South Korea enacted landmark legislation in 2018 capping the working week at 52 hours after studies linked overwork to severe public health consequences, though political pressure has since mounted to roll back those limits. Japan has spent decades grappling with "karoshi" — death by overwork — and has introduced mandatory rest policies that remain imperfectly observed. China's "996" culture, meaning work from 9am to 9pm six days a week, sparked intense public protest before authorities issued largely symbolic condemnations of the practice.

For multinationals operating in India, the debate carries direct business implications. Global technology firms with major delivery and development centres in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Pune are watching closely. India's reputation as a talent destination depends partly on its ability to offer workers conditions competitive with other emerging markets. If India moves to formally extend permissible working hours through its pending labour code reforms, analysts suggest it could push talent toward markets with stronger protections — even as proponents argue it would attract investment from companies seeking a high-hours, cost-competitive workforce.

The story also lands amid global conversations about artificial intelligence and automation. As AI tools absorb more routine technology tasks, pressure on human workers to justify their roles through sheer hours — rather than output quality — is growing. Labour economists say that pressure is particularly acute in India's mid-tier IT services sector.

What Comes Next

India's four consolidated labour codes — which would replace 29 central labour laws and could reshape working-hour norms — have passed Parliament but still await implementation by individual states. Several major states, including Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, have already moved to extend permissible working hours for factory workers to 12 hours per day, citing post-pandemic economic recovery. Whether those changes reach the services and technology sectors remains an open question heading into the second half of 2025.

Labour advocates plan to use the momentum from the engineer's viral post to press for parliamentary debate on working-hour enforcement ahead of the next session. Mental health organisations have announced plans to release new data on burnout rates among Indian technology workers, which they say will provide empirical grounding for legislative advocacy. The engineer's story, meanwhile, is likely to keep circulating — a human anchor in what has too often been an abstract policy argument, and a reminder that behind every labour statistic is a person who simply wants one day to rest.