There is no formal Silicon Valley occupation that officially requires three years of nonstop work. The claim comes from Christopher Tanner’s recollection of working at Silicon Graphics (SGI), where he said he and his colleagues worked around the clock for roughly three years and spent nearly every hour together. It is a vivid personal account of an extreme work pattern—not evidence that every technology job, or even every SGI role, operated that way.
Where the three-year, 24/7 claim comes from
In a 2019 interview conducted by Nicole Sansone for the thesis Sites of Sky, Christopher Tanner described his time at Silicon Graphics. His account was precise about the intensity and duration: “we worked 24/7 at Silicon Graphics for like, three years, where we were probably with each other all but six hours of the day, seven days a week, for … three years.”
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The wording matters. Tanner was recalling his own team’s experience, not defining a job title, publishing a company-wide policy or reporting a measured average. “24/7” in this context describes practical immersion and constant availability as he experienced it. It should not be read as proof that employees literally performed productive tasks every minute, or that all Silicon Graphics workers followed the same schedule.
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The testimony points to a high-pressure technology project environment in which work and personal time blurred together. Team members were together for almost the entire day, every day, for about three years. The defining feature was not a special occupation called a “24/7 job”; it was an unusually sustained combination of deadlines, shared responsibility and an expectation of immediate availability.
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That distinction separates three ideas that are often collapsed into one headline:
- Nominal hours: the hours written in a contract or expected in a normal week.
- Practical availability: how often a worker is expected to answer messages, attend meetings or solve urgent problems outside those hours.
- Actual work time: the hours spent building, testing, managing or supporting a product. Tanner’s recollection emphasizes total immersion, but it does not provide a time sheet that separates these categories.
Was Silicon Valley generally a 24/7 work culture?
Other educational commentary has portrayed Silicon Valley as a “work-and-wealth-obsessed culture” in which “we think work 24/7 – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s normal.” The same account describes a senior manager who expected an average of about 60 hours a week and treated the sacrifice of personal life as part of the bargain.
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Those descriptions help explain why an individual could experience extreme hours as culturally accepted. They are contextual commentary, however, not a representative survey of Silicon Valley employees. They cannot establish that most workers put in 60 hours, that most were continuously on call, or that a three-year schedule was common.
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|---|---|---|
| Tanner’s interview about Silicon Graphics | One named worker recalled a roughly three-year period of around-the-clock work and near-total time with colleagues. | A universal requirement, a company-wide rule or a prevalence rate. |
| Educational descriptions of Silicon Valley culture | Long hours and constant availability could be portrayed as normal or financially worthwhile. | An average schedule for the region or a current industry-wide norm. |
What did that level of immersion cost?
The clearest documented cost is personal-life sacrifice. Tanner said he and his colleagues were together “all but six hours of the day, seven days a week.” That leaves little room for relationships, family commitments, independent interests, rest or ordinary separation from coworkers. The account also shows how a team can become a person’s entire social environment when work dominates nearly every waking hour.
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The sources do not provide a measured burnout rate, health outcome, salary premium or productivity result for this schedule. It would therefore be misleading to claim that the pattern reliably produced career success, or that it affected every participant in the same way. The evidence supports a description of profound time loss and immersion, not a quantified cost-benefit analysis.
How to interpret “three years of 24/7” without overstating it
- Identify the speaker: the claim is Christopher Tanner’s recollection, not an anonymous internet anecdote.
- Keep the employer and period attached: he was discussing Silicon Graphics and a period of about three years.
- Read “24/7” as an account of working conditions: it conveys continuous involvement and availability, not necessarily uninterrupted physical labor.
- Separate culture from prevalence: commentary about a work-and-wealth-obsessed environment explains the attitude toward long hours but does not measure how many people lived it.
- Avoid turning an extreme case into career advice: the testimony documents sacrifice; it does not show that such a schedule is necessary for advancement or that it is sustainable.
What the evidence can—and cannot—tell job seekers
A prospective employee can reasonably treat the story as a warning about how some technology teams have framed commitment: long hours, constant contact and the expectation that personal time is negotiable. Before accepting a role, ask how hours are measured, how often urgent work occurs outside the stated schedule, who is on call, how projects handle missed deadlines and whether time off is genuinely protected.
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Those questions are more useful than searching for a job title that supposedly mandates 24/7 work. The available evidence identifies an extreme experience and a cultural narrative, not a standardized occupation or a reliable map of present-day Silicon Valley employers.
Is there a statistic for how common this was?
No defensible statistic establishes how many Silicon Valley workers followed a literal three-year, 24/7 schedule. The available material supplies a named testimony and broad cultural descriptions, but no representative survey, regional average or verified burnout figure for this exact claim. Any percentage or “typical” schedule attached to the headline would go beyond the evidence.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What Silicon Valley job makes you work 24/7 for three years?
No formal job title is established. The claim comes from Christopher Tanner’s recollection of an extreme period working at Silicon Graphics, where he said his team worked around the clock for about three years.
Did tech workers actually work nonstop?
Tanner described near-continuous involvement and being with colleagues almost all day, every day. The account does not prove that people performed active tasks every minute or that all tech workers had that schedule.
Is Silicon Valley really a 24/7 work culture?
Some educational accounts portray the region as normalizing very long hours and constant availability, including expectations of roughly 60 hours a week. Those descriptions are cultural commentary, not a representative survey.
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The documented impact in Tanner’s account is severe loss of personal time: he said colleagues were together all but about six hours a day, seven days a week, for roughly three years. The sources do not quantify health, burnout or financial outcomes.
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