As an employee and a founder of a company his viewpoint seems to go against what has made the most effective teams I've worked with. You should focus on outputs not inputs when working. If someone can do the work of someone else with a fraction of the effort that person should be rewarded not punished. I don't know anyone who can work 14 hour days regularly and still be productive. If someone is doing that, it is a red flag for me to know that something is broken or that person is incompetent and needs to be let go.
Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
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Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#52Complaining about Silicon Valley political correctness while extolling the virtues of China is at best tone deaf. It’s pretty much impossible for anyone who has any experience with Asia to deny that racism is just more socially acceptable over there than in the US. And things like homosexuality are suppressed. For example, China recently banned depictions of homosexuality on TV. So of course it’s easier to say certai…
The simplest way of looking at this is that the more power you divide up among increasingly small segments of your population, the more you divide the house.
In China, there is the objective of China, where there is a singular focus on what is good for the people and the country. Groups that would take away from this to empower their own group are viewed as attacking the collective.
America until the middle of the 1960s or so was like this to a large extent. Various minorities (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans) entered the country, kept separate identities for a while, but eventually integrated into the whole. The death of John F. Kennedy signaled the end of a unified America and the birth of a far more divided house.
Today, America has fractured into a litany of squabbling sects. In China, you have the Chinese. In America, what used to be called "Americans" are now called whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Arabs, gays, straights, bisexuals, pansexuals, transexuals, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, globalists, Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews. There are feminists and men's rights activists and Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right. Each sect wants the spotlight; it wants advantages over other groups (masked with euphemisms like "equality" or "recognition" or "reparations"); and it views the overall identity of the country as an oppressive enemy that must be fought.
That is not to say one condition is better than the other. These seem to be natural cycles nations go through. John Glubb notes the Byzantines squabbling amongst themselves over their divisions as the Ottomans blew holes in the walls around their city in 1453. [1] Byzantium, like America, had been the world's greatest super power at one time too. It seems likely the slide into infighting and decadence is a natural state of every nation advanced in the cycles of civilizations.
But of course, a people that spends its time tip-toeing around and arguing about what labels to use to refer to this group and who can use that word and who can't use that word and how many of which group you have to hire to not get sued has very different priorities and will achieve very different outcomes than a people that is relentlessly focused on a more singular, unified objective, other things being equal.
In America's case, I suppose the question is: do the benefits of diversity (which has become a sort of national religion over the past two decades) outweigh the costs?
The test case of American "maximum diversity" vs. Chinese maximal industriousness may prove as close as we'll get to a controlled study on how these two very different national priorities stack up against one another head-to-head on the world stage over the coming decades.
Place your bets now folks....
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#53Complaining about Silicon Valley political correctness while extolling the virtues of China is at best tone deaf. It’s pretty much impossible for anyone who has any experience with Asia to deny that racism is just more socially acceptable over there than in the US. And things like homosexuality are suppressed. For example, China recently banned depictions of homosexuality on TV. So of course it’s easier to say certai…
i’ve never found a country less racist than the us
The only way to think like this is to have never left the US. Unfortunately, too many American grow up not having the exposure of how people speak in the rest of the world. Ever seen an entire soccer stadium erupt into monkey calls when a black player kicks a goal? You don’t know what a climate of racism is.
Americans think they are surrounded by racism, they have no idea what that actually means.
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#54So, he's basically indicating to companies he may potentially invest in that they need to start hiring Chinese to do the actual work because they're cheaper and work longer ours.
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#55I agree with this guy. I know I'll be downvoted to oblivion but gotta say what i gotta say.
I'm not saying political correctness is bad, and I don't think this guy is saying that either. He's just stating the facts and I would like to also just state the facts.
There are way more conflicts and drama and scandals in America because Americans are much more "woke" than citizens of other parts of the world. Again, this is not a "bad" thing, but if you look at what this is causing, same americans are tearing down successful and ambitious american entrepreneurs who may have achieved something really great.
Let me use Uber as an example, since I know you guys will downvote me anyway. The founder of Uber got kicked out and now Uber is struggling. When Uber was struggling to grow in China, Americans were busy criticizing Uber for all kinds of things. This probably didn't help them in any way. You will say companies like Uber and the founder deserves it and unethical companies like Uber should not be left to survive.
And I agree with the sentiment that unethical companies are bad, but again, I'm just going to state the facts.
If you look at "less woke" developing countries around the world, they don't have this sense of social justice because they don't have the luxury. So they do whatever is possible to increase their GDP.
That's why a lot of developing countries are corrupt. But guess what, that's how these countries and companies from these countries grow. Companies like Samsung have always had very tight relationship with their government, and most people--while they never actually witness the corruption--kind of acknowledge that something like that happens behind the scenes. The woke Americans will say that's bad and that shouldn't happen, and samsung should be taken down, etc.
But at the end of the day, this is how developing countries actually accumulate their riches and this is how the top performing companies from these countries reach the top and end up growing globally.
They will one day become the "woke" ones as much as Americans are, but until then, they will become richer and richer and soon be a threat to the U.S. economy.
This has nothing to do with ethics, justice, or whatever. This is just how it has always been, and that's how it will be.
If you look at what's happening with China, it really IS taking over the world. A lot of top cryptocurrency projects and companies are from China. Most influential hardware are increasingly coming from China. All this while the ADD silicon valley founders and VCs are pouring money into fad technologies and having a serious identity crisis.
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#56So engineers should work an additional 60 hours a week each while rich VCs get to systematically steal the future with their accredited investor scam. Sounds reasonable.
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#57https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/jack-...
It is interesting to contrast this investor's cliches about working 12 or 14 hours day as a key to success and Chinese work ethic with what an actual Chinese business leader as to say on that topic:
“My grandfather worked for 16 hours a day. He thought he was very busy. We work eight hours a day for five days a week and we think we are very busy. But in the next 30 years, people will work only for four hours a day and four days a week”
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#58>> "in many respects, doing business in China is easier than doing business in California."
There are merits to this discussion and of course, all the comments I have seen including the top one, either simply suggest or put some words in his mouth!
The Virtue Signaling on HN is nauseating! Listen to the man, he has better worldly experience than most of us (me, for sure) and read the nuance too (instead of playing the snarky critic).
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#59Complaining about Silicon Valley political correctness while extolling the virtues of China is at best tone deaf. It’s pretty much impossible for anyone who has any experience with Asia to deny that racism is just more socially acceptable over there than in the US. And things like homosexuality are suppressed. For example, China recently banned depictions of homosexuality on TV. So of course it’s easier to say certai…
i’ve never found a country less racist than the us
So you're saying you've never spent anytime outside the US unless it was at a vacation resort...
Re: Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really depends. I worked at a company a few years ago and we stayed late because we were just a bunch of lonely dudes living in a big city with nothing better to do. If we went home at 5, we'd just be sitting alone playing video games.
That doesn't mean you weren't being exploited.
Exploiting implies unethical. I'm not too sure this fits the notion of unethical. Or, if it does, only from one perspective. Ethical doesn't become unethical the second you pass over 8 hours in a workday.