The term for this strategy is "collateral freedom":
996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
21–30 of 146 posts
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#22Do Chinese workers not have the flexibility to avoid working for companies that force these schedules on them? I know next to nothing about working life in China, but wouldn't workers generally gravitate to the companies that value work/life balance? Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?
Many companies can offer double salary for 996, and many people would happily accept it.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#23> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
To block the 996 Github presence on Github would mean to block Github, as Github is served via HTTPS. That's not viable as Github is far too useful to block (IIRC it and StackOverflow were blocked a couple of years ago but then unblocked due to uproar from the tech industry). To block Github 966 pages specifically means the domestic browsers are pre-filtering URL requests before they're made. And that means these dom…
IIRC from a previous discussion on HN, those browsers are essentially a VPN with a MITM proxy, and obviously trust the company's own certificates.
I believe that proxy does have other more benevolent uses than censorship, which is why people use those browsers in the first place.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#24For those of us who employ developers remotely and ask for a sane number of hours per week (usually 40), does this mean there's an opportunity to hire great developers from China who would like to have better work/life balance? Where would I start?
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#25The term for this strategy is "collateral freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom
Thanks! I learned a very useful new concept. I wonder if there’s a collateral loss of freedom, too. For example when people from the west are against Google or Apple censoring stuff, we lose all of their services—because they either censor or get censored-resulting in a loss of freedom unrelated to political contents.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#26> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
To block the 996 Github presence on Github would mean to block Github, as Github is served via HTTPS. That's not viable as Github is far too useful to block (IIRC it and StackOverflow were blocked a couple of years ago but then unblocked due to uproar from the tech industry). To block Github 966 pages specifically means the domestic browsers are pre-filtering URL requests before they're made. And that means these dom…
I really wonder if someone could start a GitHub repo mirroring, e.g., news articles that are censored by various governments. Could be a nice way of making censorship difficult.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#27Do Chinese workers not have the flexibility to avoid working for companies that force these schedules on them? I know next to nothing about working life in China, but wouldn't workers generally gravitate to the companies that value work/life balance? Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?
Chinese people are too many compared to the resources affordable to them. The US people are in the contrary position. That difference is the source of many differences between the two country.
And in this case, only a handle of companies in China offer work-life balance, most of which are owned by foreign capital (e.g. Google, Microsoft and IBM). They are very hard to get in, even harder than their US counterparts, because of the much smaller headcount and much larger pool of candidates.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#28> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
For what it's worth, I just tried opening the supposedly blocked site using Wechat, in China, on a Chinese phone (xiaomi) with a Chinese mobile plan (China unicom) and it works fine. Not sure if that's because it was never actually blocked or because they realized blocking it was a bad move and rolled it back.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#29> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
I would take away something different.
In a healthy software "marketplace", there would be plenty of browser competition and such blocking would be totally ineffective. It wouldn't matter if companies had the power to censor the internet or not because people could just switch.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#30> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
I've been saying this for years: censorship, like many things, has been privatized. Things like the First Amendment in the US are inadequate for the modern age, because the majority of our discourse touches multiple intermediary businesses on its way between individuals.
There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.