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996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

chanind.github.io

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Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#41
post #15

> Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers’ rights movements and unions are extremely uncommon mind-boggling.

They too claim "China Is the Largest Democracy in the World".

http://chinascope.org/archives/13789

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#42
post #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.

well. i have a huawei phone, which open link using its own browser. I have not found a way to use other broswer as default. I bet most of Chinese phone does the same.

for wechat, it open link in its own broswer too.

I could change phone and delete wechat. but do it cost too much.

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#43

For 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?

I think hacknews is good place. the barriar is english. chinese developer who visit hacknews pass the english requirement and usually are interested in software development.

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://lite.cnn.io/ would be a great candidate site for easy publishing to Github in some sort of markdown.

Of course I imagine there would be license problems.

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#46

> 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…

Actually, the major official propaganda People's Daily newspaper urged authorities to review working hours in the industry.

Usually, if the official opinion is negative about this campaign it will never show on any propaganda.

I cannot find the original newspaper online, but there are several mentions from some websites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

https://qz.com/1589309/996-icu-github-hosts-chinese-tech-wor...

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#47
post #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.

That's not how it works. In a truly free marketplace, eventually one, two or three winners would emerge over time and they would have an order of magnitude more capital than the rest of the players. Using that capital they can be light years ahead in terms of capabilities due to compounding effect which allows them to make some uncomfortable changes (like tracking or enforcing sister products or building walled gardens) while continue to maintain monopoly. A switch is available to customers in theory but can never be exercised without significant loss in terms of experience and/or direct money for the customer. In other words, no truly free market is actually healthy from this perspective. This is a mathematically provable by modelling events as pure random chances and players starting all equally. Eventually system will evolve to have handful of players accumulating exponential gains and resources enforcing Pareto's principle.

Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening

#49
When I visited in 1999, my friend’s mom had to work on saturdays, and pretty late everyday at that. This mostly went away but popped back up in Chinese tech industry for recent times.

Many Chinese tech companies even have time cards for salaried employees to make sure they are in the office enough, as well as cheer leaders and such to keep them motivated past dinner time.

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