131–140 of 146 posts
I'd love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it.
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A sane number of hours per week is far below 40. In France, we have a 35 hour work week. I am sure we can (and I think we must) go lower without losing much. Less hours for better hours.
My experience of working for a massive company in france was we had a "35 hour" workweek, which cadres would regularly ignore. They were typically doing 8:30-7pm or 9pm-7pm.
Do 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?
Yes, and no. IT development is one of the best paying professional jobs in China, commanding 3x to 8x a typical office worker's salary. If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a…
Is product ownership or management seriously considered a better job in China? At almost all places I worked at in EU middle management/product ownership is considered a less desirable position.
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... we do not have the same problems. Every single software engineer I know does not work 996 even if they work at a fast-paced startup
Not 996, but some of the h1bs from India go through something similar 5 days a week. Many of them have to attend 'offshore calls' with the team in India which usually starts around 10 pm and goes till midnight, in addition to the regular 9-5 work. One h1b guy I know had his schedule like this - attend early morning 1-1.5 hour meetings at 6.30 am on 3 days of a week, work from 9/9.30-4 (sometimes 5 or 6), attend offsh…
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On the other hand, switching to private communications has never been easier, at least for person-to-person chat. (Signal, etc.)
The question here was public discourse (or mass media if you will). Securing a private channel is a very different problem altogether.
Unfortunately this would also mean spreading the sort of crap as debunked on Snopes.
> 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…
Do 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?
Yes, and no. IT development is one of the best paying professional jobs in China, commanding 3x to 8x a typical office worker's salary. If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a…
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?
Two things that seem like they might be impediments: - Traversing the Great Firewall is slow and unreliable. Having team members on either side of it wouldn't be great for collaboration. - I seem to remember reading about somebody complaining that sending money to Chinese citizens from abroad can be very difficult. I don't recall the details though.
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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…
Too useful to block is a concept China doesn’t acknowledge. Too troublesome to not block is how it operates.
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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.