11–20 of 264 posts
No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours. I think awareness of the issue is great as it appears more or less systemic in China to work long hours.
But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which maligns the reputation of China.
Pretty interesting discussion. Working in IT and being surrounded by technology means that it's hard to stop 'working' per se. Coding on the weekend for side projects/hobbies while balancing actual 'work' means I'm clocking quite a few hours every week myself banging away on my keyboard. No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours. I think awareness of the issue is great as it appears more or less systemic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like he's really smart. There's a billion people. He can just keep burning them out and there will be more begging to be treated that way. The only way to solve this is with regulations -- this is where capitalism breaks down. With that many people, it won't matter if he burns through them.
If you assume you have a huge reserve of capable people, then that will clamp down on wages, but as a manager you still want to optimise the productivity of the employees they have. Extreme overtime doesn't sound like a good idea. May as well hire 2 shifts of people and pay them half as much; aim for higher per-hour performance. 9-9-6 isn't going to get you very much per hour of labour time, the employees will be zom…
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...
Leaving aside the questions around the ethics of 996... is this kind of schedule actually effective? Do companies that work knowledge workers like this actually outperform competitors?
It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a startup. When you're young, moderately fit, and ambitious you can crank out a ton of code.
However, the important point is that it was my choice to do that. You can't ignore the ethics because that's what makes it wrong - asking people to do it while (even silently) implying bad things will happen if they don't is deeply unethical.
Leaving aside the questions around the ethics of 996... is this kind of schedule actually effective? Do companies that work knowledge workers like this actually outperform competitors?
If there are a lot of people in the company doing 996 every day I think they're probably spending most of their time doing mindless busywork.