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Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

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Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#41

Post by rococode »

cjw3 wrote: post #18

It’s interesting to compare the Bloomberg article with this one from the South China Morning Post, titled “Alibaba founder Jack Ma says companies forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’”. Two articles reporting on the same statements and drawing completely different conclusions. It’s getting harder to find the truth. [1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...

edit: seems like there are contradicting statements from him on this so I'll remove the stuff I had written earlier. It appears he is generally against forced hours but highly encourages his employees to work those hours anyways.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#42

Post by achow »

cjw3 wrote: post #18

It’s interesting to compare the Bloomberg article with this one from the South China Morning Post, titled “Alibaba founder Jack Ma says companies forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’”. Two articles reporting on the same statements and drawing completely different conclusions. It’s getting harder to find the truth. [1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...

Bloomberg did it again - false reporting?* It is very weird.

Others reports this:

“No one likes working at a company that forces you to do ‘996’. Not only is it inhumane, it’s unhealthy and even more unsustainable for long periods – plus workers, relatives and the law do not approve of it,” he said. “In the long term, even if you pay a higher salary, employees will all leave.”

https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-companies...

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#43

Post by echelon »

onion2k wrote: post #19
anbop wrote: post #5

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?

I spent a good chunk of my twenties working a schedule of 8 hours coding at work followed by 6 hours coding on a side project, with my entire weekend on the side project as well. I didn't have any sort of social life (largely by choice but also because I was remote working in a tiny rural village). It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a…

Also worth noting is that you spent time working on your own side project. Not for a company that owned your intellectual output. You invested in yourself and your interests.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#45

Post by gexla »

onion2k wrote: post #19
anbop wrote: post #5

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?

I spent a good chunk of my twenties working a schedule of 8 hours coding at work followed by 6 hours coding on a side project, with my entire weekend on the side project as well. I didn't have any sort of social life (largely by choice but also because I was remote working in a tiny rural village). It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a…

A side project is much different than a work project. You got your eight hours of work and got to go home and do whatever you pleased. In this case, it was to write more code. Having to corral your brain into the singular focus of an employer's project against deadlines, feedback (sometimes crazy talk,) updates, documentation and other distractions is different.

I can happily crank out code all day if it's something I'm doing for myself. As soon as you add the employer, it immediately starts doing my head in. It's completely different work. Some employers are better than others in this regard I suppose.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#46

Post by khawkins »

jedberg wrote: post #4
devoply wrote: post #2

Jack Ma is an idiot for doing this for very simple reasons. It's a country of 1 billion people. His company has 5 billion dollars in revenue, they pay their developers like 30k USD. Burning out your brightest is a stupid business strategy. They can afford to hire many more people as they have plenty of money to afford to do so. It's like some stupid idea of machismo. Like be a man! Yeah fuck that noise. It's in fact…

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.

Regulations from whom? The "Communist Party", a regime founded on anti-capitalist doctrine?

This is where communism breaks down. The only way to make it work in an economic sense is to turn it into a soulless corporate dystopia. Absent the incentive to work for personal gain, everyone must be motivated to work for the glory of the country through near constant propaganda.

Poor performance becomes a sign of anti-government sentiment. Thus, finding a new job after getting fired is extremely difficult, regardless of skill or desire to hire, because such governments go to great effort to blackball anyone who steps out of line, for fear of protest or dissent.

The USSR did indeed make great advances in technology and had a functioning economy, but at the despair and large-scale death of its people.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#47

Post by arvinsim »

> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.

And this is why I got disillusioned with the "you should be passionate about your work" mantra. Capitalist companies exploits it for the own benefit.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#48

Post by rwallace »

human20190310 wrote: post #25

I'm beginning to suspect that the 996 schedule (and its equivalents in other cultures) aren't actually about productivity; they're about devotion. Devotion isn't something a CEO can explicitly ask for, but a 996 schedule is, so that becomes the expectation even if it actually has a neutral-to-negative impact on productivity. Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were…

Your conclusion is absolutely correct.

The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.

But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.

So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#49

Post by techsupporter »

tedk-42 wrote: post #11

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…

The thing is, from my perspective, you're not "working," as in giving your time solely to your employer, on your weekends when you're banging away on your keyboard on side projects.

> No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours.

That's true, and so you can stop doing it or change what you're doing on your off time whenever you like and have no ill consequence for it. For these workers, they don't have that option. Either be at the keyboard, dedicated to the employer, for the requisite time or be fired.

We see a lesser version of this in the US IT industry a lot. People are nominally employed for 40 hours per week but management only puts a priority or good focus on the people who do the "above and beyond." Sure, you might officially only be paid for 40 hours most of the time (special circumstances excepted), but when management only gives raises and promotions to the people who are consistently e-mailing at 9:30 at night and slinging code on Sunday, the real rules stand out very quickly.

Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On

#50

Post by regularfry »

human20190310 wrote: post #25

I'm beginning to suspect that the 996 schedule (and its equivalents in other cultures) aren't actually about productivity; they're about devotion. Devotion isn't something a CEO can explicitly ask for, but a 996 schedule is, so that becomes the expectation even if it actually has a neutral-to-negative impact on productivity. Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were…

It's simple: you can pay a "passionate" person less, and generally subject them to worse working conditions, and they won't leave.
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