China is a communist country - shouldn't be the workers rights one of its top priorities?
China is ruled by a party with the word “Communist” in its name. That is basically the extent to which they are communist.
996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
51–60 of 146 posts
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#52China is a communist country - shouldn't be the workers rights one of its top priorities?
“At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate to the interests of the nation and the masses. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight are most contemptible, while ... working with all one’s energy, whole hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.”
- Chairman Mao Zedong
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#53> 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…
Hmm, mass communication wasn't easy back in the time the First Amendment was written and the problem was "we don't have enough free communication". You could just as well argue that it wouldn't exist if written today.
There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#54Well, if the work culture in China's tech industry improves after this, it's time to seriously consider moving back to China :)
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#55I would like to see something similar in the U.S. Unfortunately, I don't see a path to resolution anytime soon, both for U.S. and China. In the past 20 years, I have only seen society become more and more corporation-friendly.
... 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
I don't even understand what the point of 996 is. I work normal hours and I find by the last hour I'm mentally done and I become totally unable to do anything more, staying extra hours would get nothing extra done.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#56> Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers’ rights movements and unions are extremely uncommon mind-boggling.
The idea of communism is that government is your employer and you trust your government to re-distribute product of all labours fairly among all participants. Given that workers unions exist as an adversarial or at the very least opposing power to employers, they are explicitly not allowed in communism because otherwise (in theory) you hurt government's ability to meet its goals for fair redistribution. Another reason they are not allowed is because they can potentially create new workers movement overthrowing present government. Also, things like work hours, overtime, holidays are non-negotiable because now you are supposed to be working for all your comrades, not just yourself. If country happens to have only 1/10th of doctors and if doctors are now need to work 18 hours shifts, that's what they need to do for same pay.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#57Slightly more readable companies blacklist (website URLs extracted): https://pastebin.com/rP4YHr0s
Huawei is #1, with hours even worse, labeled as "9106". Alibaba is #2. Xiaomi is also there.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#58For 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.
I agree. I work for a Chinese company in Shenzhen. There are a few software developers I cannot speak with face-to-face, but almost all are decent through text and patient enough when I need clarification. And if they are actually visiting sites like HackerNews, or contributing to StackOverflow they likely are more than proficient enough to work with.
Just be sure to double check their comments and documentation to be sure it's readable. My coworkers have always appreciated when I've helped make their stuff more readable.
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#59> 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…
Apparently tweeting the 996.icu website from the official Twitter Android/iOS clients causes it to refuse to send at all. You don't even need to be in China to see the result, because it blacklists the link globally. It allows the link on web and 3rd party clients, though.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/copiesofcopies/status/111403968059961344...
Have just tested. I get "Failed to send tweet" if sending from Android client, and I leave in the page preview when composing the tweet.
- It works fine from web interface, problem is specific to Android - The problem doesn't show up for "123.icu" so it seems specific to 996.icu
Re: 996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
#60> 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…
Bingo. Liberalism is ill-equipped to promote free expression in any meaningful sense, because the principles it presumably holds sacred play second fiddle to the central tenant of the philosophy: private property.
Most "live free or die" types wouldn't tell someone struggling against government repression, "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave your country?" Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states. It may seem histrionic to complain about much free-market censorship now, but the vise will tighten as firms consolidate and anything threatening to the bottom line will become increasingly difficult to disseminate to a wider population.