Jack Ma will be surprised to find out that it doesn't matter how many hours you spend at the office. Actual productive activities will total only 2-3 hours per day.
So spending 12 hours per day at the office actually means more time for social media, news sites, gossip, etc
(i'm not going to dwell on the negative effects of his comments since they're well understood - less time spent at the office = better productivity).
Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
51–60 of 264 posts
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#52Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations. Labeling people who deman…
996 is fine if you're a founder of a company. It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires. We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.
> It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires.
What if everyone who does it will become millionaires?
What if everyone who does it understands the tradeoffs involved and makes an informed decision that you disagree with?
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#53Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations. Labeling people who deman…
> Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" or lazy is utterly disgusting.
Worth clarifying that the "slackers" comment came from JD.com's founder Richard Liu, not Jack Ma.
edit: removed comments on whether he endorses it or not since it seems like there are contradicting statements from him. My current impression is that he disagrees with forced overtime but wants his employees to work similar hours voluntarily (although I suspect this is a common sentiment among business execs).
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#54Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations. Labeling people who deman…
Sounds almost funny in light of how much the company is messed up on tech side.
It has one of the biggest tech workforce in China, but they can't make Taobao frontpage work moderately well. It is almost as if they felt "giving up" on that.
Having worked with them on their DC project in 2016, I can attest that the rest of the company is not different.
They are constantly loosing managerial cadres, and almost all Alibabers I knew can attest of the company feeling "ungoverned" and "in state of Brownian motion"
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#55Leaving 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 think it probably works. The 6th day in particular seems like it would be a big boost. Technically, even if having a work week 80% longer than your competitors only ekes out a 10% boost to the amount of work done, that's still a big advantage.
The problem then is that the weekend is 50% shorter, so workers are coming to work on Monday without having rested as effectively. In the long run, I can well imagine that costing 10% or more.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#56Passion of his employees is very well observable from garbage quality products they make: trashy APIs, utter trash SDKs, broken endpoints, outages, broken user stories.
Amazon also treats its employees like shit but at least their products are usable.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#57Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations. Labeling people who deman…
> Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" or lazy is utterly disgusting. Worth clarifying that the "slackers" comment came from JD.com's founder Richard Liu, not Jack Ma. edit: removed comments on whether he endorses it or not since it seems like there are contradicting statements from him. My current impression is that he disagrees with forced overtime but wants his employees to work si…
corrected. Thanks.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
996 is fine if you're a founder of a company. It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires. We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.
> It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires. What if everyone who does it will become millionaires? What if everyone who does it understands the tradeoffs involved and makes an informed decision that you disagree with?
That's like if you said "what if everyone won a lottery". You know full well this sweatshop bullshit produces very few millionaires, and millions of burn-outs.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#59It’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...
The headlines are different, but the content is the same. If you read into the SCMP headline, what it's actually saying is that Jack Ma expects employees to want to work 12 hour days, 6 days a week, without being forced.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#60What furor? Does he not have the right to free speech? Does he abduct people to work for his company？
If you don’t like it, go to Microsoft China or open your 4-hours a day company