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'“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.' says a billionaire... That's a pretty wild assumption, especially coming from a billionaire, but I guess he needs to justify treating his employees like crap to himself somehow.
Earlier 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?
Earlier 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?
Plus for many people, at certain stage, family/relationship/life/health becomes much more important than making millions.
I'm bit worried about the person(or the group) manning the 996.ICU github. The page states,"This is not a political movement". But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which maligns the reputation of China.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you missed my point.
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…
All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.
Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.
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.
Sooner or later, this mentality will bite back. Smart people cannot be manufactured en masse like plastic.
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...