Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
1–10 of 264 posts
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#2Jack 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 physically sickening to subject people to this. As they are sitting 12 hours a day for 6 days a week and then probably sleeping all day on the 7th to recover.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#3[deleted]
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#4Jack 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.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#5Leaving 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?
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#6Jack 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.
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 zombies.
4 shifts of people will get you 24 hour 7-day coverage if you want continuous production if that is what the business needs. Just hold per-hour pay as constant as possible using the reserve of willing workers as leverage.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#7I find 12 hours a day to be too much. And 6 days a week is throwing the mental health of a person off a cliff.
I’ve frequently found, personally and observing others, that productivity drops after 6h of continuous work especially if it forces you to think a lot (which is pretty much always in software - you still need to apply your brain to connect the plumbing between APIs)
Anything after 6h should either be menial work, cleanup or something else. I’ve found it is usually better to postpone any intense work to the next day. As a solo founder who tried to keep up 12h+ days, I’ve had the same amount of productivity by shutting down my day after 7h. You usually end up stretching things into hours for what would take a couple of minutes with a fresh brain.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#8Unfortunately China is a repressive country where economic prosperity is anti-correlated with happiness:
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#9Those who can stick with a 996 are either stupid or desperate (I assume mostly desperate with enough stupid sprinkled in to keep this going). This idea of working your life away for a piece of shit like Ma needs to die. The culture in such places is absolutely toxic and frankly disgusting, not to mention detrimental to the final product. It's amazing to me that this is the norm in much of Asia and the US. I don't know what exactly is wrong with cultures who share this stupid idea, but it's something very serious. The desperation that drives people to almost kill themselves for work is incredible. It seems to be a form of self enslavement. The alternatives must be truly horrific for people to do this to themselves. They definitely are in the US and I imagine they are worse in China. I think people probably know this and don't need assholes like Ma to not only demand this enslavement of themselves, but also to demand that they enjoy their own enslavement and torture. What a scumbag.
Re: Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On
#10Jack 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 demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.
I understand sometimes people might need to work a bit overtime to get things done or have on-call duties. We all do, but working 12 hours a day/6 days a week is not sustainable whatsoever. Of all these Chinese entrepreneurs, none of them mentioned even the slightest of their total rewards systems, which makes me think they are avoiding this topic on purpose and all their comments are attempts to put out fire while keeping the status quo, sneaky indeed.
To be honest, if someone I manage constantly works crazy hours with no rest for a long period of time, voluntarily or not, I won't even let him/her push any piece of code to production.
Fried brains == Disaster
Edit: had a discussion with some of my friends from China on this. One of the common arguments is "why are developers whining about work conditions while tons of other occupations such as factory/delivery workers and nurses work long hours with lower pay?"
First of all, other occupations having bad work condition does not justify the legitimacy of 996. This is yet another common logical fallacy when it comes to arguments like this. Also, how can people assume workers of other occupations are fine with endless long hours? Did anyone consider the possibility that they never had a systematic way to express their dissatisfaction and just tried going along with it for as long as possible before they were burnt out and got replaced?