7 ms·

China’s Grueling Formula for Success: 9-9-6

55 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

redm 9y ago
The older I get, the more I find that making the right decisions, even in day-to-day programming, makes your far more efficient and effective than throwing time at a problem.
- neor 9y ago
  Years ago I read a blog that I always remembered, very summarised it stated that even though developers logging a lot of overtime are generally considered to be hard workers most of them actually are horrible at planning their work. The developers who don't log extra hours don't have to be less motivated, sometimes they are just a lot better at prioritising their work.
  - internetman55 9y ago
    Isn't prioritizing work a manager's job ?
rocqua 9y ago
Does anyone actually believe this kind of schedule is actually effective? I don't see how anyone performs well under these circumstances unless they are horribly overqualified for the job. In order for a programmer to be even 60% effective at this kind of schedule, the work has to be essentially trivial. I don't see any debugging happening in this kind of situation. The only explanation I see is that there is a 'social status' for bosses to have their employees work a lot. Because I do not believe this actually yields decent commercial results for anyone.
- WalterSear 9y ago
  I've worked with Chinese people, on this schedule. It's not effective. As you mentioned, it's about social signalling.
- SlowBro 9y ago
  I’m currently working from about 8am until 10pm every day, and usually in bed reading something that applies to my job between 10p and 12p and yes, 6 days a week. I’ve got a day job but am also spinning up a hardware manufacturing business. Been doing this for over a year. My clarity and productivity haven’t suffered that I notice, but I do not anticipate doing this forever. I’d burned out once before ten years ago doing even more hours and days. This is about my limit. You have a point though. Look at the crap China churns out. Edited to add: Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
  - fellellor 9y ago
    Yeah but you're doing this for your own business. If it works out well you'll end up reaping most of the rewards. I seriously doubt these companies pay these guys that much. At the end of the day, these are just jobs and businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own.
    - bsenftner 9y ago
      "businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own" hahaha Business owners tend to think their employees have a sense of "ownership" and use that to drive them as hard as they drive themselves. It is astounding the low EQ of many business owners.
  - coldcode 9y ago
    I did 100 hr weeks for my first startup 3 decades ago for about 4.5 months, then wound up in a hospital. The code turned out OK but my body was pretty much used up. After that I decided becoming more efficient in 40 hrs or less is much better.
    - SlowBro 9y ago
      Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
- zelos 9y ago
  The mindset involved in complex programming feels quite similar to writing long-form fiction to me. It seems common for people writing novels to consider 4 hours of actual writing a day to be a maximum, beyond which their productivity plummets. Sure, they may be thinking about the novel outside that, but they're not actually sat at a keyboard typing.
  - sn41 9y ago
    Seems to correspond to what is said in "A Mathematician's Apology" by G. H. Hardy: "Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked at his own mathematics. Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician, he used to say."
- ardit33 9y ago
  Nope I worked with a team of Korean engineers (Samsung) to integrate one of my employer's products (MobiTV) into their first true touch screen phone. This was in 2007 at Sprint's headquarters in Kansas. They all worked very very long hours, will get in around 9-10am and stay until 10pm in the office, with Saturdays being half days. It was cultural to show you working hard, and "sleeping" in your desk was seen as a badge of honor: (so tired form working hard, that I have to sleep on the desk). The code they produced was shit, and full of bugs. For every fix, there was another bug introduced. But whatever, they eventually ended up shipping an "ok" product, but they way they went to it was horribly inefficient. I personally would not recommend. In addition, now that I am working on my own app full time, I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. It seems that there is a natural limit on how much 'intelectual' work can be done in a week, and spending more time is counter productive. On the other hand, if the tasks are easy and don't require brainpower (i.e. small UI tweaks, adjustments, etc), spending more time doesn't necessary reduce efficiency. My strategy has been work on the hard tasks first (usually 3-4 hours), then spend the rest of your time on low intensity items.
  - bonesss 9y ago
    > I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. In addition to decreasing efficiency at code-production (ie fewer lines being written), the major killer with tired coding is that adrenaline takes over and you get into 'go mode'... suddenly you're punching out widgets and no longer stopping to question your approach. It's doubly bad because that kind of work tends to mate with deadlines to create higher stress and a feeling of having no time to try out alternatives... Head down and plowing though is a good approach to some problems sometimes. But for IT work? There's a good chance that OT work isn't just poor quality and slow, but also contains a lot of unnecessary effort that never needed to be done at all. A good Engineer will solve your problem in 5 days. A great Engineer will spend 4 days figuring out how to solve your problem in 1... A tired Engineer under a deadline will work a 110 hour week cranking out a half-assed bare-minimum solution only to find it replaced in less than 10 hours by someone who was awake enough to consider some alternatives and needed something that worked :/
- emidln 9y ago
  I've worked 12+ hours 6-7 days a week at multiple points in my career for an extended period (the longest lasting 8 months). In my most recent case (which was 10 years ago), I was starting a company with a friend and we signed client contracts very early. We knew what we were obligated to build. I learned Javascript, CSS, and PHP (coming from a background of embedded C/C++, Python scripting, and Linux/Unix administration) at the same time as I shipped a vertical-specific CMS. I didn't have a family, significant other, or other time commitments and so I could focus 100% of my energy on the joys of learning and building. I don't know that building a large CMS tuned to a specific vertical is trivial, but it wasn't the most technically challenging problem I have ever worked on. There were a boatload of details (especially in the analytics and traffic arbitrage modules), very tight deadlines, and entirely new technologies to learn. I was getting normal amounts of sleep per night (5-7 depending on how I felt) and when I was tired, I'd take a half day or day off. I communicated mainly via SIP phone, IRC, and email with my cofounder and both of us understood when the other needed some time to decompress. The thing was, working for ourselves building something we wanted to exist, we didn't need much time for decompression. I made enough off that business to be debt-free (from a starting point of about -140K USD), build up savings and retirement accounts I ignored before, and coast for the next 18 months doing whatever I felt like (which was a self-directed study of computer science and a lot of Magic: the Gathering). I didn't get rich, but I did improve my situation substantially. If I didn't have commitments to my family, I would jump at a chance to do something like this again.
gaius 9y ago
Welcome to the race to the bottom
- madengr 9y ago
  It only takes a few smart managers to start this in the USA.
koolba 9y ago
> Chinese labor law dictates a 40-hour workweek and extra pay for overtime, but many companies circumvent those rules by asking employees to sign contracts that say their jobs require flexible work schedules. Being able to supersede labor laws by forcing^Wasking employees to sign a contract that nullifies them is suspect at best. I get that office tech workers aren't the factory assembly line workers for which these laws were originally designed but the exclusions need to come from the other direction. > Huawei Technologies employees work on the last Saturday of each month, and that earns them an extra 12 days by the end of the year that they can take in pay or days off. A year into their jobs, Huawei’s Chinese staff can sign a “dedicated employee agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days and overtime. That quote links to a different article[1] explaining this further: > A year into their jobs, Chinese staff may sign a “dedicated employee agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days and overtime. One Huawei engineer said he signed the agreement four years ago to start receiving shares as part of his compensation. The closely held firm says its shares are owned entirely by its executives and employees. So the deal is "Work an extra 12 days per year for 12 days of pay/vacation. Then give it up along with all the rest of your vacation days and maybe we'll give you some equity. Also, we can probably claw back the equity. Also, you'll probably never be able to actually cash it out. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long-shadow-over-telecom-giant-1480715055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long-sh...
- mtgx 9y ago
  > that earns them an extra 12 days by the end of the year that they can take in pay or days off That line is hilarious. How exactly are they "earning" anything? They're just getting deferred pay for those days or deferred day offs, which were supposed to be day-offs in the first place, as they were saturdays.
  - dis-sys 9y ago
    > That line is hilarious. How exactly are they "earning" anything? They're just getting deferred pay for those days or deferred day offs, which were supposed to be day-offs in the first place, as they were saturdays. Well done, trying to claim/protect rights for Huawei engineers who just happen to be the best paid tech workers in China getting 20 times of the national average. Have a look at their online discussions which are free to view, just check the sheer number of Groupon style shopping frenzy for investment properties - http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=2920773 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=1070925 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=130698 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... there are hundreds more, if not thousands more. Trust yourself one thing - when their average pay is like 20 times of the national average, they don't need you to jump up and argue for their annual leave related rights.
throwaway77384 9y ago
This is horrific, inefficient and stupid. Multiple speculative causes: - Social pressure. The bosses want to be able to say "look at how hard I can make my workers work", probably without comparing productivity in any way - Social pressure. People competing with each other for how hard working they are. This seems prevalent in many cultures. "Oh I am so tired / stressed". When you claim those things, you can stop worrying about other issues, like doing good work. I have always noticed that the busier I appear, the less people would hold me to account for problems. Ridiculous. - A tired / overworked populace doesn't have the energy to get any revolutionary ideas. The status quo is maintained, no matter what the cost. This suits almost nobody, other than a select few. But, we do it to ourselves. Like the herd of bison running from the lion, we do not realise our power and instead accept whatever the oppressors (companies) force on us. So, we made our bed and are lying in it. No point complaining unless we are willing to do something about it. See points 1 and 2, this has never been about productivity.
leemailll 9y ago
still better than a postdoc
madengr 9y ago
Finally had a manager at my employer (in MO, USA) dumb enough to mandate 48 hrs/week in writing. It’s illegal in the state to expect continual, uncompensated hours > 40. The managers with 2 digit IQs demand it verbally, once with a company wide voicemail.
- gruez 9y ago
  please tell me somebody reported them to the government.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Not just state law, federal law as well.
pipio21 9y ago
I had worked as an European engineer in China. I worked European hours and days. IMHO the secret of success of China, if there is one(China is way poorer than EU or USA), is accepting capitalism after centuries of stagnation with systems that worked very bad for most people(worked for Emperors, communist dictators and people in power thought). To say that working 996 is the secret to success is just manipulation of the wsj, which does not surprise me coming from this newspaper. Not accepting patents in practice like US did with England could be the secret of China industry advancing very fast but working too much is not. Chinese spend a long time in work, they even sleep there but the energy they have most of the time is very low precisely because of that. European system is far superior.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  Work efficiency is clearly superior here, hard to argue with that point. But what strikes me most, how little real life these people must get. You know, the time you have for yourself, friends, family, adventures, stuff that makes you smile when remembering, that makes you proud you experienced it, that forms you as a person your whole life. I have cca 6-7 hours of this kind of time after work, I have amazing adventures almost every weekend in the alps, and 3-4 vacations thousands of kms away per year. Wouldn't trade that for anything. Having free time when retired sucks since your body (and mind) is already in heavy decline, if you still live at all. Most true adventures are impossible if you are > 65 for most. Life well lived ain't a life worked hard all the time.
welanes 9y ago
In the words of Alibaba's Jack Ma: “ If we go to work at 8am and go home at 5pm, this is not a high tech company and Alibaba will never be successful...If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them.” It's even more incredible watching him say it: https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552 https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552
jrochkind1 9y ago
I frequently see WSJ articles on the HN front page. Is there a secret for getting past the paywall that I don't know? How are y'all reading these? Or are many HN readers WSJ subscribers?
- Arun2009 9y ago
  I just went on incognito mode and googled the title of the article. From google search results, I followed the WSJ link that showed up.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    Incognito, google title of article, click on it... I still get a paywall. Doh!

55 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

redm 9y ago

The older I get, the more I find that making the right decisions, even in day-to-day programming, makes your far more efficient and effective than throwing time at a problem.

neor 9y ago
Years ago I read a blog that I always remembered, very summarised it stated that even though developers logging a lot of overtime are generally considered to be hard workers most of them actually are horrible at planning their work. The developers who don't log extra hours don't have to be less motivated, sometimes they are just a lot better at prioritising their work.
- internetman55 9y ago
  Isn't prioritizing work a manager's job ?

rocqua 9y ago

Does anyone actually believe this kind of schedule is actually effective? I don't see how anyone performs well under these circumstances unless they are horribly overqualified for the job. In order for a programmer to be even 60% effective at this kind of schedule, the work has to be essentially trivial. I don't see any debugging happening in this kind of situation. The only explanation I see is that there is a 'social status' for bosses to have their employees work a lot. Because I do not believe this actually yields decent commercial results for anyone.

WalterSear 9y ago
I've worked with Chinese people, on this schedule. It's not effective. As you mentioned, it's about social signalling.
SlowBro 9y ago
I’m currently working from about 8am until 10pm every day, and usually in bed reading something that applies to my job between 10p and 12p and yes, 6 days a week. I’ve got a day job but am also spinning up a hardware manufacturing business. Been doing this for over a year. My clarity and productivity haven’t suffered that I notice, but I do not anticipate doing this forever. I’d burned out once before ten years ago doing even more hours and days. This is about my limit. You have a point though. Look at the crap China churns out. Edited to add: Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
- fellellor 9y ago
  Yeah but you're doing this for your own business. If it works out well you'll end up reaping most of the rewards. I seriously doubt these companies pay these guys that much. At the end of the day, these are just jobs and businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own.
  - bsenftner 9y ago
    "businesses shouldn't expect their employees to sacrifice so much for something they don't even own" hahaha Business owners tend to think their employees have a sense of "ownership" and use that to drive them as hard as they drive themselves. It is astounding the low EQ of many business owners.
- coldcode 9y ago
  I did 100 hr weeks for my first startup 3 decades ago for about 4.5 months, then wound up in a hospital. The code turned out OK but my body was pretty much used up. After that I decided becoming more efficient in 40 hrs or less is much better.
  - SlowBro 9y ago
    Having experience the burnout lesson the hard way, I do pace myself. Sundays are for friends, church, and family. I get all the sleep I want. I stop at times to read YC news and talk to others :-) I get bike rides and watch a movie now and again. Life is not all about work.
zelos 9y ago
The mindset involved in complex programming feels quite similar to writing long-form fiction to me. It seems common for people writing novels to consider 4 hours of actual writing a day to be a maximum, beyond which their productivity plummets. Sure, they may be thinking about the novel outside that, but they're not actually sat at a keyboard typing.
- sn41 9y ago
  Seems to correspond to what is said in "A Mathematician's Apology" by G. H. Hardy: "Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked at his own mathematics. Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician, he used to say."
ardit33 9y ago
Nope I worked with a team of Korean engineers (Samsung) to integrate one of my employer's products (MobiTV) into their first true touch screen phone. This was in 2007 at Sprint's headquarters in Kansas. They all worked very very long hours, will get in around 9-10am and stay until 10pm in the office, with Saturdays being half days. It was cultural to show you working hard, and "sleeping" in your desk was seen as a badge of honor: (so tired form working hard, that I have to sleep on the desk). The code they produced was shit, and full of bugs. For every fix, there was another bug introduced. But whatever, they eventually ended up shipping an "ok" product, but they way they went to it was horribly inefficient. I personally would not recommend. In addition, now that I am working on my own app full time, I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. It seems that there is a natural limit on how much 'intelectual' work can be done in a week, and spending more time is counter productive. On the other hand, if the tasks are easy and don't require brainpower (i.e. small UI tweaks, adjustments, etc), spending more time doesn't necessary reduce efficiency. My strategy has been work on the hard tasks first (usually 3-4 hours), then spend the rest of your time on low intensity items.
- bonesss 9y ago
  > I have seen that once I start spending a lot of time coding/in front of the computer, my efficiency (amount of work down per hour) goes down. In addition to decreasing efficiency at code-production (ie fewer lines being written), the major killer with tired coding is that adrenaline takes over and you get into 'go mode'... suddenly you're punching out widgets and no longer stopping to question your approach. It's doubly bad because that kind of work tends to mate with deadlines to create higher stress and a feeling of having no time to try out alternatives... Head down and plowing though is a good approach to some problems sometimes. But for IT work? There's a good chance that OT work isn't just poor quality and slow, but also contains a lot of unnecessary effort that never needed to be done at all. A good Engineer will solve your problem in 5 days. A great Engineer will spend 4 days figuring out how to solve your problem in 1... A tired Engineer under a deadline will work a 110 hour week cranking out a half-assed bare-minimum solution only to find it replaced in less than 10 hours by someone who was awake enough to consider some alternatives and needed something that worked :/
emidln 9y ago
I've worked 12+ hours 6-7 days a week at multiple points in my career for an extended period (the longest lasting 8 months). In my most recent case (which was 10 years ago), I was starting a company with a friend and we signed client contracts very early. We knew what we were obligated to build. I learned Javascript, CSS, and PHP (coming from a background of embedded C/C++, Python scripting, and Linux/Unix administration) at the same time as I shipped a vertical-specific CMS. I didn't have a family, significant other, or other time commitments and so I could focus 100% of my energy on the joys of learning and building. I don't know that building a large CMS tuned to a specific vertical is trivial, but it wasn't the most technically challenging problem I have ever worked on. There were a boatload of details (especially in the analytics and traffic arbitrage modules), very tight deadlines, and entirely new technologies to learn. I was getting normal amounts of sleep per night (5-7 depending on how I felt) and when I was tired, I'd take a half day or day off. I communicated mainly via SIP phone, IRC, and email with my cofounder and both of us understood when the other needed some time to decompress. The thing was, working for ourselves building something we wanted to exist, we didn't need much time for decompression. I made enough off that business to be debt-free (from a starting point of about -140K USD), build up savings and retirement accounts I ignored before, and coast for the next 18 months doing whatever I felt like (which was a self-directed study of computer science and a lot of Magic: the Gathering). I didn't get rich, but I did improve my situation substantially. If I didn't have commitments to my family, I would jump at a chance to do something like this again.

gaius 9y ago

Welcome to the race to the bottom

madengr 9y ago
It only takes a few smart managers to start this in the USA.

koolba 9y ago

> Chinese labor law dictates a 40-hour workweek and extra pay for overtime, but many companies circumvent those rules by asking employees to sign contracts that say their jobs require flexible work schedules. Being able to supersede labor laws by forcing^Wasking employees to sign a contract that nullifies them is suspect at best. I get that office tech workers aren't the factory assembly line workers for which these laws were originally designed but the exclusions need to come from the other direction. > Huawei Technologies employees work on the last Saturday of each month, and that earns them an extra 12 days by the end of the year that they can take in pay or days off. A year into their jobs, Huawei’s Chinese staff can sign a “dedicated employee agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days and overtime. That quote links to a different article[1] explaining this further: > A year into their jobs, Chinese staff may sign a “dedicated employee agreement,” voluntarily forgoing paid vacation days and overtime. One Huawei engineer said he signed the agreement four years ago to start receiving shares as part of his compensation. The closely held firm says its shares are owned entirely by its executives and employees. So the deal is "Work an extra 12 days per year for 12 days of pay/vacation. Then give it up along with all the rest of your vacation days and maybe we'll give you some equity. Also, we can probably claw back the equity. Also, you'll probably never be able to actually cash it out. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long-shadow-over-telecom-giant-1480715055 https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-founder-casts-a-long-sh...

mtgx 9y ago
> that earns them an extra 12 days by the end of the year that they can take in pay or days off That line is hilarious. How exactly are they "earning" anything? They're just getting deferred pay for those days or deferred day offs, which were supposed to be day-offs in the first place, as they were saturdays.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  > That line is hilarious. How exactly are they "earning" anything? They're just getting deferred pay for those days or deferred day offs, which were supposed to be day-offs in the first place, as they were saturdays. Well done, trying to claim/protect rights for Huawei engineers who just happen to be the best paid tech workers in China getting 20 times of the national average. Have a look at their online discussions which are free to view, just check the sheer number of Groupon style shopping frenzy for investment properties - http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=2920773 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=1070925 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail&act=index&id=130698 http://xinsheng.huawei.com/cn/index.php?app=forum&mod=Detail... there are hundreds more, if not thousands more. Trust yourself one thing - when their average pay is like 20 times of the national average, they don't need you to jump up and argue for their annual leave related rights.

throwaway77384 9y ago

This is horrific, inefficient and stupid. Multiple speculative causes: - Social pressure. The bosses want to be able to say "look at how hard I can make my workers work", probably without comparing productivity in any way - Social pressure. People competing with each other for how hard working they are. This seems prevalent in many cultures. "Oh I am so tired / stressed". When you claim those things, you can stop worrying about other issues, like doing good work. I have always noticed that the busier I appear, the less people would hold me to account for problems. Ridiculous. - A tired / overworked populace doesn't have the energy to get any revolutionary ideas. The status quo is maintained, no matter what the cost. This suits almost nobody, other than a select few. But, we do it to ourselves. Like the herd of bison running from the lion, we do not realise our power and instead accept whatever the oppressors (companies) force on us. So, we made our bed and are lying in it. No point complaining unless we are willing to do something about it. See points 1 and 2, this has never been about productivity.

leemailll 9y ago

still better than a postdoc

madengr 9y ago

Finally had a manager at my employer (in MO, USA) dumb enough to mandate 48 hrs/week in writing. It’s illegal in the state to expect continual, uncompensated hours > 40. The managers with 2 digit IQs demand it verbally, once with a company wide voicemail.

gruez 9y ago
please tell me somebody reported them to the government.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Not just state law, federal law as well.

pipio21 9y ago

I had worked as an European engineer in China. I worked European hours and days. IMHO the secret of success of China, if there is one(China is way poorer than EU or USA), is accepting capitalism after centuries of stagnation with systems that worked very bad for most people(worked for Emperors, communist dictators and people in power thought). To say that working 996 is the secret to success is just manipulation of the wsj, which does not surprise me coming from this newspaper. Not accepting patents in practice like US did with England could be the secret of China industry advancing very fast but working too much is not. Chinese spend a long time in work, they even sleep there but the energy they have most of the time is very low precisely because of that. European system is far superior.

saiya-jin 9y ago
Work efficiency is clearly superior here, hard to argue with that point. But what strikes me most, how little real life these people must get. You know, the time you have for yourself, friends, family, adventures, stuff that makes you smile when remembering, that makes you proud you experienced it, that forms you as a person your whole life. I have cca 6-7 hours of this kind of time after work, I have amazing adventures almost every weekend in the alps, and 3-4 vacations thousands of kms away per year. Wouldn't trade that for anything. Having free time when retired sucks since your body (and mind) is already in heavy decline, if you still live at all. Most true adventures are impossible if you are > 65 for most. Life well lived ain't a life worked hard all the time.

welanes 9y ago

In the words of Alibaba's Jack Ma: “ If we go to work at 8am and go home at 5pm, this is not a high tech company and Alibaba will never be successful...If we are a good team and know what we want to do, one of us can defeat ten of them.” It's even more incredible watching him say it: https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552 https://twitter.com/humanismusic/status/963714910269079552

jrochkind1 9y ago

I frequently see WSJ articles on the HN front page. Is there a secret for getting past the paywall that I don't know? How are y'all reading these? Or are many HN readers WSJ subscribers?

Arun2009 9y ago
I just went on incognito mode and googled the title of the article. From google search results, I followed the WSJ link that showed up.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  Incognito, google title of article, click on it... I still get a paywall. Doh!