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Tech workers in China’s Silicon Valley face burnout before they reach 30

86 points by theBashShell 8y ago

ctoth 8y ago
Interesting, from 10 months ago: The Fate of Most Silicon Valley Drones: ‘Live Work Work Work Die’ [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057
sokoloff 8y ago
> A young couple want their own family but have no energy for sex after work. Well, I'd recommend against having kids until that situation changes somehow. If you're too tired for sex, what are you going to do with an infant?
- reidjs 8y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong but culturally I believe it’s much more important to have children in China vs USA
  - mawburn 8y ago
    Sorry, but I don't see how this is relevant to what the other person said. Important or not, if you're too tired for sex then wtf are you going to do with an infant?
    - ralph84 8y ago
      In China the infant gets shipped to the grandparents while the parents continue working.
      - mc32 8y ago
        To add, often it’s these parents (potential grandparents to be) who pressure their children to have children to continue the line. It goes beyond what people are used to in the US, ie “when are you guys gonna have kids?” No, it’s more, “hey, hurry up, you owe me grandkids now, that’s why I helped you with mortgage, now get to work and deliver!”
        Foobar8568 8y ago
        Not just children but also sons.
        dranka 8y ago
        One Chinese I talked to said there are two reasons that can play into this pressure. First reason is that the grandparents probably had the same situation themselves, they were raised by their grandparents, so now they have a urge to take the parent role themselves since they never were that close when their own children grew up. Second is the age aspect, they want to do this before they get to old and tired.
        aitchnyu 8y ago
        In India, a husband and wife both earning tech salary will get a full time maid for a while who may cost Rs15000 of a Rs60000 combined income, rent another 15000. Woman will spend maternity leave at her parents home, 4 paid, 2 unpaid. Either set of parents will take long vacations, even from India to US, to raise infant or toddler grandchildren, especially if they are retired. There are cultures which shudder at couples who have to take care of an infant alone or elderly parents who live without their chidlren.
- dstick 8y ago
  Have it cook dinner? ;-)
- NedIsakoff 8y ago
  In China, you're mom or mother-in-law will help you raise the kid. That's also why the retirement age in China is 60 for men and 50 for women (55 for women civil servants).
swuecho 8y ago
https://996.icu/#/en_US https://996.icu/#/en_US
goalieca 8y ago
Maybe this is a controversial opinion but the world is too competitive but in all the wrong ways.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  Human society has been great at and thrived on exploiting people for a very long time now. We'd probably have to go all the way back to hunter and gatherer tribes before we find a point in time where that wasn't a normal fact of life. Capitalism is just the most efficient form of exploitation that we've found. It's not really controversial though.
  - goodfight 8y ago
    It's unfortunate that we can't come to a world agreement to work 32 hours a week or something reasonable like that. There can still be a healthy competition without all of us working ourselves to death.
    - rmah 8y ago
      We essentially already did and the # of hours is 40 per week.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      Easy to say when you're salaried. Not so easy when you work for hourly wages. It's not as though pay would suddenly increase by ~20%. Also, 40 hours / week is already a decrease from what it was ~100 years ago.
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        100 years ago the average industrial working hours was apparently 45, so not that many - I feel like today 40 is more the exception than the rule. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab... In fact the hours were starting to change to 40 that year. Funny coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Convention,_1919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Conve... Edit: Did some more research and in 1890 we have some truly ridiculous numbers. http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html But there's a good reason we turned from those.
cheesymuffin 8y ago
I honestly wonder whether anyone else has had my philosophical crisis this past few years. I started to think all of my attempts to be part of an elite group that's "changing the world" through technology are actually fucking it up more. Whether this is fueled by burnout or a feeling of uneasiness with world events I can't be sure. I'm getting scared though because if I don't get my motivation back in a few years being broke is going to suck.
- indigo945 8y ago
  Well, did nobody say they were going to change it for the better. If you know that's what you care about, though, at least that's actionable information for your future.
- jakeinspace 8y ago
  Yeah, I think anybody with some kind of moral compass in tech has that thought at the back of their mind. When I was 18, the thought of working somewhere like Google was the dream, but now I'm not so sure.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    Google itself changed a lot. 13 years ago it was amazing to work there. In 2008 there was a feeling of slowing down luxury expenses, but the real change was when Larry came instead of Eric Schmidt as a CEO: he's boring (and Sundar is just his puppet) and forces boredom on the employees. Eric Schmidt had a great way of saying no to employees while still making them excited about the possibilities ahead of Google.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  I do have ask about this desire to "change the world", as I constantly question my own motivations. We all generally think of it in a positive manner, but have most SV companies actually done that objectively? I'm not so sure. I think when we say "change the world", most of the time we really mean, get rich doing something impactful (negative or positive). If we all really wanted to change the world we would go work for non-profits cleaning water for African children or something. By this I mean, there are things that are currently objectively changing the world in a positive way and can certainly benefit from people who have analytical and software skills, but they don't tend to pay very well.
AlexandrB 8y ago
> Tech firms in China typically expect their employees to work long hours to prove their dedication. > By the end of 2018, many tech companies were announcing plans to cut benefits, bonuses and jobs as they hunkered down amid the country’s worst economic slowdown in nearly three decades. > Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour. There's a lesson here. Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to assume that the word "dedicated" automatically means exploitation and extrapolate that across the spectrum of organizations that are out there. That's quite a reach.
  - AlexandrB 8y ago
    Dedication almost always translates to "doing stuff you're not getting paid to do". How exploitative this is depends on context. If you're volunteering at the local community theatre, it's not really exploitative. You're there for your own reasons, probably doing something you like. However, if you're asked to be dedicated at your job in a multimillion dollar corporation what's probably happening is they're trying to save on labor costs. And they're doing it by keeping headcount lower than it otherwise needs to be to get the job done. This becomes really apparent when you consider contractors. Nobody ever screens contractors for "dedication". They find one whose rate and qualifications are acceptable and pay them for their time. Likewise with other professions like lawyers. It's weird how this has become normalized for many rank-and-file tech employees though.
    - chrisco255 8y ago
      No, it doesn't. The word dedicated just means that you're engaged with the problems that the business is trying to solve. You are always doing things for your own personal reasons. Whether volunteering or not. It's also true (besides the point about dedication), that certain jobs and certain missions DO require extraordinary hours. NASA required long hours for their Apollo engineers. It's unlikely they would have achieved what they did if they had engineers that worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and multiple breaks throughout the day. Was this exploitation? No. Folks knew going in what they were trying to achieve had never been done before. People do screen contractors for dedication. For whatever job you're hiring for, you want someone dedicated to solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and executing effectively.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Maybe this is an excessively callous view, but isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed? Is the expectation for the reader to pity their condition? There is no totalitarian government that's relocating these people to a gulag and forcing them into 996 labor work for their motherland. These are people who are trying to break into upper middle class or beyond by pursuing high risk high reward economic opportunities and sacrificing much in exchange. When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  > isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed > you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you
  - BadassFractal 8y ago
    Is it unfair to voluntarily give another party leverage over you? Or is that a fair choice?
    - goodfight 8y ago
      I think it's less about fairness and more about the harsh facts of reality. In a perfect world, the workers would be able to come to fair agreements with employers and get exploited less.
    - jjoonathan 8y ago
      Choice does not imply fairness. If I am a serial killer and I offer my victims a choice between dying by machete and dying by shotgun, does that exonerate the murder?
  - kian 8y ago
    > When ... you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you
- jonahss 8y ago
dblotsky 8y ago
And also in America’s Silicon Valley.
nacho2sweet 8y ago
Same thing in the real Silicon Valley. Wasn't there adoring stories about "dedicated" people sleeping under their desks or in parking lot vans. Doubt everyone is banging out kids to move into their $3600/month studio apartments.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rafiki6 8y ago
> “One thing Chinese founders or unicorns haven’t figured out is how to become a sustainable business. If you continue those [long hours] for 10 years, people will have no personal life any more, they will have no kids, they will go crazy,” Wingender said. I wonder if this is simply symptomatic of a labor market imbalance. China has a lot of people, and proportionally they have a lot of people who can do software. Employers can demand what they want. This model is only sustainable so long as the stream of labor is constant, which I suspect it is.
- roymurdock 8y ago
  there are 2 inputs to the classical production function (e.g. the 2 things businesses need to purchase/obtain in order to stay in business) - labor and capital if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health
  - chillacy 8y ago
stuntkite 8y ago
This sounds like my life. I come from poverty and now I make decent money and my company doesn’t request this. I have really been trying to figure out how to turn it off, or at least down. It’s very hard. I get depressed and a bit paranoid if I’m not martyring myself for work.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Pick one day a week, doesn't matter which one, finish early and plan an activity you enjoy. Hell or high water stick to that activity on that day. You'll naturally start to look forwards to that day. Then make it two days and so on. Don't try to make massive changes, make little ones that become habits. As someone who went from working 70 hours a week (or more technically in hindsight sitting behind a computer for 70 hours and working for maybe 30 of those productively to working 37 hrs a week with about the same level of productivity) it matters.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Focus on investing your money, building up an asset portfolio (I suggest commodities over stocks/housing in the current market, but that's not the important part here). Your financial future should depend on your wealth compounding, and not on your number of promotions. And of course for wealth compounding timing is key: the earlier you start the better it will be for you over time.
papermill 8y ago
Doesn't every tech worker face burnout before they reach 30. Especially in silicon valley or the startup scene. Why should it be any different in china. It's pretty much high risk, high reward. The startup I worked at, we all slept in our offices working 24/7 to reach milestones every few months. The point work hard and get the company sold off within 10 years and retire.

86 points by theBashShell 8y ago

Interesting, from 10 months ago: The Fate of Most Silicon Valley Drones: ‘Live Work Work Work Die’ [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17201057

sokoloff 8y ago

> A young couple want their own family but have no energy for sex after work. Well, I'd recommend against having kids until that situation changes somehow. If you're too tired for sex, what are you going to do with an infant?

reidjs 8y ago
Correct me if I’m wrong but culturally I believe it’s much more important to have children in China vs USA
- mawburn 8y ago
  Sorry, but I don't see how this is relevant to what the other person said. Important or not, if you're too tired for sex then wtf are you going to do with an infant?
  - ralph84 8y ago
    In China the infant gets shipped to the grandparents while the parents continue working.
    - mc32 8y ago
      To add, often it’s these parents (potential grandparents to be) who pressure their children to have children to continue the line. It goes beyond what people are used to in the US, ie “when are you guys gonna have kids?” No, it’s more, “hey, hurry up, you owe me grandkids now, that’s why I helped you with mortgage, now get to work and deliver!”
      - Foobar8568 8y ago
        Not just children but also sons.
      - dranka 8y ago
        One Chinese I talked to said there are two reasons that can play into this pressure. First reason is that the grandparents probably had the same situation themselves, they were raised by their grandparents, so now they have a urge to take the parent role themselves since they never were that close when their own children grew up. Second is the age aspect, they want to do this before they get to old and tired.
      - aitchnyu 8y ago
        In India, a husband and wife both earning tech salary will get a full time maid for a while who may cost Rs15000 of a Rs60000 combined income, rent another 15000. Woman will spend maternity leave at her parents home, 4 paid, 2 unpaid. Either set of parents will take long vacations, even from India to US, to raise infant or toddler grandchildren, especially if they are retired. There are cultures which shudder at couples who have to take care of an infant alone or elderly parents who live without their chidlren.
dstick 8y ago
Have it cook dinner? ;-)
NedIsakoff 8y ago
In China, you're mom or mother-in-law will help you raise the kid. That's also why the retirement age in China is 60 for men and 50 for women (55 for women civil servants).

swuecho 8y ago

https://996.icu/#/en_US https://996.icu/#/en_US

goalieca 8y ago

Maybe this is a controversial opinion but the world is too competitive but in all the wrong ways.

jplayer01 8y ago
Human society has been great at and thrived on exploiting people for a very long time now. We'd probably have to go all the way back to hunter and gatherer tribes before we find a point in time where that wasn't a normal fact of life. Capitalism is just the most efficient form of exploitation that we've found. It's not really controversial though.
- goodfight 8y ago
  It's unfortunate that we can't come to a world agreement to work 32 hours a week or something reasonable like that. There can still be a healthy competition without all of us working ourselves to death.
  - rmah 8y ago
    We essentially already did and the # of hours is 40 per week.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    Easy to say when you're salaried. Not so easy when you work for hourly wages. It's not as though pay would suddenly increase by ~20%. Also, 40 hours / week is already a decrease from what it was ~100 years ago.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      100 years ago the average industrial working hours was apparently 45, so not that many - I feel like today 40 is more the exception than the rule. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820827?seq=1#metadata_info_tab... In fact the hours were starting to change to 40 that year. Funny coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Convention,_1919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Work_(Industry)_Conve... Edit: Did some more research and in 1890 we have some truly ridiculous numbers. http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html But there's a good reason we turned from those.

cheesymuffin 8y ago

I honestly wonder whether anyone else has had my philosophical crisis this past few years. I started to think all of my attempts to be part of an elite group that's "changing the world" through technology are actually fucking it up more. Whether this is fueled by burnout or a feeling of uneasiness with world events I can't be sure. I'm getting scared though because if I don't get my motivation back in a few years being broke is going to suck.

indigo945 8y ago
Well, did nobody say they were going to change it for the better. If you know that's what you care about, though, at least that's actionable information for your future.
jakeinspace 8y ago
Yeah, I think anybody with some kind of moral compass in tech has that thought at the back of their mind. When I was 18, the thought of working somewhere like Google was the dream, but now I'm not so sure.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Google itself changed a lot. 13 years ago it was amazing to work there. In 2008 there was a feeling of slowing down luxury expenses, but the real change was when Larry came instead of Eric Schmidt as a CEO: he's boring (and Sundar is just his puppet) and forces boredom on the employees. Eric Schmidt had a great way of saying no to employees while still making them excited about the possibilities ahead of Google.
rafiki6 8y ago
I do have ask about this desire to "change the world", as I constantly question my own motivations. We all generally think of it in a positive manner, but have most SV companies actually done that objectively? I'm not so sure. I think when we say "change the world", most of the time we really mean, get rich doing something impactful (negative or positive). If we all really wanted to change the world we would go work for non-profits cleaning water for African children or something. By this I mean, there are things that are currently objectively changing the world in a positive way and can certainly benefit from people who have analytical and software skills, but they don't tend to pay very well.

AlexandrB 8y ago

> Tech firms in China typically expect their employees to work long hours to prove their dedication. > By the end of 2018, many tech companies were announcing plans to cut benefits, bonuses and jobs as they hunkered down amid the country’s worst economic slowdown in nearly three decades. > Yang is pondering what comes next. With more than 10 years of experience, he now holds a mid-level position at a top-tier internet company but has reached a career ceiling. He compares himself to a construction worker, who can earn good money due to high work intensity but can easily be replaced by younger, cheaper labour. There's a lesson here. Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.

chrisco255 8y ago
I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to assume that the word "dedicated" automatically means exploitation and extrapolate that across the spectrum of organizations that are out there. That's quite a reach.
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  Dedication almost always translates to "doing stuff you're not getting paid to do". How exploitative this is depends on context. If you're volunteering at the local community theatre, it's not really exploitative. You're there for your own reasons, probably doing something you like. However, if you're asked to be dedicated at your job in a multimillion dollar corporation what's probably happening is they're trying to save on labor costs. And they're doing it by keeping headcount lower than it otherwise needs to be to get the job done. This becomes really apparent when you consider contractors. Nobody ever screens contractors for "dedication". They find one whose rate and qualifications are acceptable and pay them for their time. Likewise with other professions like lawyers. It's weird how this has become normalized for many rank-and-file tech employees though.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    No, it doesn't. The word dedicated just means that you're engaged with the problems that the business is trying to solve. You are always doing things for your own personal reasons. Whether volunteering or not. It's also true (besides the point about dedication), that certain jobs and certain missions DO require extraordinary hours. NASA required long hours for their Apollo engineers. It's unlikely they would have achieved what they did if they had engineers that worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and multiple breaks throughout the day. Was this exploitation? No. Folks knew going in what they were trying to achieve had never been done before. People do screen contractors for dedication. For whatever job you're hiring for, you want someone dedicated to solving problems, overcoming obstacles, and executing effectively.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Maybe this is an excessively callous view, but isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed? Is the expectation for the reader to pity their condition? There is no totalitarian government that's relocating these people to a gulag and forcing them into 996 labor work for their motherland. These are people who are trying to break into upper middle class or beyond by pursuing high risk high reward economic opportunities and sacrificing much in exchange. When you start with nothing, and you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you.

jjoonathan 8y ago
> isn't all of this voluntary and self-imposed > you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you
- BadassFractal 8y ago
  Is it unfair to voluntarily give another party leverage over you? Or is that a fair choice?
  - goodfight 8y ago
    I think it's less about fairness and more about the harsh facts of reality. In a perfect world, the workers would be able to come to fair agreements with employers and get exploited less.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Choice does not imply fairness. If I am a serial killer and I offer my victims a choice between dying by machete and dying by shotgun, does that exonerate the murder?
- kian 8y ago
  > When ... you want a lot, you end up getting exploited by a system that has major leverage over you
jonahss 8y ago

dblotsky 8y ago

And also in America’s Silicon Valley.

nacho2sweet 8y ago

Same thing in the real Silicon Valley. Wasn't there adoring stories about "dedicated" people sleeping under their desks or in parking lot vans. Doubt everyone is banging out kids to move into their $3600/month studio apartments.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rafiki6 8y ago

> “One thing Chinese founders or unicorns haven’t figured out is how to become a sustainable business. If you continue those [long hours] for 10 years, people will have no personal life any more, they will have no kids, they will go crazy,” Wingender said. I wonder if this is simply symptomatic of a labor market imbalance. China has a lot of people, and proportionally they have a lot of people who can do software. Employers can demand what they want. This model is only sustainable so long as the stream of labor is constant, which I suspect it is.

roymurdock 8y ago
there are 2 inputs to the classical production function (e.g. the 2 things businesses need to purchase/obtain in order to stay in business) - labor and capital if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health
- chillacy 8y ago

stuntkite 8y ago

This sounds like my life. I come from poverty and now I make decent money and my company doesn’t request this. I have really been trying to figure out how to turn it off, or at least down. It’s very hard. I get depressed and a bit paranoid if I’m not martyring myself for work.

noir_lord 8y ago
Pick one day a week, doesn't matter which one, finish early and plan an activity you enjoy. Hell or high water stick to that activity on that day. You'll naturally start to look forwards to that day. Then make it two days and so on. Don't try to make massive changes, make little ones that become habits. As someone who went from working 70 hours a week (or more technically in hindsight sitting behind a computer for 70 hours and working for maybe 30 of those productively to working 37 hrs a week with about the same level of productivity) it matters.
xiphias2 8y ago
Focus on investing your money, building up an asset portfolio (I suggest commodities over stocks/housing in the current market, but that's not the important part here). Your financial future should depend on your wealth compounding, and not on your number of promotions. And of course for wealth compounding timing is key: the earlier you start the better it will be for you over time.

papermill 8y ago

Doesn't every tech worker face burnout before they reach 30. Especially in silicon valley or the startup scene. Why should it be any different in china. It's pretty much high risk, high reward. The startup I worked at, we all slept in our offices working 24/7 to reach milestones every few months. The point work hard and get the company sold off within 10 years and retire.