5 ms·

Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. The org on GitHub that developed this license is called 996ICU (https://996.icu

by I-Iuw 8y ago

Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. The org on GitHub that developed this license is called 996ICU (https://996.icu/#/en_US https://996.icu/#/en_US). It is a (very large) group of Chinese developers that are upset with the common practice of working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Please be mindful of the fact that lots of developers around the world work under genuinely awful conditions, and that your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. (P.S. This is a protest, not a legally binding license)

balfirevic 8y ago
> Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. Comment section is not "toxic" just because it expresses the notion that this license is useless, nonsensical, stupid or any other thing you disagree with. Even if commenters might have missed the point.
justinjlynn 8y ago
12 hours a day, 6 days a week - 72 hours a week - and this is a normal practice businesses expect to keep up every week of the year? Yikes.
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. With most of "us" being some kind of a software engineer, I'm sincerely curious: was 80-hours workweek ever a mandatory thing for an engineer (teacher, doctor)?
- um_ya 8y ago
  In terms of a software development, laws/licences requiring maximum workweek hours is kind of pointless. If any company forces their employees to work in those kinds of conditions, they're going to get poor results, and their customers will notice. Software development requires a clear thinking mind, you can only get away with so much before productivity tanks. Manufacturing work is mindless, so they can get away with extra hours without as much decrease in productivity.
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    Are you basically denying the existence of this problem?
- geofft 8y ago
  Well, it sort of depends on how / where you see yourself and whether you work for yourself. Doctors today work long hours, and teachers are sort of limited by class schedules so their labor organizing has generally focused on better pay / benefits rather than fewer hours, but even for engineers, there's a spectrum from locomotive engineer to Nikola Tesla. Here are some things I've learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States and linked pages : - In 1791, carpenters in Philadelphia went on strike against "the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week" and fought for a 10-hour day. http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html - The International Typographical Union, which had relatively well-off members, went on strike around 1900-ish initially for a 48-hour work week and then for a 40-hour work week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Un... - In 1907, the US passed the "Hours of Service Act," which limited railroad telegraphers to a 9-hour day. In committee the act was almost going to be a limit to a 12-hour day (i.e., the normal day was longer than that!), until the telegraphers spammed their congresspeople using their telegraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers#Impact_of_Hours_of_Service_Act_of_1907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers... I would say that software engineers, SREs, etc. working IC jobs maintaining large codebases/services at the direction of their bosses in large companies are far closer to the professions that historically have made up the labor movement—carpenters and typesetters and electricians and actors and journalists and composers and telegraph operators and so forth—than they are to the doctor running their own private clinic as their own business.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  A quick search for “doctor work week” is returning numbers that start around 50 and go up to 108 for an emergency room surgeon. There is a horrible cultural expectation of crazy amounts of overwork in the US hospital world.
  - sebazzz 8y ago
    Seems dangerous in a medical profession. I certainly start making all kinds of obvious mistakes when tired or overworked, but my web application doesn't hurt anyone.
    - Jarwain 8y ago
      I read somewhere that the rationale is essentially that more mistakes are made when handing a patient off to another doctor on shift change. Communicating all the necessary information is difficult, context or details can be left out, resulting in larger mistakes being made by the incoming doctor. They think the tradeoff is worthwhile
  - rb808 8y ago
    Pretty much every hospital globally. Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.
    - vkou 8y ago
      There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you. However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, checklists are a good idea during surgeries. If someone came up with a process improvement that made patient handoff better, many doctors would resist it out of principle, vanity, or plain-old "I was hazed with 90 hr/week residency, so should every new doctor."
learnstats2 8y ago
Why would it not be legally binding?
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  Ok let me answer that.. Which country is going to vote a LAW that writes: nobody works more than 45 hours/week? The next day healthcare will collapse. Big corporations will lobby VERY hard against that.
  - logicchains 8y ago
    Funny thing: the Chinese constitution actually guarantees everybody a 44 hour workweek. It's generally not enforced however.
  - henryfjordan 8y ago
    There's no LAW about it. You get license to use the software if you abide by the terms of the license agreement. A company that asks its employees to work 60 hour weeks breaks the license agreement, and therefore cannot use the software. The only LAW that could be written about this would be "Contracts cannot include limits on the number of hours employers ask people to work". So maybe, yes, the megacorps get that law passed. Until then this license is binding... Now whether the any particular legal system cares to enforce the license terms is another matter
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    The Europen Union's Working Time Directive. The limit is 48 hours, and it's calculated with some averaging over multiple days, but I hope that's close enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003
  - learnstats2 8y ago
    That's not what legally-binding means. By using the software, you agree to the terms of the license, and can in principle suffer a civil (non-criminal) lawsuit against you for breaching them.
jstanley 8y ago
> your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. You have no proof of this. The (x times y) work week for manual labourers was earned by a long history of labour activism. Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.
- logicchains 8y ago
  >Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand. But they don't necessarily arise if the demand from workers wanting to do that work is sufficient. For instance, game developers have relatively terrible work conditions by the standards of the software industry, because so many people want to work on games. You could reasonably argue that they get enough satisfaction from being able to work on games that they're willing to put up with worse conditions, but that doesn't change that their work conditions are relatively bad. The nice thing about somehow bringing about a reduction in developer working hours is that it wouldn't necessarily result in any loss in economic output or employer profit, as there's a wealth of research showing that working beyond a certain amount of hours daily is counterproductive, so it's a win-win, and could even increase productivity.
- deogeo 8y ago
  > naturally So collective bargaining is unnatural? Except when a corporation does it on behalf of its shareholders, of course.
- HenryBemis 8y ago
  http://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/ http://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/
- moosey 8y ago
  I would love to have examples of good working conditions being arrived at naturally. Given that there are many programmers of various talent levels throughout the industry I have noted a number of dark patterns in programming work: long hours, pay that refuses to follow value of work (Apple makes 400k profit per employee), reduction in workspace quality, etc. We can all pretend that we have more economic power than our highly paid blue collar peers that worked in highly unionized work forces in the past, but the programmers that make the kind of money for that to be true are very rare. Nearly 30 years ago my father made 70k as a union welder. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to match that salary street inflation, and the world is more expensive: education and health care could eat us alive at any moment. I don't know how much of our effort the capital owning class needs to strip from us before we take advantage of the massive productive capacities we have before we make it fair again, but I assure you, it will be organized, not natural.
geuszb 8y ago
Thanks. I thought this was about the gaming industry, which also has a tradition of crazy crunch time.

by I-Iuw 8y ago

balfirevic 8y ago

> Before this comment section gets any more toxic, please understand the context. Comment section is not "toxic" just because it expresses the notion that this license is useless, nonsensical, stupid or any other thing you disagree with. Even if commenters might have missed the point.

justinjlynn 8y ago

12 hours a day, 6 days a week - 72 hours a week - and this is a normal practice businesses expect to keep up every week of the year? Yikes.

AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. With most of "us" being some kind of a software engineer, I'm sincerely curious: was 80-hours workweek ever a mandatory thing for an engineer (teacher, doctor)?

um_ya 8y ago
In terms of a software development, laws/licences requiring maximum workweek hours is kind of pointless. If any company forces their employees to work in those kinds of conditions, they're going to get poor results, and their customers will notice. Software development requires a clear thinking mind, you can only get away with so much before productivity tanks. Manufacturing work is mindless, so they can get away with extra hours without as much decrease in productivity.
- ubercow13 8y ago
  Are you basically denying the existence of this problem?
geofft 8y ago
Well, it sort of depends on how / where you see yourself and whether you work for yourself. Doctors today work long hours, and teachers are sort of limited by class schedules so their labor organizing has generally focused on better pay / benefits rather than fewer hours, but even for engineers, there's a spectrum from locomotive engineer to Nikola Tesla. Here are some things I've learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States and linked pages : - In 1791, carpenters in Philadelphia went on strike against "the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week" and fought for a 10-hour day. http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html - The International Typographical Union, which had relatively well-off members, went on strike around 1900-ish initially for a 48-hour work week and then for a 40-hour work week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Un... - In 1907, the US passed the "Hours of Service Act," which limited railroad telegraphers to a 9-hour day. In committee the act was almost going to be a limit to a 12-hour day (i.e., the normal day was longer than that!), until the telegraphers spammed their congresspeople using their telegraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers#Impact_of_Hours_of_Service_Act_of_1907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers... I would say that software engineers, SREs, etc. working IC jobs maintaining large codebases/services at the direction of their bosses in large companies are far closer to the professions that historically have made up the labor movement—carpenters and typesetters and electricians and actors and journalists and composers and telegraph operators and so forth—than they are to the doctor running their own private clinic as their own business.
egypturnash 8y ago
A quick search for “doctor work week” is returning numbers that start around 50 and go up to 108 for an emergency room surgeon. There is a horrible cultural expectation of crazy amounts of overwork in the US hospital world.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Seems dangerous in a medical profession. I certainly start making all kinds of obvious mistakes when tired or overworked, but my web application doesn't hurt anyone.
  - Jarwain 8y ago
    I read somewhere that the rationale is essentially that more mistakes are made when handing a patient off to another doctor on shift change. Communicating all the necessary information is difficult, context or details can be left out, resulting in larger mistakes being made by the incoming doctor. They think the tradeoff is worthwhile
- rb808 8y ago
  Pretty much every hospital globally. Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.
  - vkou 8y ago
    There's probably a more optimal solution then either a current 8h handoff, or a zombie caring for you. However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, checklists are a good idea during surgeries. If someone came up with a process improvement that made patient handoff better, many doctors would resist it out of principle, vanity, or plain-old "I was hazed with 90 hr/week residency, so should every new doctor."

learnstats2 8y ago

Why would it not be legally binding?

HenryBemis 8y ago
Ok let me answer that.. Which country is going to vote a LAW that writes: nobody works more than 45 hours/week? The next day healthcare will collapse. Big corporations will lobby VERY hard against that.
- logicchains 8y ago
  Funny thing: the Chinese constitution actually guarantees everybody a 44 hour workweek. It's generally not enforced however.
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  There's no LAW about it. You get license to use the software if you abide by the terms of the license agreement. A company that asks its employees to work 60 hour weeks breaks the license agreement, and therefore cannot use the software. The only LAW that could be written about this would be "Contracts cannot include limits on the number of hours employers ask people to work". So maybe, yes, the megacorps get that law passed. Until then this license is binding... Now whether the any particular legal system cares to enforce the license terms is another matter
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The Europen Union's Working Time Directive. The limit is 48 hours, and it's calculated with some averaging over multiple days, but I hope that's close enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003
- learnstats2 8y ago
  That's not what legally-binding means. By using the software, you agree to the terms of the license, and can in principle suffer a civil (non-criminal) lawsuit against you for breaching them.

jstanley 8y ago

> your (x times y) work week is a privilege earned by a long history of labour activism in the Western world. You have no proof of this. The (x times y) work week for manual labourers was earned by a long history of labour activism. Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.

logicchains 8y ago
>Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand. But they don't necessarily arise if the demand from workers wanting to do that work is sufficient. For instance, game developers have relatively terrible work conditions by the standards of the software industry, because so many people want to work on games. You could reasonably argue that they get enough satisfaction from being able to work on games that they're willing to put up with worse conditions, but that doesn't change that their work conditions are relatively bad. The nice thing about somehow bringing about a reduction in developer working hours is that it wouldn't necessarily result in any loss in economic output or employer profit, as there's a wealth of research showing that working beyond a certain amount of hours daily is counterproductive, so it's a win-win, and could even increase productivity.
deogeo 8y ago
> naturally So collective bargaining is unnatural? Except when a corporation does it on behalf of its shareholders, of course.
HenryBemis 8y ago
http://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/ http://time.com/3836834/may-day-labor-history/
moosey 8y ago
I would love to have examples of good working conditions being arrived at naturally. Given that there are many programmers of various talent levels throughout the industry I have noted a number of dark patterns in programming work: long hours, pay that refuses to follow value of work (Apple makes 400k profit per employee), reduction in workspace quality, etc. We can all pretend that we have more economic power than our highly paid blue collar peers that worked in highly unionized work forces in the past, but the programmers that make the kind of money for that to be true are very rare. Nearly 30 years ago my father made 70k as a union welder. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to match that salary street inflation, and the world is more expensive: education and health care could eat us alive at any moment. I don't know how much of our effort the capital owning class needs to strip from us before we take advantage of the massive productive capacities we have before we make it fair again, but I assure you, it will be organized, not natural.

geuszb 8y ago

Thanks. I thought this was about the gaming industry, which also has a tradition of crazy crunch time.