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996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
- president 7y agoI would like to see something similar in the U.S. Unfortunately, I don't see a path to resolution anytime soon, both for U.S. and China. In the past 20 years, I have only seen society become more and more corporation-friendly.
- chanind 7y agoThe recent Google employee protests against their Dragonfly project give me hope that there might be a similar push by tech workers in the US, but it could also just be an isolated incident.
- tiredyam 7y ago... we do not have the same problems. Every single software engineer I know does not work 996 even if they work at a fast-paced startup
- baroffoos 7y agoI don't even understand what the point of 996 is. I work normal hours and I find by the last hour I'm mentally done and I become totally unable to do anything more, staying extra hours would get nothing extra done.
- njepa 7y agoThere is no point other than opportunism. The same reason kids were working in textile mills last century and why housing costs are multiplying now in the western world.
- baroffoos 7y agoBut a greedy company acting purely in self interest wouldn't want this because you are getting less productivity by making sure your employees are constantly tired and never getting anything done.
- ahartmetz 7y agoInappropriate incentives for individuals cause behavior that hurts everyone. Not exactly a new thing.
- hrktb 7y agoTo get the full picture you need to shift perspective and see humans more as resources. When a resource doesn’t produce enough anymore it gets replaced.
- ndnxhs 7y agoHow can you possibly develop a product when none of your developers have been around for more than a few months?
- Ericson2314 7y agoIf the entire industry is less productive, it's not a business problem. Overworked employees a probably cheeper per hour too.
- unicornmama 7y agoI think it’s a symptom of double digit growth. China does not have enough experienced and qualified managers and executives. So this stupid shit like this flies.
- throwawaymjabba 7y agoNot 996, but some of the h1bs from India go through something similar 5 days a week. Many of them have to attend 'offshore calls' with the team in India which usually starts around 10 pm and goes till midnight, in addition to the regular 9-5 work. One h1b guy I know had his schedule like this - attend early morning 1-1.5 hour meetings at 6.30 am on 3 days of a week, work from 9/9.30-4 (sometimes 5 or 6), attend offshore calls from 10pm that sometimes go beyond 12 am. He worked like this for almost 4 years.
- devdas 7y agoThe same goes for people in India working with US workers though.
- lucideer 7y ago> ... we do not have the same problems You/we do not have problems of the same scale/severity, but they are still the same problems. This is the argument that things are good in one place because they're slightly better off than another place where things are worse. The status quo of working hours in the US are far from ideal.
- gpickett00 7y agoWow, that's a brutal work schedule. Hard to believe it's the norm. Isn't there enough demand that tech workers could elect to work elsewhere if their employer enforces this?
- munk-a 7y agoI was never on a schedule this bad but when I was doing regular overtime (~52 hrs/week, the worst weeks coming in at 60) I found that my work drained me physically to the point where I just lost all ability to enjoy my life and do... anything - I just sort of collapsed through a work day into the next work day with a blearily remember transit ride and face-stuffed-with-pizza home time between it. As one of the two back-end developers I put my foot down regarding more OT and got out of that job as soon as I had a solid alternative. My life is not a way to transform calories into money for someone else, nobody's should be - stand up for your rights.
- bendbro 7y ago+1 for "tranform calories into money," it brought me a small chuckle.
- narag 7y agoThat was an old joke with caffeine instead of calories. I worked seven days a week for two months. We were paid double salaries and some perks, but no amount of money would have convinced us to keep that schedule longer. It was absolutely crazy.
- namelosw 7y agoMost of the tech firms do this kind of brutal work schedule, so there are only very few choices left in the market, which are mostly foreign or national enterprises.
- j16sdiz 7y ago996 is illegal in China. Tech company do it anyway with no consequences. This is selective enforcement of law.
- sfotm 7y agoDo Chinese workers not have the flexibility to avoid working for companies that force these schedules on them? I know next to nothing about working life in China, but wouldn't workers generally gravitate to the companies that value work/life balance? Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?
- bctnry 7y agoIn Mainland China you have to be really lucky to get such a choice.
- fasthandle 7y agoYes, and no. IT development is one of the best paying professional jobs in China, commanding 3x to 8x a typical office worker's salary. If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a F500 without too much difficulty. Normal 9-6, 5 day work week, public holidays plus 10-15 days discretionary holiday per year, stability over fast-pace, middle class income (8,000 Yuan per month for 0-2 years experience, 20,000 per month in a Tier-2 city for 5 years experience; for reference rent for a newish 2 bedroom apartment within 20 minutes walk to the office would be about 3000 Yuan per month). The BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) pay more, 2x or 3x, and are the glamorous places for fresh grads to work. Good luck getting in though. Want-to-be BATs are probably the worst employers. They lack the pay and prestige of BATs, lack the stability and sane working culture of F500s, and tend to have terrible management that lack conviction and realistic goals. Without a BAT or F500 early in one's career, it's hard to break away from want-to-be-BATs. I know nothing about Games development, so no comment there. There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic. Working in a Tier-1 city will mean rents are way higher, purchase of property probably unattainable, and wages probably less than double those mentioned above. I hope that answers part of your questions.
- 7y ago
- saagarjha 7y ago> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser. This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
- bo1024 7y agoI would take away something different. In a healthy software "marketplace", there would be plenty of browser competition and such blocking would be totally ineffective. It wouldn't matter if companies had the power to censor the internet or not because people could just switch.
- swuecho 7y agowell. i have a huawei phone, which open link using its own browser. I have not found a way to use other broswer as default. I bet most of Chinese phone does the same. for wechat, it open link in its own broswer too. I could change phone and delete wechat. but do it cost too much.
- telltruth 7y agoThat's not how it works. In a truly free marketplace, eventually one, two or three winners would emerge over time and they would have an order of magnitude more capital than the rest of the players. Using that capital they can be light years ahead in terms of capabilities due to compounding effect which allows them to make some uncomfortable changes (like tracking or enforcing sister products or building walled gardens) while continue to maintain monopoly. A switch is available to customers in theory but can never be exercised without significant loss in terms of experience and/or direct money for the customer. In other words, no truly free market is actually healthy from this perspective. This is a mathematically provable by modelling events as pure random chances and players starting all equally. Eventually system will evolve to have handful of players accumulating exponential gains and resources enforcing Pareto's principle.
- reverite 7y agoApparently tweeting the 996.icu website from the official Twitter Android/iOS clients causes it to refuse to send at all. You don't even need to be in China to see the result, because it blacklists the link globally. It allows the link on web and 3rd party clients, though.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/copiesofcopies/status/1114039680599613440 https://twitter.com/copiesofcopies/status/111403968059961344...
- ezoe 7y ago> Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers’ rights movements and unions are extremely uncommon mind-boggling.
- codedokode 7y agoI think there was a similar thing in USSR: there were no independent workers' unions and a worker in a capitalist country had better chances to protect their rights. There wasn't anything like 996 though and people mostly didn't work overtime.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ePierre 7y agoChina is not a communist country, it's a “communist with Chinese values” country. I don't know what it means, but every time the topic is brought on the table, this is the official stance from the Chinese Communist Party. I guess it means you owe loyalty to whatever authority you get: father, teacher, employer, emperor. Respect them, or they will crush you.
- whooshee 7y agoChina was a pure communist country before the reform. To keep the name, they had to attach it to a different interpretation. when it comes to respecting the authority, 「王侯將相,寧有種乎!」is a pretty common value to Chinese people. can be partially translated as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman？--John Ball".
- ezoe 7y agoDo you realized that the quote was from this incident? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazexiang_uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazexiang_uprising If that is the common value to Chinese people, It's been too long since the last revolution.
- 7y ago
- valgaze 7y agoTriangle Boy... http://www.webrant.com/safeweb_site/html/www/tboy_whitepaper.html http://www.webrant.com/safeweb_site/html/www/tboy_whitepaper... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TriangleBoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TriangleBoy
- _air 7y agoPrevious discussion around the 996.icu website: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620
- girzel 7y agoThe term for this strategy is "collateral freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom
- schuke 7y agoThanks! I learned a very useful new concept. I wonder if there’s a collateral loss of freedom, too. For example when people from the west are against Google or Apple censoring stuff, we lose all of their services—because they either censor or get censored-resulting in a loss of freedom unrelated to political contents.
- est 7y agoAnd collateral freedom converges to no freedom. That wikipedia page used to have list of available working "domain fronting" list, and not it's all gone. People seems don't to remember Github was blocked several times in China before. Each time the developers united to file complaints to central government to get it unlocked. Still today all gist.github.com is blocked. http is blocked. God know when will github be totally blocked.
- ZeikJT 7y agoThat wikipedia page never had any domain fronting lists according to its edit history. It does and seemingly has always had a link to the Domain Fronting page in the "See also" section. Looking over the Domain Fronting page I also don't see any proof in the edit history that any list has been removed. Maybe you were confusing these two for a different page that still exists?
- stebann 7y agoNice!
- apatters 7y agoFor those of us who employ developers remotely and ask for a sane number of hours per week (usually 40), does this mean there's an opportunity to hire great developers from China who would like to have better work/life balance? Where would I start?
- swuecho 7y agoI think hacknews is good place. the barriar is english. chinese developer who visit hacknews pass the english requirement and usually are interested in software development.
- swelz 7y agoI agree. I work for a Chinese company in Shenzhen. There are a few software developers I cannot speak with face-to-face, but almost all are decent through text and patient enough when I need clarification. And if they are actually visiting sites like HackerNews, or contributing to StackOverflow they likely are more than proficient enough to work with. Just be sure to double check their comments and documentation to be sure it's readable. My coworkers have always appreciated when I've helped make their stuff more readable.
- zhouyxamp 7y agoI'm a Chinese developer. Yes, English is a high barrier for most Chinese developer to get in touch with developers out of China. I can read, write without any problem but talk is hard for me as I have no chance to talk to any English speaking people.
- JimDabell 7y agoTwo things that seem like they might be impediments: - Traversing the Great Firewall is slow and unreliable. Having team members on either side of it wouldn't be great for collaboration. - I seem to remember reading about somebody complaining that sending money to Chinese citizens from abroad can be very difficult. I don't recall the details though.
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- number6 7y agoChina is a communist country - shouldn't be the workers rights one of its top priorities?
- nradov 7y agoAre you being sarcastic? Worker rights have never been a priority in any communist country.
- umanwizard 7y agoChina is ruled by a party with the word “Communist” in its name. That is basically the extent to which they are communist.
- telltruth 7y ago“At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate to the interests of the nation and the masses. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight are most contemptible, while ... working with all one’s energy, whole hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.” - Chairman Mao Zedong
- est 7y agoChina has their own definition of "worker" e.g. Party members with some engineering background.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoWhen I visited in 1999, my friend’s mom had to work on saturdays, and pretty late everyday at that. This mostly went away but popped back up in Chinese tech industry for recent times. Many Chinese tech companies even have time cards for salaried employees to make sure they are in the office enough, as well as cheer leaders and such to keep them motivated past dinner time.
- echevil 7y agoWell, if the work culture in China's tech industry improves after this, it's time to seriously consider moving back to China :)
- ComodoHacker 7y agoSlightly more readable companies blacklist (website URLs extracted): https://pastebin.com/rP4YHr0s https://pastebin.com/rP4YHr0s Huawei is #1, with hours even worse, labeled as "9106". Alibaba is #2. Xiaomi is also there.
- 1xtrm0 7y agoI guess I'll have to live without github again...
- wenbin 7y agoSome Silicon Valley VCs seem to love 996. - An article from VC https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+moritz+ft+996&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+moritz+ft+996&ie=UTF-8&... (first result; paywalled, but okay to read via google search results) - A 996 podcast from VC https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/996-podcast-by-ggv-capital-ggv-capital--QaJrlmxpS1/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/996-podcast-by-ggv-capi... Edited: update the FT article url
- mintplant 7y agoThe FT article is paywalled, but accessible if you search the title and click through via Google. It's as sickening as one might expect. One more thing to think about the next time the VC crowd decides to remind us of the supposed evils of unionization and labor movements.
- powerapple 7y agoThere is a reason why companies cannot just lower employee's salary and hire more people instead of pushing people to work more time: that is, once you give people these option, people will go to choose to work for companies with higher pay and more overtime. That's a choice. There is a reason your salary is a lot higher than any other people, and there is a reason it is a developing country.
- nomercy400 7y agoI didn't know they had a phrase for long working hours until I read this. I have done 996 for a while in china, and it wrecks your social life, as now all of a sudden you have no free evenings and only one day in the weekend to balance fun stuff with weekly chores. Meeting friends outside of work is nearly impossible. Also, when near a release, expect to 'give your best' for the company and work on sunday as well. You do however get 2-hour lunch breaks (i.e. nap time for your chinese colleagues), and about half a hour for dinner which you can also get at or near work.
- xiaoyafeng 7y agoI don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge. Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.
- xiaoyafeng 7y agoActually, I don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge. Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.
- anoncake 7y ago> First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge. Good. Oppression should make a country less succesfull.
- ex-aws-now-goog 7y ago> they 996 just because they earn much more. Maybe in absolute terms but their per-hour income is lower. They're working 1.8 times longer than a 40 hour week but not earning 1.8 times as much as they would when working in e.g. Europe.
- bartimus 7y agoGo ahead, China. Why wouldn't you block Github?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jialutu 7y agoThe working hours is one thing. What I am most curious about is does more hours being put in mean more/better work output; ie does the 996 work culture actually means a higher output, even if by a slight margin? Personally my opinion is that coding is not like the assembly line where more hours mean more things that's produced, but more lines of code can mean absolutely nothing (sometimes can even be a negative). However, looking at the recent progress in China, I am wondering what percentage of that is attributed to the 996 working culture, or is it to do with something else?
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago9am-9pm really is the period of presence in office. It's always that way in countries where the stats show high "working hours". It is also traditional in Chinese work culture to have a nap after lunch, which provides a break and helps with staying later. Dinner is also usually early (6pm) so 9am-9pm days mean a lunch break and a dinner break. Working 6 days a week has been quite standard in Asia. I remember Korea moved to 2-day weekends only a few years ago, and it's hard to change work culture. It's probably also compounded by the fact that in China there is no day off for shops, restaurants, banks, etc. Everything is open 7 days a week by default, which is great as a consumer but probably means pressure on staff.
- jialutu 7y agoSo a 40 hour work week does not mean 40 productive hours. Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your work time, then 40 hour work week means 16 productive hours per week, whereas 996, 72 hours a week means 28.8 productive hours per week. Now my question is, is the assumption of productive hour ratio real or does it start high and end low? And if my assumption of the flat productive ratio is true, then does it actually yield any good results?
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago> Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your work time That's not the case. Hourly productivity decreases at some point. The law of diminishing returns is at play here. Working longer hours leads to higher overall output up to a point as the marginal increase diminishes. Then, at some point you are too tired and produces bad software that will cost to fix. If your employer pays you a flat rate then it is profitable to make you work long hours up to the point when you start screwing up. If they pay you by the hour or if they pay you overtime, rationally they shouldn't push you beyond the point where your hourly output is too low to justify your pay.
- netrus 7y agoInteresting observation from Germany: I have encountered some reports about 996 in main-stream media in the past weeks. However, the spin was that Chinese workers are proud to work 996, or demand not to work MORE than 996 - in essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with their productivity.
- adventured 7y ago> in essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with their productivity. 996 isn't a matter of productivity (other than perhaps indicating exceptionally poor productivity). Productivity is closer related to how much output you generate in a given unit of time. Brace yourself Chinese, the Germans are smashing you when it comes to productivity with their $48,000 GDP per capita and 30 hours per week of work. A balanced mixture of high value output and quality of life (fewer hours worked) is the ideal. If China had an epic GDP per capita, it'd be worth considering the merits of how they're doing things. As it is now, they're still losing horribly. The premise properly should be that 996 dies - it becomes an absurdity, a relic of development - as they push up the economic ladder. If they can't escape the middle income trap, that may never happen.
- whoevercares 7y agoTo be fair, China has a HUGE rural population that might be close to 10X Germany size. They can’t even work on tech or any high value added industry because of their low education level on average. So I’d bet per-capita China will NEVER beat German while tech sector 10X more productive and 100X bigger in scale
- Proven 7y agoYou can stay at home or get a job at Foxconn if you don't like your digital job. The problem is it's not much better elsewhere in China, and what's common to all locations within mainland China is.... the government. If you're in Shenzhen, you have shitty rights. If you're 10 miles south, you're OK _even if_ you work for the same company (let's say Huawei) because you are in Hong Kong and don't live under a highly autocratic government. This isn't a problem of worker exploitation in free market capitalism.
- ratling 7y agoI don't see this going anywhere. Anyone seriously pushing this will just be replaced. Chinese companies will probably take the US approach and just ignore/cover up the whole thing, or make some handwavey pithy gestures. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it.