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I wonder if this will be good or bad for the competitiveness of China if they are able to enforce it. The company I work in now has no problem competing with C

• secondaryacct 5y ago
  I work in China but european company so 965, pretty nice. The problem as always is: will they deeply want to solve the issue because they understand it, or is it instead now illegal to say that you work 996? :D It's not the same thing: I hope it wont come to that, but sometimes top down systems like ours create the appearance of the result before the result itself.
• thinkingemote 5y ago
  Depends on the job. Most manufacturing jobs is done on a conveyor belt. More time is more stuff. It's different job from software engineering. More time doesn't lead to more stuff.
  • nix23 5y ago
    Also not true with manufacturing (btw software engineering is manufacturing too). More time = More errors = More damaged Machines = Worse QA etc....it's the same as with software.
    • lmeyerov 5y ago
      Many factories, utilities, and other tricky hw like 24/7 b/c less restart errors Blind men and elaphant? :)
      • nix23 5y ago
        We talk about humans NOT the Machines, Servers are 24/7 the admins are Not...i hope ;)
      • burnished 5y ago
        Those facilities are also typically running three shifts, whereas you seem to be implying it is common for individuals to be working.. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
        • mediaman 5y ago
          24/7 would usually be four shifts. The most common schedule is for each shift to run 12 hours, working three days one week and four the next, for a total of 84 hours per two weeks. Three shifts works well for 24/5, each shift running eight hours a day.
          • burnished 5y ago
            Thanks!
      • ahi 5y ago
        Hospitals prefer 12 hour shifts for similar reasons. Their "restarts" are called "handoffs". A tired nurse in hour 11 of their shift is less dangerous than a fresh nurse who doesn't know everything that didn't make it into the patient records. There's a large body of research into handoff errors, and the lessons have mostly been put into practice. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case in "knowledge" based industries where failure isn't as easy to measure as death and malpractice lawsuits.
• accurrent 5y ago
  I actually think in this case CCP is playing the right cards (unlike in the case of tutoring). I also believe that Chinese are quite tired of having to put up with the exploitative work practices and I highly doubt 996 is anything of a competitive advantage. The whole mentality of 996 goes back to the time when most of the jobs were manufacturing jobs. If you are a garments factory whats the simplest way to increase throughput? Well, make your workers work harder. If you are in a country the size of China and your workers revolt, replacing them is simple enough. This unfortunately does not work for tech companies. Making software engineers work long hours will just piss them of. Also by its nature spending more time on a piece of code doesn't mean you'll be more productive (in fact I've found the best way to deal with a bug is often take a break and come back and reread your code likely you'll spot the mistake far more easily). Also if a software engineer is good enough they may simply choose to work for an American firm which gives them much more free time and are equally competitive. Furthermore, the more turnover there is in a software firm, the less efficient it is as new hires will have to learn the code base from scratch. So now firing an individual and replacing him may not be as easy as before. Hence, I doubt CCP will actually have to enforce the rule, the firms themselves will self enforce the rules.
  • GlennS 5y ago
    > Also if a software engineer is good enough they may simply choose to work for an American firm This seems a bit unlikely to me: 1. Ignores patriotism. 2. The number of good programmers in China is going to overwhelmingly outnumber the opportunities for them to work for a US company.
    • simonh 5y ago
      There are vanishingly few good programmers in China, proportionally. I have a friend that heads a computer science department at a regional university in China. He's an old friend of my wife. The vast majority of graduates from his department have never run a single line of code on an actual computer. The teaching and assessment is 100% theoretical on paper, and this is typical. Now I'm sure there are colleges and universities where this isn't true, and there are lots of Chinese programmers that do it for fun and love it just as much as any 'westerner'. I've actually met some shit hot C and C++ coders in china professionally and these people absolutely knew their stuff. However the base level education system is woefully unfit for purpose and the vast majority of computer science graduates cannot be assumed to have any practical knowledge of the subject. This was as of about 5 years ago, so maybe things are changing.
• tellersid 5y ago
  I would think they will become more productive. I love working hard but working hours have dependency when it comes to being unproductive. That many hours is just hard work signaling or some kind of test of commitment. Working that many hours is ultimately a cortisol problem that only less work can solve. This is obviously sub-optimal. Anything China ever seems to do is rather smart and reasoned so I assume they have just figured out this makes no sense and will lead to an increase in productivity.
  • notpachet 5y ago
    > Anything China ever seems to do is rather smart and reasoned Not sure if this was meant as sarcasm? China imposes their fair share policies that are shortsighted and eventually self-destructive, the same as almost all groups of people larger than 0.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  This is an insightful comment. Very long working hours are very often associated with inefficient companies that are built on micromanagement.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > The company I work in now has no problem competing with Chinese companies working 996, despite us working 7.5h days and having way more vacation days. My previous employer rushed to open offices in China because the CEO was convinced that 996 and China’s lower wages would double our productivity while cutting costs in half. They opened an expensive office and got recruiters to hire well credentialed people. Despite having twice as many people and supposedly working twice as many hours, they struggled to deliver comparable work. We spent a lot of time fixing the work that came out of the 996 office in China. Don’t get me wrong: There were some talented people in that office who I enjoyed working with. However, the 996 schtick always felt more like a performance art than actual productivity technique. The CEO was ecstatic that he could ask a question in Slack at any time day or night and within minutes they would all respond with many enthusiastically positive Slack responses. Whenever they talked about accomplishing something, they made sure to specifically mention that they accomplished it late at night or on the weekend. They seemed to send more e-mails on Saturday than any other day. But they weren’t actually doing as much as you’d expect for as many people as they had and as much as they claimed to be working. Their code was notoriously unpolished and was often submitted in “good enough” form as soon as they got it to compile or work enough for demos. We also had strange problems with a lot of employees who were trying to use company resources to do freelance work for other companies, assuming we wouldn’t care or notice. Unfortunately, their 996 performance worked on the CEO for a while. He was convinced they were our highest performing, most dedicated office. It took several years of buggy software and imminent product launches that never materialized for management to realize that they weren’t actually getting more work out of that office, contrary to their impressions. The lesson is that you get what you reward: If you try to build an office or company around rewarding people for the appearance of long hours and weekend work, that’s what you’re going to get. If you build the culture around expectations of solid software shipped reasonably fast, people will start figuring out how to accomplish that within their own time.
  • civilized 5y ago
    The performance of working long hours has been a staple of Chinese culture for many years (and Japanese culture, while we're at it). And everyone knows it's a performance.
• camjohnson26 5y ago
  Working overtime is usually an antipattern
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    > an antipattern Not clear, could you explain?
    • hurflmurfl 5y ago
      I think the poster means that it's a symptom of (and a temporary solution to) underlying issues. Sometimes I have to do a bit of overtime to fix a time-sensitive issue, and I'm fine with that. The underlying issue, though, might be lack of code review, insufficient testing, fatigue or anything else. It's good to remember that overtime is a viable solution, but as any solution it has its costs. This can build resentment among employees (making them quit earlier), increase fatigue (this requiring even more overtime to fix issues caused by fatigued employees), build dissatisfaction (resulting in loss of motivation), etc. In other words, if you're finding yourself plumbing leaks every week, a better solution for the long term might be to replace the whole pipe :)
    • markstos 5y ago
      An anti-pattern is a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
    • Jtsummers 5y ago
      There are two reasons to use OT (IME): The occasional and unpredictable issue. Construction crews took out the internet for half the city (happened to us a few weeks ago, maybe not half the city but it was bad). This broke a lot of communication systems (how can you deploy your work even working remotely when the systems you need aren't reachable?) and other things. Once service was restored, this forced a scramble the next week to get things done that had to be delayed and also hit the expected deadlines for that week (or risk a cascade effect of everything being delayed). One week of OT for a few people, everything was back in order. This is rare, unpredictable, and so not an anti pattern. It's a thing that happens. Regular OT is the anti pattern. If your team is working long hours every day, regularly coming in on the weekend, if deployment always runs long and the team has to stay all weekend (even if this is an annual thing because you didn't get the memo on CI/CD), you have a problem. It could be understaffing. It could be just lousy work. Working long hours seems to induce a decline in quality on its own. It could be a cultural problem. It could be abuse of the system (especially if OT is paid at a higher rate). It could just be bad processes. But regardless, if it happens regularly it warrants investigating.
• deleted 5y ago
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• thesz 5y ago
  My former colleagues who was trained for PSP/TSP said that it is recommended to count on 4 hours per day in time-on-task activities. Planning for more ToT hours will result in project being late as if it was planned for 4 hours/day ToT and people will have to work overtime (weekends). I have to say that remaining 3.5-4 hours are spent on other tasks like documentation reviews, etc. For time being we can assume relationship of performance regression is 4/ToT if ToT more than 4. This means that these Chinese workers perform 3.5 less work per hour or even less so. One can try to compensate by hiring more workers, say, 3.5 more workers but then the amount of communication will increase quadratically and there will be more than 12 times increase in communication needed for team(s) to work. That means that "996" policy results in great underutilization of people's potential. My napkin calculation is that each "996" worker performs less than 1/30 of what he/she can do. Regardless of culture, it is sad.
  • 6keZbCECT2uB 5y ago
    Documentation is time on task.
    • burnished 5y ago
      I haven't written a lot of documentation, would you say that it requires the same level of mental focus? I understood the dividing line of 'time on task' as being what is difficult/taxing, whereas admin or docs (important tasks!) are relatively light weight.
      • ericbarrett 5y ago
        I would; it’s a bit like teaching. For general documentation you need to refresh your mental model of the system and organize it to be explained to somebody without your familiarity. For specific areas (APIs, for example) you must review the assumptions in that domain and summarize them.
      • plorkyeran 5y ago
        Writing _good_ documentation absolutely can be just as tiring as creating the thing being documented. It's quite common to not particularly value documentation quality and be happy with a mess of words churned out with little thought because at least it exists, but ensuring that it's accurate, covers all of the little details, and is organized well requires some careful thought and editing processes. With a formal division between "deep thought" work and "easy" work, I'd be inclined to churn out a rough draft of documentation in the second time box but then spend at least as much time as that in the first time box cleaning it up.
• pototo666 5y ago
  Coming out of one of those 996 companies, I would say that most of my working time are wasted. I would do almost nothing in the moring. I did most of my work in the afternoon. In the evening I just pretended to be working. Forcing a real 7.5h day would not hurt most companies. But it would hurt the ego of middle managers, who want to prove that their teams are trying their best by working long hours.
  • someguydave 5y ago
    yeah I am skeptical that people are putting in full 12 hour days
  • OriginalNebula 5y ago
    I am working 40h in a Middle European country and think that a lot of my working time is wasted. Somewhere between 20h and 30h and a 4 day working week would be best for performance imo
    • lostgame 5y ago
      I agree, and I'm in Toronto, Canada. I genuinely believe a 4-day work week is the way to go. It's Friday and I'm already burnt out at 11am.
      • coldacid 5y ago
        My experience is that the burnout and wasted time comes from all the crap that distracts from real work -- the meetings, emails, bug boards, etc. When I don't have all these things getting between me and the IDE, I'm far more productive and get a lot more enjoyment from my work. Of course, if all the crap were cut out, I'd probably be looking at two days of work per week, never mind four.
        • Sharlin 5y ago
          In the past several years most of the burnout and wasted time I’ve experienced has come from libraries, frameworks, build/CI systems, architectural patterns, and so on that simply suck, or at the very least fail to properly work together. Unfortunately, they’re all mainstream technologies that people seem to think are perfectly okay, and that fighting against your tools simply in order to develop good solutions to the actual domain problems is just what coding is supposed to be.
• phatfish 5y ago
  Sensible working hours and good productivity require good management. Working extended hours like "996" is just brute-forcing results. You need teams with clear objectives and project plans so employees are able focus on a task without getting side-tracked due to too many responsibilities or bad planning. This shouldn't mean that agency or creativity is removed, it's simply about providing the right environment for people to work on complex problems.
• ren_engineer 5y ago
  I'd imagine the system is probably similar to Japan where they stay at the office a long time but don't work for most of it. Unless China has something special in the water it's not really possible for knowledge workers to be highly productive based on more hours worked.
• Taylor_OD 5y ago
  I don't know a lot about how the 996 culture came to be but it makes sense to me that is you're a country that is heavily invested in manufacturing goods you could enforce something like this and it would equal a boost in goods produced. But once a large portion or eventually a majority of your exports are high skill knowledge based work (like programming) then the returns will diminish as has been reported many times over the years. This may just be a natural change as China shifts its core export.
• xster 5y ago
  A bit of a tangent, but how would you change the gaokao system? It's certainly a huge strain on the child, but I'm not sure how to design a different system that allows a similar level of class mobility and fairness either.
• powerapple 5y ago
  What is the root problem of 996? The crack down on after-school tutoring is mainly to drive the capital away from it, it is not designed to eliminate every single after-school tutoring. CCP does not want the after-school tutoring to be a lucrative business for unicorn IPOs.
• honkycat 5y ago
  I suspect people going home, working out, living their lives, decompressing, and relieving stress would increase productivity. I'm not screwing caps onto bottles, the number of hours I work has NOTHING to do with how much I get done. I get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time, the rest is gathering information.
• nevermindiguess 5y ago
  Are yours 7.5h in the office or hours of work? Just curious whether they include lunch and breaks.
• baja_blast 5y ago
  I think there is no way 996 work culture improves productivity. Working that long only causes burn out which makes developers slower and more prone to mistakes, and with more mistakes leads to more effort devoted towards fixing those mistakes. Personally, my productivity varies greatly depending on my mental state, days when I am feeling fresh/sharp/motivated I can accomplish more in a few hours than I could over days burnt out, and the resulting code is more resilient and thought out than I anything I could produce burnt out. When I am burn out, my mind is foggy and less able to reason about various branches of the program and I am way less motivated. IMO like other posters have stated, 996 culture is less about productivity and more keeping up appearances with management. In China/SK/Japan you don't leave until your boss leaves, even if your work is done, so you will see people staying late a work shopping online or playing video games. The more the office becomes your home the less productive of an environment it becomes.