7 ms·

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 w

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.
  - solaarphunk 5y ago
    5 years in china is equivalent to 15 years in the outside world. Things have definitely changed.
    - FooBarWidget 5y ago
      So China is the heavenly palace and the rest of the world is earth? What will Sun Wukong think?
      - thesz 5y ago
        It is the other way around. "Year for three" is a staple of hard work in harsh conditions, such as foundry work.
  - naniwaduni 5y ago
    Honestly, this genre of venting about new grads has long been applied to new grads here in the West too. It's a long-standing complaint of the industry that academia isn't willing to serve as vocational training.
    - enkid 5y ago
      I mean sure, but most of the time Comp Sci degrees have Freshman compiling code on day one. This is a pretty be qualitative difference if the above comment is true.
      - lapetitejort 5y ago
        I took a freshmen level C/C++ class in community college as a requirement to get an Associates in Science. All we did was compile. We didn't learn any high level CS theory.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        My mother's friend's husband is a math professor at a university in Kansas. A major complaint of his is students coming in who aren't able to add fractions. So I don't see the big qualitative difference between complaints about bottom-end Chinese college students and complaints about bottom-end American college students, no. If it's of interest, I looked into gaokao test scores a while ago and the cutoff for being admitted to a Chinese university lies around the 40th percentile. The schools are officially divided into two tiers (obviously, there are finer distinctions you can make), and the cutoff for the higher tier is around the 80th percentile. So a large number of Chinese universities should have almost the entire student body within what you might think of as an IQ range from 96 to 112.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Joeri 5y ago
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. That doesn’t really work except for the lowest quality tier, because tired workers make mistakes, and mistakes cost time. Automate more to remove the human factor, and the remaining people need to be more focused, not less. There is a sort of maximum amount of net useful work you can get out of a person, taking into account slacking off and correcting for errors, and for most people that is not working 996.
908B64B197 5y ago
> 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). Or realize you don't need the code at all and there's a way to do it better.

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.
- solaarphunk 5y ago
  5 years in china is equivalent to 15 years in the outside world. Things have definitely changed.
  - FooBarWidget 5y ago
    So China is the heavenly palace and the rest of the world is earth? What will Sun Wukong think?
    - thesz 5y ago
      It is the other way around. "Year for three" is a staple of hard work in harsh conditions, such as foundry work.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  Honestly, this genre of venting about new grads has long been applied to new grads here in the West too. It's a long-standing complaint of the industry that academia isn't willing to serve as vocational training.
  - enkid 5y ago
    I mean sure, but most of the time Comp Sci degrees have Freshman compiling code on day one. This is a pretty be qualitative difference if the above comment is true.
    - lapetitejort 5y ago
      I took a freshmen level C/C++ class in community college as a requirement to get an Associates in Science. All we did was compile. We didn't learn any high level CS theory.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      My mother's friend's husband is a math professor at a university in Kansas. A major complaint of his is students coming in who aren't able to add fractions. So I don't see the big qualitative difference between complaints about bottom-end Chinese college students and complaints about bottom-end American college students, no. If it's of interest, I looked into gaokao test scores a while ago and the cutoff for being admitted to a Chinese university lies around the 40th percentile. The schools are officially divided into two tiers (obviously, there are finer distinctions you can make), and the cutoff for the higher tier is around the 80th percentile. So a large number of Chinese universities should have almost the entire student body within what you might think of as an IQ range from 96 to 112.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Joeri 5y ago

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. That doesn’t really work except for the lowest quality tier, because tired workers make mistakes, and mistakes cost time. Automate more to remove the human factor, and the remaining people need to be more focused, not less. There is a sort of maximum amount of net useful work you can get out of a person, taking into account slacking off and correcting for errors, and for most people that is not working 996.

908B64B197 5y ago

> 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). Or realize you don't need the code at all and there's a way to do it better.