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24 year old Ogilvy China employee dies from 'overwork'
- Torn 13y agoWhy is this in hacker news?
- prawn 13y agoBecause a user found it suitable enough to submit and a few others agreed with that submission enough to upvote it.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoSince this site has stricter guidelines than Reddit, that's not actually an answer.
- prawn 13y agoCan you elaborate? I'm not sure what Reddit has to do with this. HN is about what hackers find interesting. A fair number of us have endorsed this particular topic and resulting discussion, enough to suggest that people find it interesting for one reason or another.
- davidw 13y agoDoes one need to be a hacker to sign up for this site? As a thought experiment, do you think it would be that difficult to get, say, 15 or 20 people who love professional bike racing to sign up, and coordinate voting up an article about Bradley Wiggins' difficulties at the Giro d'Italia, which some of us hackers find to be very interesting reading?
- sergiotapia 13y agoBecause startup people can identify with the mindset of working 16 hour days. I don't but some people here do.
- mellotron 13y agoAny statistics on US deaths like this? I couldn't seem to find anything particularly useful. I just mean to say that China is an enormous country, and statistically these things are bound to happen. Does anyone else perceive this type of media coverage as part of a greater strategy of propagandizing or is the oversturation of news outlets just hungry for enything sensationalist to grab eyeballs? Both?
- kayoone 13y agowhile you are right, these things just happen. I have just recently read about a 22 year old guy from Zynga and from a similiarly aged engineer that had the same thing happen to them. While chances to survive are extremly low, both guys are well now. I read about it on HN and Reddit.
- objclxt 13y agoSudden cardiac arrest is quite common amongst the population as a whole (http://www.sca-aware.org/about-sca http://www.sca-aware.org/about-sca). What's rather uncommon is it to happen at a young age, but it's not unknown. In the four years I was at college two students suffered fatal arrests, both thought to be healthy with no prior symptoms.
- walshemj 13y agoAnecdotal but some one I know who worked at one of the big 4 had a younger co worker who "worked him self to death" in the UK.
- reeses 13y agoInterestingly, the only people (OK, two) who died on "death march" projects were offshore team members from India and China who came to the US specifically for the final 18-24h/day push to hit a launch date. This is out of maybe 90 people working extreme hours on the two projects in question.
- ig1 13y agoThere's plenty of people (in every competitive industry from startups to consulting) who work until 11pm everyday without having heart attacks, presumably there were other factors at play here.
- michaelochurch 13y agoIf you don't have congenital heart problems and you're under 40, the panic attacks and dissociative episodes and visual flashing will hit you before you have a cardiac event.
- craigching 13y agoI didn't see it mentioned in the article, but it could be due to the type of work he was doing. Until I know what sort of work he was doing, I'm not going to judge or compare it to me working on software until 11pm every day.
- ig1 13y agoHe works for a creative PR agency, it's not as if he's going to be hauling steel.
- kayoone 13y agoSudden cardiac arrest can, in theory, happen to anyone at anytime, its just that its an extremely rare occurrence. Most of those cases can be traced back to a previously unknown heart disease though. In general, the probability of you dieing in an accident on your way to/from work is alot higher. The fact that i read about 3 cases of sudden cardiac arrest in very young and seemingly healthy people on HN in a rather short period is a bit discomforting though.
- michaelochurch 13y agoWhen things like this happen, names, pictures, and home addresses of responsible managers should be posted on the Internet so that the good fight can start.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoThat is really not OK. People who publish such information and call for vigilante justice should be found and prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law. Even if we knew with 100% certainty that the boss played a role in this guy’s death (which we don’t), then it would be up to the DA and the court, not the angry mob with pitchforks or the cowardly script kids on 4chan.
- michaelochurch 13y agoVigilante justice is terrible but I don't see anything else doing the job; it may be a last resort but I think our globalist-corporatist society is At That Point. The people with connections and resources own the politicians (all over the world) who make the laws. Besides, even if one country does everything right, the parasites in charge of the world can just move their money around. I've been saying since the late '90s that health insurance executives should be publicly exposed when they murder people, and I still feel that way. If the courts were actually cracking down on those fuckers, then I'd say that vigilante justice is unwarranted; but how many health-insurance murderers are in prison? The fuckers kill 45,000 per year (a 9/11 every 24 days) and I don't know of one who has gone to prison. Why do we tear the shit out of two Middle Eastern nations (one of which had nothing to do with it) over 3,000 dead but allow health insurers to kill half a million over that same decade and not even give them personal civil liability?
- xradionut 13y agoWe are irrational sheep. As long as the "average" person has their "average" basic life needs met, some entertainment and some hope of a better life, this shit will continue. A true "correction" would be bloody and very destructive, since no one in power is going to give up power willingly. They are more likely to go to the extreme and "cull" the masses to reduce what they see as the "problem".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- denzil_correa 13y agoIt seems over work a serious problem in China. 600,000 Chinese workers die from overwork annually. That's quite huge. http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1103&id=20121029000069 http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=110...
- maeon3 13y agoI think the key to solving the root of the problem here is understanding that there is such a thing as: "Cooperative compliance disorder", which is the other end of the spectrum of "Oppositional defiant disorder". So the question becomes: How did this person get to believe that when the desires of other men are of higher priority than your own physical health. Like cell in your own hand, it did not object when the mind decide to send the hand through the fire, he gave his life so that the whole might complete its objective. Cooperative Compliance disorder.
- potatolicious 13y agoWe really don't need to pathologize everything. In a sufficiently perverse environment, choosing to sacrifice your own well being for the good of someone else can be a rational decision - it can be the only rational decision. When gatekeepers control access to wealth, stability, and a good life - and the alternative to working for the gatekeepers is poverty and disease - you basically will do anything the gatekeepers want, because the alternative is nearly as good as death itself. Without knowing more about this incident, it strikes me as a symptom of a broken system, not a broken man.
- FD3SA 13y agoThis is precisely why our slow boil in the pot of American Fascism is so troubling. The frog is all but cooked, and it is none the wiser, even one minute to midnight... Advocates of liberty and privacy are constantly savaged by the media, meanwhile the erosion of personal rights continue unhindered. I sincerely hope we begin to act before it is too late.
- derleth 13y agoYou have no idea what Fascism is and are doing more harm than good to your side of this debate. People like you can get the whole group painted as historically illiterate idiots with nothing to contribute. http://www.anesi.com/Fascism-TheUltimateDefinition.htm http://www.anesi.com/Fascism-TheUltimateDefinition.htm
- venus 13y agoThis is so common in Japan they have a word for it. Which came in useful for naming our group at a previous company: "Team Karoshi".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lefstathiou 13y agoI am a bit surprised this happened. While working until 11PM every day is mentally frustrating, I am curious as to the physical toll it actually takes on your body. Said differently, is there a difference between being awake until 11PM every night and being at the office? I've watched analysts and associates in investment banking keep up this schedule for years at a time... Now, if you told me he was getting in at 9 and leaving at 5 every day for 6 weeks, this would make sense and I can see how this would be problematic for Ogilvy. With what we have in this article, I think he suffered from a heart condition.
- GFischer 13y agoI live in Uruguay, and the kind of medical checks most of the population has are so superficial, most people who have a heart condition won't know about it until it hits (I haven't had a good checkout in years either !! I should, after reading this). I know of a case here, the guy was one of 3 managers at a toxic company, the other 2 guys quit, and he took on their burdens. He died of a heart attack, at age 34. He thought he wasn't able to quit because of his children, but the result was obviously worse for them.
- patio11 13y agoFor anyone who thinks death from overwork merits scare quotes: I really, really can't recommend becoming a salaryman, but it would change your mind.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThe article says 600,000 people a year die from "Work Exhaustion" (their quotes not mine). That reminds me of the conditions that lead to the rise of labor unions, although in looking at various sources it seems that China already has unions of one form or another? Clearly not doing their job if that is the case.
- scarmig 13y agoChinese unions are pretty close to what were called company unions back in the day. Organized and controlled by the people sitting at the opposite side of the table. In the case of China, government officials who benefit personally when industrial interests in their domain are really profitable.
- barry-cotter 13y agoMuch like HR is for the company's benefit not the workers' in a Communist state unions are for the state's benefit not the workers'.
- akamaka 13y ago“Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.” -David Ogilvy (from Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963)
- derleth 13y agoNonsense. If you do more work than you take in calories, you will eventually die of that work. If you work through injury, the injury will get worse and may well kill you.
- chc 13y ago> If you do more work than you take in calories, you will eventually die of that work. No, you'll die of starvation. If you're not taking in sufficient nutrients, you'll die even if you do no work at all.
- dubfan 13y agoYour body is doing work through basal metabolism even while sitting idle. Starving to death and being overworked to death are basically the same thing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- reeses 13y agoThere's a beauty to that, especially as Ogilvy used the quote often enough for it to be strongly associated with him.
- iamjason89 13y agoKira! Where are you L. We need you now!