[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...
Most of those companies are not forcing their employees to work 996 on paper. But if you don't, then first, your team leader will give you some hint to ask you to stay longer. If you still don't, you will be fired for any number of reasons (KPI is too low for example).
Because of that, the company actually don't need to force it's employees. It just keep giving them tasks which cannot be finished without work 996, plus some peer pressures (One of it is "Boss's still here, you can't leave").
Jack Ma's "forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’" statement is basically the same thing: You need to fight for your own future. On the surface, it's correct, but underneath it, he's trying to make you believe Personal strive === Overwork.
It worth notice that Jack Ma also said "If you love your job, 12 hours is not very long" (“如果你热爱（工作），其实12个小时不算太长”[0]) just days ago. Hit: If you don't work 12 hours a day, you don't love your job.
Some background: Jack Ma is a lair who also likes to pretend to be a Life Advisor, he will sometime throw out some bullshit to convince others to sacrifice for him. You need to read between lines.
> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.
You see what's going on here :)
[0] https://finance.sina.com.cn/china/gncj/2019-04-12/doc-ihvhie...
Edited to fix some grammar problem. Hope that will make it easier to read. Thanks for pointing out :)
Yes, I fixed it again.
This sounds exactly like the accounts of what it’s like to work as an Amazon delivery driver.
First up, I'm not arguing against the fact that there are many many managers, bosses, directors and CEOs that use emotional manipulation to blackmail employees to do their bidding even though on paper they claim differently. They give it all sorts of names to make you believe this behaviour is okay. The most damaging use of emotive language makes you feel crazy for feeling the way you feel. This invalidation of your experience, of your feelings, is pulled straight out of the narcissist's playbook and it has a name - it's called gaslighting. Making you feel crazy and invalidating you for feeling the way you do. "If you loved this job, you'd do this for me. If you don't do this for me, you can't possibly love this job." Anyone who has escaped an emotionally abusive relationship will attest to how damaging this one technique is. It's often the tool of choice for a narcissist to maintain emotional control of their target.
It's tough to spot because usually the people at the top got there by being charismatic and motivational. They're charming and make you want to follow them... the same way they treat their partners to get them into a relationship before they invalidate them and make them feel crazy to keep control of them and keep them from leaving. The language they're using to make you follow them is manipulation and is also another tool lifted directly from the narcissist's playbook. Beware of the way people make you feel to get you to play along. When you start to feel like your feelings are crazy and that you feel guilty for not wanting to play along, chances are you're being manipulated using these tools.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/here-there-and-every...
Secondly, the first part of the statement Ma made, given my own experience is, to an extent, true: "if you love your job, 12 hours is not very long."
I tend to agree that if you're occupied by something you love to do or are fascinated by, 12 hours doesn't seem very long. My experience has been that it tends to go by in the blink of an eye. This statement can stand alone without any implication. I frequently work for 12-18 hours straight without even realizing I've done it and then wonder how I didn't even notice it had got dark and I've missed dinner.
However, the opposing statement that if you don't work 12 hours, you don't love your job just isn't true in my experience. There are days, honestly, where I'm fairly apathetic towards work and I struggle to sit in front of my computer for even an hour. This doesn't mean I don't love my job. It just means I don't love what needs to be done right now.
Just because all cats are mammals does not mean that all mammals are cats.
Google news and other social media used to do this until they got pressured to "localize" the news and favor "authoritative" sources.
What is shocking is how the same event is covered so differently by different countries and media groups. But the only way you would know this is if you actively search for news which is getting more difficult and which hardly anyone does.
> But in a speech to Alibaba staff on Thursday, Ma said the company expected people to be ready to work 12 hours a day since it had huge commitments to its clients.
> “If you don’t work 996 when you are young, when will you? Do you think never having to work 996 in your life is an honour to boast about?” he said in the speech.
Either Bloomberg got a lot worse; or I was too dumb to realize how bad they were in the past.
Most people think fake news is reporting false information. But nowadays it’s relatively easy to fact-check something. Much more onerous is selecting facts to report on so as to tell a story that fits an agenda. It’s harder to recognize, and hey—it’s facts! What could go wrong?
No, it's opinions and editorializing. Because if all news that are made to fit an agenda are "fake news", all news would be "fake"
Oh wait, no. The other thing. The thing about never trusting anything you read, especially if it was written by someone who has something to gain by manipulating your emotions.
Others reports this:
“No one likes working at a company that forces you to do ‘996’. Not only is it inhumane, it’s unhealthy and even more unsustainable for long periods – plus workers, relatives and the law do not approve of it,” he said. “In the long term, even if you pay a higher salary, employees will all leave.”
https://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-companies...
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
>“If you find a job you like, the 996 problem does not exist; if you’re not passionate about it, every minute of going to work is a torment,” Ma said in a post on his Weibo account on Sunday.
The point he's making is not that 996 is bad, he's saying it's bad for people who aren't passionate about what they do. It only works for people who are passionate about their jobs.
Now let's take that into consideration shall we, do you think he's saying that it's fine for you to turn up to BABA and do a 9-5 and tell your boss that you're not passionate enough to do 996? Hell No! In fact he says:
> if you’re not passionate about it, every minute of going to work is a torment
So here's the choice he's laying out - either you're passionate and you're happy to work 996 (and by corollary you need to work 996 to demonstrate your passion or commitment) or every moment is a torment and clearly you shouldn't be employed there.
So no, he's not endorsing forcing people to work 996. He's endorsing forcing people to pretend they want to work 996. Which by the way, isn't sustainable for most people no matter how passionate they are.
Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.
I understand sometimes people might need to work a bit overtime to get things done or have on-call duties. We all do, but working 12 hours a day/6 days a week is not sustainable whatsoever. Of all these Chinese entrepreneurs, none of them mentioned even the slightest of their total rewards systems, which makes me think they are avoiding this topic on purpose and all their comments are attempts to put out fire while keeping the status quo, sneaky indeed.
To be honest, if someone I manage constantly works crazy hours with no rest for a long period of time, voluntarily or not, I won't even let him/her push any piece of code to production.
Fried brains == Disaster
Edit: had a discussion with some of my friends from China on this. One of the common arguments is "why are developers whining about work conditions while tons of other occupations such as factory/delivery workers and nurses work long hours with lower pay?"
First of all, other occupations having bad work condition does not justify the legitimacy of 996. This is yet another common logical fallacy when it comes to arguments like this. Also, how can people assume workers of other occupations are fine with endless long hours? Did anyone consider the possibility that they never had a systematic way to express their dissatisfaction and just tried going along with it for as long as possible before they were burnt out and got replaced?
We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.
Is it?
You have production access to the company’s most important relationships. If you’re falling asleep in meetings or just unable to exercise emotional intelligence, that seems pretty bad for the company.
EDIT: falling asleep in meetings is bad, not good.
What if everyone who does it will become millionaires?
What if everyone who does it understands the tradeoffs involved and makes an informed decision that you disagree with?
The Longer The Shifts For Hospital Nurses, The Higher The Levels Of Burnout And Patient Dissatisfaction
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608421
Nurses seek to reduce long hours and fatigue
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2015/02/01/nurse-...
January 31, 2012 — State laws against mandatory overtime hours for nurses are effective, researchers reported in an article published online August 29, 2011, in Nursing Outlook.
"Nurses routinely work long shifts, often as long as 12 hours straight," said Carol Brewer, PhD, RN, FAAN, a professor at the School of Nursing, University at Buffalo, New York, in a news release. "These laws were intended to prevent hospitals from piling mandatory overtime on top of such shifts, a practice that research shows can increase the likelihood of mistakes."
Treatment of medical staff, mainly doctors is pretty ridiculous compared to easy life we (most of us) have in IT. What I mean by example - the by far the biggest employer - university hospital is forcing employers overtime, nightshifts which are properly debilitating, and not 1, but easily 4-5 in a row. At the end of such a row, the doctor feels drunk and sluggish when discussed with.
Which 3rd world country do you think I discuss? One of the biggest hospitals in Switzerland.
I have tons of stories from friends of us - like cantonal hospital in Bern, where chef of whole department set up the badge-sharing system that forced his doctors to share badges over weekend with others who didn't work,so they could do more overtime (unpaid of course) because the Swiss laws prohibited them from doing so, and entrance badge system was programmed accordingly). You don't want to participate, good bye (also to your career in whole country). 2018 story.
My advice - stay healthy, just don't go to hospital unless you have to. At the end, just drop dead.
They do work much longer hour as compared to most American companies (like Google, I worked at too), even longer than the average Chinese ones. However, 9-to-9 doesn't mean people work 12 hour straight and nobody forcing anyone to stay at work until 9. Chinese work schedule includes 30 minutes to 1 hour extra napping time at noon, and Alibaba has on-campus canteens and facilities so employees go gym/game after dinner then back to work a little longer before leaving.
When I was working there I usually leave right after dinner so the actual work hour was around 8.5-9 hours a day. And our team never work on weekends (except for around 11.11 the annual shopping craze). However I do work at night and weekends at home, voluntarily.
They do pay well though.
Can you raise a child if you are away 9-9? You wake up at 7AM, return home at 10PM, how is that even considered a life worth living?
That's just insane if you ask me.
The point is not to offer a "sustainable worklife". The whole point is to chew through fresh graduates as fast as you can. They are fuel for the fire. And China has many, many hungry and young graduates.
It's kinda fair to say this out loud. People know what they are getting into. Some people actually enjoy this and thrive in such a high strain environment. The losers are the people who think they have to do this to "prove themselves" and just suffer and burn out.
Those who survive get promoted, and perpetuate the culture.
The only pathology I see is that if people think this is the only way to run a technology company and start aping the practice - which is a likely outcome.
Worth clarifying that the "slackers" comment came from JD.com's founder Richard Liu, not Jack Ma.
edit: removed comments on whether he endorses it or not since it seems like there are contradicting statements from him. My current impression is that he disagrees with forced overtime but wants his employees to work similar hours voluntarily (although I suspect this is a common sentiment among business execs).
If your boss says they want you to work overtime 'voluntarily', what do you do? Doesn't sound very voluntary, and middle managers actually doing the enforcement aren't going to treat it like that, especially when they get targets.
It has one of the biggest tech workforce in China, but they can't make Taobao frontpage work moderately well. It is almost as if they felt "giving up" on that.
Having worked with them on their DC project in 2016, I can attest that the rest of the company is not different.
They are constantly loosing managerial cadres, and almost all Alibabers I knew can attest of the company feeling "ungoverned" and "in state of Brownian motion"
Also as much employee or employers claim that they are developing and maintaining a hugely complex systems. Most of it are age old 3-tier applications. Employers can easily replace most of the grunt workers with another lot. Average employees know this and that's why they put up with these demands. It is not like companies are lining up to hire run of the mill CRUD devs in these countries. I personally know many folks once they are laid off it would take anywhere between 3-12 month to get next job.
So what remains are few exceptional developers/engineers who can negotiate better benefits and working hours independently with companies. Companies absolutely do not feel any need to extend same level of respect and perks to everyone.
When the excuse is feeble, it's because it isn't an excuse, it's just an expression of indifference
Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were not his "brothers".
The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line... and I have no idea why. I don't buy the explanation that all of this is just "dumb". Something is up with this.
The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.
But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.
So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.
Amazing phrase.
All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.
Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.
Kai-Fu Lee discusses this culture in the Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next. He suggests that many of the workers will be the only ones in their family who have high paid office jobs. The rest work in factories, farms and other manual labor. Thus, they see an opportunity to be successful and lift their family out of poverty.
For some people this is called breaks.
Yes, you shouldn't do 12 hours full working, you should take sufficient number of breaks in between.
This will fit the 996 system.
That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.
It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money to quit working for several years and do a startup. When you're young, moderately fit, and ambitious you can crank out a ton of code.
However, the important point is that it was my choice to do that. You can't ignore the ethics because that's what makes it wrong - asking people to do it while (even silently) implying bad things will happen if they don't is deeply unethical.
I can happily crank out code all day if it's something I'm doing for myself. As soon as you add the employer, it immediately starts doing my head in. It's completely different work. Some employers are better than others in this regard I suppose.
If there are a lot of people in the company doing 996 every day I think they're probably spending most of their time doing mindless busywork.
It is not like you can do the same project twice, one crunching and one not and see what the results are?
In terms of health, definitely not good.
Also from economics, makes no sense if you are not a founder.
I’ve frequently found, personally and observing others, that productivity drops after 6h of continuous work especially if it forces you to think a lot (which is pretty much always in software - you still need to apply your brain to connect the plumbing between APIs)
Anything after 6h should either be menial work, cleanup or something else. I’ve found it is usually better to postpone any intense work to the next day. As a solo founder who tried to keep up 12h+ days, I’ve had the same amount of productivity by shutting down my day after 7h. You usually end up stretching things into hours for what would take a couple of minutes with a fresh brain.
Humans only work so many hours a day. Outlier humans who can work more won't waste their talent/superpower at an employer where their extra time isn't compensated.
Yes and no. Some might compromise the hourly rates for salary, if it comes with fringe benefits - say, having an FAANG on your resume, for example.
When I do concentrated programming work, I can maybe do 4 hours, at best 6 hours. It seems I can stretch it when doing more mundane work when I know what needs to be done. But this time is seriously reduced when I have to think about architecture or more complex stuff.
The literature also point into this direction, where writers and serious thinkers do these kind of few hours (also see Cal Newport on deep work).
I know John Carmack said you can be more productive when you can do more easy tasks to fill up the day, but it ends somewhere.
I have a master degree in computer science, and during the exams, my head was full at 20:00. Nothing could get in after that. I know people who could study until 3 in the morning. But you know what, after questioning them, they didn't do shit in the morning.
At work, I always had great reviews and my employers loved me (I'm almost 40 now). I always felt I was slacking off because I worked too little. But then I understood, if I work so little and get great reviews, what are those other guys doing?
So 12 hours a day? You are just lying to yourself. Those people are slacking off like crazy, and probably can't get anything done during the day. And at the end of the day, they are angry at themselves that they didn't do shit and wasted most of those 12 hours slacking off.
But I am sincerely asking to prove me wrong. Is it possible to work 12 productive hours a day? I was always searching for this how some people claim to be able to pull this off. But after investigation, they never really were able to do this.
After that they typically begin to "check on me" regularly to make sure I'm not "slacking." This would go on long-term.
I have never worked anywhere where this didn't happen.
I think it's a mistake to force people to stay in the office and work for this long. Even if it isn't 100% productive work hours, it still deprives them of opportunities to do other things with their lives such as family, hobbies and fitness activities.
It's as if he doesn't realize he's doing tangible harm to thousands of lives.
I also find it strange that someone that is currently retired at the early age of 54 can demand that other people (earning salaries) work 996. If working is so great and virtuous then why did Jack Ma retire early?
It's in fact physically sickening to subject people to this. As they are sitting 12 hours a day for 6 days a week and then probably sleeping all day on the 7th to recover.
Extreme overtime doesn't sound like a good idea. May as well hire 2 shifts of people and pay them half as much; aim for higher per-hour performance. 9-9-6 isn't going to get you very much per hour of labour time, the employees will be zombies.
4 shifts of people will get you 24 hour 7-day coverage if you want continuous production if that is what the business needs. Just hold per-hour pay as constant as possible using the reserve of willing workers as leverage.
Sooner or later, this mentality will bite back. Smart people cannot be manufactured en masse like plastic.
This is where communism breaks down. The only way to make it work in an economic sense is to turn it into a soulless corporate dystopia. Absent the incentive to work for personal gain, everyone must be motivated to work for the glory of the country through near constant propaganda.
Poor performance becomes a sign of anti-government sentiment. Thus, finding a new job after getting fired is extremely difficult, regardless of skill or desire to hire, because such governments go to great effort to blackball anyone who steps out of line, for fear of protest or dissent.
The USSR did indeed make great advances in technology and had a functioning economy, but at the despair and large-scale death of its people.
But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which maligns the reputation of China.
But I feel this is a moral issue. The thing is, the system of employment is the evolution of plain old fashioned slavery. That is where Ma is coming from. He believes that he owns those people. Class is still a very strong part of global society.
Just look at the etymology of the word 'employ'. It means using something. Earlier it came from
late 14c., implien, emplien "to enfold, enwrap, entangle"
The thing that is really tough about this is that it's a subtle form of violence as the vast majority of people (even programmers) are in fact dependant upon keeping their jobs.
So in fact the forced overtime is forced labor and is a human rights issue.
I think it's going to get worse rather than better because AI, robotics and automation in general are gradually picking up steam.
Maybe we can be optimistic though and imagine a time where using people ("employing" them) is recognized as unethical. Maybe we will have that luxury someday if we have machines that are smart and dextrous enough to replace human workers. That probably won't end class structures on it's own though.
These laws don't require that anyone forced anyone to do it - the manager is literally responsible to make sure people don't work too much. Obviously this will happen occasionally anyway, but now it is at least llegal.
Yes, the richest self-made man in China will soon be lectured by a random commenter on the Internet about how he got it all wrong.
No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours. I think awareness of the issue is great as it appears more or less systemic in China to work long hours.
> No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours.
That's true, and so you can stop doing it or change what you're doing on your off time whenever you like and have no ill consequence for it. For these workers, they don't have that option. Either be at the keyboard, dedicated to the employer, for the requisite time or be fired.
We see a lesser version of this in the US IT industry a lot. People are nominally employed for 40 hours per week but management only puts a priority or good focus on the people who do the "above and beyond." Sure, you might officially only be paid for 40 hours most of the time (special circumstances excepted), but when management only gives raises and promotions to the people who are consistently e-mailing at 9:30 at night and slinging code on Sunday, the real rules stand out very quickly.
Oh, what's that? You want to pay me the same total compensation as any other company, but make me spend twice as many hours working?
No thank you. I'll seek employment elsewhere.
Unpaid labor performing most of the factory's value-added activities, along similar lines to how the cotton was raised agriculturally on nearby plantations.
Company accountant complains about "$9,800 of total labor cost" for the year, which is about $800 more than it was the year before. "When is it going to end?" is often heard, even though the actual workers recieve no payment and never have, there is still a fundamental cost of labor even in a pure slavery situation.
Another year comes & goes, the Civil War ends, slaves are emancipated, and the factory is then required to actually divert some cash directly to the newly christened "employees" for the first time, in the form of a regular paycheck.
The accountant has never been so grumpy. "Looks like we're going to have over $15,000 in labor costs this year, thanks to the plumb fool Yankees."
And life goes on.
When is it going to end?
Anyway, I prefer to work a 12-hour day because I get more accomplished than would otherwise be accomplished over two 8-hour days. Relatively speaking, someone else's 16-hour project which takes them two workdays and completes no sooner than 34 hours after assignment, can often be completed in only 12 hours after assignment if all energy is directed continuously until completion.
For those that do not have that much ability to focus, I understand.
If owners and top executives were doing an amazing job directing the company then front line employees would not even have to work that hard because the company already has a strategic advantage.
That's a pretty wild assumption, especially coming from a billionaire, but I guess he needs to justify treating his employees like crap to himself somehow.
Holy cow! People went ballistic when Elon said in his post that the employees should hold up for the sake of the company.
But it shouldn't be surprising, since his company is so used to milking the "millions" of sellers.
Camera captured video: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av49491980/
Amazon also treats its employees like shit but at least their products are usable.
And this is why I got disillusioned with the "you should be passionate about your work" mantra. Capitalist companies exploits it for the own benefit.
Does HN need this sort of traffic and comments? I think not. Please don't post/upvote dubious Bloomberg clickbait.
