[HN Gopher] Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is ill...
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Chinese authorities say overtime '996' policy is illegal
Author : hkmaxpro
Score : 345 points
Date : 2021-08-27 08:50 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| baybal2 wrote:
| And it was so before, just like 4+ hours unpaid overtimes at
| sweatshops.
|
| What matters is them suddenly remembering it after decades of
| busting unions, and any labour activism protesting it.
|
| Clearly, they want to mop the floor with tech companies for them
| becoming bigger than the "sun king."
|
| And they do it this way to pretend that there is no obvious
| crackdown on private property, and businessmen, while it is
| exactly the case.
| audunw wrote:
| 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 Chinese
| companies working 996, despite us working 7.5h days and having
| way more vacation days. I believe part of that is that working
| longer hours doesn't necessarily make you more productive, as has
| been discussed in tech communities for a while now.
|
| The thing is, to be productive with shorter working hours
| requires a very different culture. The company I work in now has
| a very flat structure, and people are encouraged to work on side
| projects that can improve productivity, and there's a focus on
| continuously improving methodology. The last company I worked for
| was Chinese-American (based in US, but 99% Chinese working
| there), and it was the exact opposite. Decisions on what to work
| on was made top-down and results were mainly achieved through
| brute force. Although since we worked in a somewhat independent
| office in Europe we ended up with a hybrid system.
|
| So the question is, will a shift away from 996 lead to a shift in
| work culture that increases productivity, or will they just work
| fewer hours with the same culture?
|
| That seems to be the problem for the CCP in general. They want to
| make improvements, but they don't really get to the root of the
| problem. They crack down on after-school tutoring for instance,
| but they don't change the Gaokao system, so tutoring will just go
| underground.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Working overtime is usually an antipattern
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > an antipattern
|
| Not clear, could you explain?
| hurflmurfl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| pototo666 wrote:
| 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.
| bigjimmyjohnson wrote:
| I worked at a US company that wanted us to put in the extra
| effort and do work after hours. They tracked this with a
| summary report of work submitted after 5.
|
| So I worked normally and then I'd sit on all my work and wait
| until just after 5:15 to submit it all and then leave
| immediately. I didn't get in until 9:30 or 10 anyway so there
| was literally no difference except my work was delayed.
|
| They praised our team for all the extra work. They really had
| no clue.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This is a perfect example of "you get what you measure."
| [deleted]
| someguydave wrote:
| yeah I am skeptical that people are putting in full 12 hour
| days
| civilized wrote:
| So how do you spend those morning and evening times? It just
| seems depressing to have your butt in chair all those hours
| doing nothing...?
| pototo666 wrote:
| I read Hacker News and Reddit, or read tech docs, or write
| some code, or talk with friends. Then I quit. I am making a
| Reddit for China now. I want to help all those boring souls
| like the old me :).
|
| It is truly depressing. I would never go back. I earn 1/20
| of my old salary as a solo developer. I can't make ends
| meet, yet. But I would never go back.
|
| Paul Graham wrote somewhing like, if you fail, you would
| have to go back to those boring companies. This fact
| provides a lot of motivation. I can't remember the exact
| phrase. But yes, that's exactly how I feel.
| civilized wrote:
| Good luck, my satanic potato friend.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Same way people have been doing it for decades.
|
| Chit chat with your friends online, have a cup of coffee,
| spend 30 min listening to an audiobook or reading. And hey,
| what do you know, it's lunch time already!
| pototo666 wrote:
| Yep. Your writing makes me miss the morning coffee. I
| used to have a lot intereting talks beside the coffee
| machine. Coffee was better. Now I have to drink cheap
| instant coffee alone.
| OriginalNebula wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| But moving to a 4 day week doesn't eliminate any of that,
| it simply means you'd get less done.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| mindv0rtex wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious which of those items you consider
| as sucky and why. I am asking because I've recently been
| moved from a C++ to a JS team at my current workplace,
| and now I am exposed to this wide range of new tools
| which are all alien to me.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| I've recently negotiated a 4-day work week with my
| employer. It's been a huge quality of life improvement.
| Whether I make $80k/yr or $150k/yr, it doesn't matter as
| much to me as quality of life. Maybe I'm an outlier, but
| money isn't everything.
|
| If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries
| and options that larger companies provide, they can
| certainly compete on flexible work schedules. A developer
| working 4 days a week is pretty much just as useful to me
| as the engineering manager as a developer who is working
| 5 days a week. Budget and schedule.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries
| and options that larger companies provide, they can
| certainly compete on flexible work schedules.
|
| They certainly can compete. Just raise more or adopt a
| stock comp model.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Not all companies looking to hire devs have massive
| injections of VC money to play with.
|
| Tech at this point is needed to some degree in lots of
| products.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Maybe they need better founders.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| if everyone does it, labor will become more scarse, and
| wages should go back up too to recover the some or all of
| missing 1/5, so please everyone do this!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Only if total production goes down. If productivity
| increases enough to compensate (what really looks like
| the case), it should have no impact on wages.
| after_care wrote:
| If we adopted a four day work week do you think people
| would feel a burned out feeling at Thursday at 11am? I
| honestly _don't know_ and think some long term
| experimentation is needed
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Who cares. Even if I feel just as bad during the week, I
| have more weekend time. That's worth it.
|
| We don't have a worldwide labor shortage (!).
| Productivity going up and work hours not going is a
| travesty.
| dmitriy_ko wrote:
| There's a labor shortage in US right now. You can feel it
| everywhere: from having to book car mechanic appointment
| weeks in advance to construction projects going to
| standstill.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I honestly don't think I would. I am exhausted by Friday
| and then the weekend is basically just Saturday so
| there's hardly any time to recharge during it.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| I'm not burnt out on Thursdays. I feel empowered. That
| said, I've only been on a 4-day work week for a month and
| half now.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Not nearly enough time to adjust. Any job switch the
| first month is like the honeymoon phase.
| Nadya wrote:
| Everyone I've ever known has loved working 4 10's and
| honestly 4 8's would be even better. They never complain
| about burnout and a 3-day weekend every week leaves them
| energized and recharged for the next weeks' work. I only
| ever hear complaints from people working 4 12's which at
| that point you'd hear the usual complaints of anyone
| working 8 hours of overtime a week.
|
| The fact I've never once heard a complaint about 4 10's
| from anyone I've ever known to work them says a lot
| compared to the usual 5 8's which I hear complaints from
| about everyone (including myself).
|
| n = 19~21 people or so
| atty wrote:
| Possibly, but at some point it has to stop, right? Take
| the extreme example of working 4 hours, one day a week.
| If you are even marginally interested in what you're
| doing, I can't imagine anyone feeling burned out by that.
| I just don't know what the threshold is (and it's
| certainly different for different people). A lot of it
| probably has to do with how busy people's lives are
| outside of work, and if they feel like they're able to
| manage their lives at least somewhat stress free.
| thioordc wrote:
| Yeah it would have to stop obviously. But let's take it
| the other way! Do you think working 20 hours a day 7 days
| a week is optional efficiency? We need to find the right
| balance!
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| I'll play devils advocate. Say you work 40 hour work week
| with 20 hours of "productive" time. If we moved to a 30
| hour 4 day work week would you actually only have 15 hours
| of productive time per week? I say this because I don't
| think all the non productive parts of working life would go
| away, instead we would just get less done.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Many factories, utilities, and other tricky hw like 24/7
| b/c less restart errors
|
| Blind men and elaphant? :)
| burnished wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks!
| nix23 wrote:
| We talk about humans NOT the Machines, Servers are 24/7
| the admins are Not...i hope ;)
| ahi wrote:
| 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wouldn't the handoff suffer more at the 11th compared to
| the 8th hour. I wonder if they take employee constant
| sleep deprivation transferring into patient experiences
| vs legal coverage when making these decisions.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| The trade-off is whether patients see tired staff vs
| patients rotate through more staff with no context (=
| multiply chance of onboarding mistakes, more delays,
| ...). Tempering this a bit, a lot of smaller-staffed late
| shift care is more about handling emergencies and
| otherwise keeping folks fine until the bigger day shift
| comes in.
|
| Most software IT/ops is luckily generally much smaller in
| time scale of most incidents, and much more tolerant of
| hand-off errors and delays. Ex: For 24/7, you get an
| instant email acknowledgement of ticket receipt, someone
| triages it, and if on a boundary, OK for current shift to
| ignore and leave for the next one. Likewise, for bigger
| incidents, better for throughput for the same person to
| pick across shifts to avoid hand-off errors, even if that
| introduces delays when it spans shifts. But not
| universally true across orgs, nor for incident types. Ex:
| For tricky & sensitive incidents that take 8-24 hours,
| the hospital results show longer shifts _might_ make
| sense, so I 'd want to see experiments before making
| assumptions!
| pjc50 wrote:
| > More time is more stuff.
|
| That's the Taylorist position, but I think Deming would like
| a word. And in the more sophisticated manufacturing world
| with shorter more bespoke runs, the problem-solving ability
| of your employees and their time spent performing non-
| recurring setup matters as well.
| asoneth wrote:
| > Most manufacturing jobs is done on a conveyor belt. More
| time is more stuff.
|
| The 40 hour work week actually comes to us from research on
| the original assembly line. Henry Ford's analysts apparently
| concluded that 40 hours was optimal for overall productivity.
| Past that point and the cost due to the greater number of
| human errors more than canceled out the additional work.
|
| I would wager that this optimal number is different for
| different people but also for different professions. In
| professions where fatigue doesn't result in more mistakes or
| mistakes are cheaper to rectify then the "optimally
| productive" hours per week might be higher. In professions
| where fatigue results in even more mistakes and mistakes are
| more expensive to rectify then the reverse might be true.
|
| And this says nothing of the leverage of the workers
| themselves -- I suspect software engineers can get away with
| working fewer hours if they want to due to the fact that they
| have more leverage than most workers.
| accurrent wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Joeri wrote:
| _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.
| GlennS wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 5 years in china is equivalent to 15 years in the outside
| world. Things have definitely changed.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| So China is the heavenly palace and the rest of the world
| is earth? What will Sun Wukong think?
| thesz wrote:
| It is the other way around. "Year for three" is a staple
| of hard work in harsh conditions, such as foundry work.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| Having interviewed new grads from the west and new grads
| in China, I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads
| in China had had exactly the education the OP described
| and were completely unable to do anything. It's not just
| venting, it's the reality.
|
| There are some great universities in China and there are
| definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid
| level university in China? Nope, completely useless.
|
| To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China
| since.
| obmelvin wrote:
| I realize this may have changed, but at least at the
| time, was this partially due to access to computers at
| the university (i.e. lack of funds for computer labs)? Or
| just prioritizing the theoretical side?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I can guarantee you that a lot of the new grads in
| China had had exactly the education the OP described and
| were completely unable to do anything. It's not just
| venting, it's the reality.
|
| Isn't it the foundational concept of fizzbuzz that a lot
| of applicants to programming jobs are "completely unable
| to do anything"?
| edgyquant wrote:
| I've never really done traditional interviews, but is
| this true? I've been able to do a fizzbuzz since I was
| like 14 years old :/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-
| program/
|
| (internal link to
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ )
| simonh wrote:
| We're not talking about graduates not able to solve
| theoretical exercises. These graduates might well be able
| to solve an on-paper algorithms exercise like that, after
| all their teaching and assessment was all theoretical.
|
| The problem is they don't know how to actually compile
| and run a "Hello World" program, or write and run any
| kind of program on a physical computer, because they
| never had to do it as part of their computer science
| education.
| burnished wrote:
| FizzBuzz isn't a programming challenge for interviews
| anymore, that was like ten years ago. Now its more like a
| data structures and algorithms exam.
| dbt00 wrote:
| FizzBuzz was never a programming challenge, it was just a
| very quick filter before getting to real challenges.
|
| Real tech interviews have always been about understanding
| and applying data structures and algorithms, with some
| emphasis on problem solving with those tools.
|
| A really long time ago, there used to be questions that
| were more like "do you know some very common C/hacker
| idioms", like write a one line strlen or reverse a linked
| list in place. I used to get asked stuff like that in the
| late 90s.
|
| (There were also the brainteaser style things, like how
| many golf balls fit in a 747, but those were often for
| non-programming roles where people were looking for your
| ability to problem solve in a vacuum with little
| information. Those were rarely aimed at engineers, but at
| engineer adjacent non-technical roles.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Did the observation that "hey, a lot of our applicants
| can't even do anything" become less true?
| burnished wrote:
| Hell if I know, if I'm going to be frank I responded more
| from stress and wishing FizzBuzz was still a common test
| than anything.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| If it's still true, then why do the tests get harder and
| harder?
| simonh wrote:
| The Chinese attitude to academia is very different to
| that in the West. This distinction you draw between the
| academic and vocational goals of institutions just isn't
| really a thing over there in the same way.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Well if Academia doesn't want to be vocational training,
| then we probably need to cut the number of people going
| to college back to the 5-10% range.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of
| skills needed to be a good commercial developer.
|
| The best approach would be apprenticeships; learning the
| craft while doing the job. But the industry has always
| been ridiculously opposed to training its own staff -
| echoing your point that this is seen as something that
| the education system should do (why?).
|
| I've heard managers say crap like "but if we train them
| then they'll leave us when they finish the training and
| go somewhere else - we'll have paid for their training
| and get no benefit". This is a staff retention problem,
| not a training problem.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Which is crazy. No University can teach the kind of
| skills needed to be a good commercial developer.
|
| You sorta can.
|
| https://missing.csail.mit.edu/
|
| I've also met grads that basically had a dedicated
| software engineering class where they learned: What's a
| package manager, build system, how to compile C++ code
| (linking and compilation), makefiles, agile, waterfall
| and source control and a few quality metrics to look out
| for.
| blippage wrote:
| > I've heard managers say crap like "but if we train them
| then they'll leave us when they finish the training and
| go somewhere else - we'll have paid for their training
| and get no benefit".
|
| The clever response to that is: but what if we don't
| train them and they stay?
|
| I'll say this: programming isn't a profession. If I was
| being particularly unkind, it's more like a collection of
| wild west gunslingers.
|
| It probably won't be a profession either until we've
| settled the whole C++ vs Rust vs Lisp vs JavaScript vs
| $LANGUAGE_DU_JOUR debate, and stopped acting like
| egotists. "Rockstar programmer" is a problematical
| phrase. What it tells us is that programming is one big
| dick-measuring contest.
|
| I trained as a UK chartered accountant, having graduated
| in mathematics. I had to go through a set of professional
| exams. I was under a training contract, started as a
| junior. I couldn't sign audit reports. That was for the
| partners. My work was reviewed, and as I moved up through
| the ranks, I reviewed others. When I was a senior, the
| juniors asked me for advice. When I finished my work, I
| spoke to a partner, he reviewed my work, and I reworked
| whatever was necessary.
|
| There was also "calling and casting". After the accounts
| were typed up, a more junior clerk would have an old copy
| of the accounts with corrections, and the more senior
| clerk would have the revised copy. The junior clerk then
| read aloud what was on the accounts, and the senior
| checked it against his copy.
|
| See that? Professional. I imagine lawyers, engineers and
| manifold other professions have similar appropriate
| procedures.
|
| What do us programmers do? Release our shit onto the
| world and fix it later via patches. And issue licences
| that say we take no responsibility for the fitness of our
| programs.
|
| That's why I call what we do gunslinging.
|
| Maybe one day the queen will create an Institute of
| Chartered Programmers, but that day is not only far over
| the horizon, it's not even in the same solar system.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > It probably won't be a profession either until we've
| settled the whole C++ vs Rust vs Lisp vs JavaScript vs
| $LANGUAGE_DU_JOUR debate
|
| I don't see how it's a debate. Different languages have
| strengths and weaknesses.
|
| > and stopped acting like egotists. "Rockstar programmer"
| is a problematical phrase. What it tells us is that
| programming is one big dick-measuring contest.
|
| And yet law is extremely bi-modal. It's not surprising
| software is similar; you can't argue the average
| offshored programmer is in any way similar to John
| Carmack for instance.
|
| > See that? Professional. I imagine lawyers, engineers
| and manifold other professions have similar appropriate
| procedures. What do us programmers do? Release our shit
| onto the world and fix it later via patches. And issue
| licences that say we take no responsibility for the
| fitness of our programs.
|
| Sounds like you are hiring wrong. You are hiring
| programmers and then whine they aren't acting like
| engineers. Software Engineers have code review, proper
| release pipelines and methodologies. The bargain-bin
| programmers don't, of course.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have been told, anecdotally, that German college
| curricula are very "vocation-based," with students being
| quite well-versed in the needs of the workplace upon
| graduation.
|
| I've been fairly impressed with the Germans that I've
| worked with, but that may be sample bias.
| dasil003 wrote:
| There are vanishingly few good programmers anywhere. SV
| has more because it attracted them from around the world.
|
| In my experience college education has nothing to do with
| who is really a good programmer. Sure MIT grads are
| better than average, but that's because they have a
| reputation to attract the people that are the most
| interested in it. CS fundamentals definitely make you a
| better programmer and able to solve harder problems, but
| it's somewhat orthogonal to the daily grind of keeping a
| mental model of a large obtuse system in your head while
| solving hundred arcane micro-hurdles one after another.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > SV has more because it attracted them from around the
| world.
|
| There's also a filter here: To immigrate to the US as a
| dev you need to be able to secure a job as a dev, and the
| employer must be willing to sponsor you.
|
| That puts the bar way higher.
| golergka wrote:
| Eastern Europe and Israel seem to have a decent
| proportion.
| dasil003 wrote:
| My hypothesis there would be cultural factors drawing out
| a greater percentage of those with the potential.
| rory wrote:
| In eastern europe it's pretty simple. The collapse of the
| soviet union left a strong education system and also
| poverty. Learning to program is one of the most
| straightforward and doable ways to a good income, so lots
| of people do it.
|
| Israel is probably a knock-on effect of that, since most
| (jewish) israelis are (or descend from) eastern european
| migrants.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| At a regional Chinese university you are basically
| looking at those who couldn't go abroad and to the tier
| one institutions. And same thing for the TAs and teachers
| there.
| goodpoint wrote:
| This is an insightful comment.
|
| Very long working hours are very often associated with
| inefficient companies that are built on micromanagement.
| baja_blast wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > 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.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Reading this post gave me a tremendous feeling of anxiety.
| civilized wrote:
| 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.
| lozaning wrote:
| The number of people that come into the Samsung HQ on
| saturdays, just to take a 4 hour nap and then go home is
| staggering.
| xster wrote:
| 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.
| thesz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Documentation is time on task.
| burnished wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| TSP/PSP makes no task differentiation according to what
| is difficult. If it directly relates to project
| deliverables, then it's considered time on task.
|
| I'd say that documentation _that is expected to be used_
| is every bit as difficult to create as good code.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 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.
| powerapple wrote:
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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.
| honkycat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are yours 7.5h in the office or hours of work? Just curious
| whether they include lunch and breaks.
| tellersid wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Excited to hear Sequoia has introduced 996 for themselves, seeing
| what a competitive advantage it is. Not too shabby for 66 years
| old Mike Moritz.
| courtf wrote:
| I hear slavery is an even bigger competitive advantage. Moritz
| should chain himself to his desk if he really wants to succeed.
| ausudhz wrote:
| Meanwhile banks in NYC are making their interns work for 80 hours
| a week and people here complaining about 996
| stayfrosty420 wrote:
| That feels like a very different thing. Those interns come out
| of college with double the salary of their peers and insanely
| good career prospects. They often come with strong backgrounds
| and from prestigious schools - they can do almost anything they
| want.
|
| They can work in retail or commercial banking instead if they
| want better hours.
| axus wrote:
| Aren't the Chinese office workers working 996 making double
| the salary of their peers, with much better career prospects?
| stayfrosty420 wrote:
| I actually don't know, but my impression is that they were
| often at tech companies where the salary trajectory is a
| lot less steep, and also there were far fewer alternatives
| with a good work life balance. This always is framed as a
| pervasive cultural issue in the media I consume. Could be
| totally wrong though.
| tellersid wrote:
| Because the people that run banks are morons.
|
| It is exactly the same thing. It has nothing to do with
| productivity. It is a test for membership in a club.
| feu wrote:
| Both things are bad and deserving of complaint. People have the
| capacity to be concerned about the bad working practices in
| both NYC and China at the same time, it's not an either-or
| situation.
| logicchains wrote:
| Someone working 80 hour weeks at a prestige job for the chance
| of a seven figure income is different from someone working 80
| hour weeks just to put food on the table and support their
| family.
| rvba wrote:
| Programmer in China working 996 is a prestige job with a
| chance of a big payout though.
|
| Programmers have it much easier to switch jobs due to
| scarcity and high demand - this also applies to China.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| There are vanishingly few bank jobs and so the hazing
| process to get them is brutal. The banks push their
| associates to work 80hr/wk because they can. Technologists,
| for instance, don't work these hours (something closer to
| 60hr/wk in my experience).
|
| The 996 phenomenon seems to be more common. It's as if
| every job put you through the ringer.
| SerLava wrote:
| This happened on the same day the US Supreme Court decided to
| make 5-10 million Americans homeless.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| As a side note, is there any possible way to keep chineese
| products out of your life ?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Answering as a thinking exercise: probably not, or, only if you
| change your life drastically.
|
| E.g. if you own a car there must be parts in it made in China,
| even things like screws or connectors. Are you allowed to take
| public transport for this self-imposed "embargo"?
|
| I guess even your power company has components made in China.
| Hey, let's buy solar panels and go off-grid, oh wait...
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/avoidchineseproducts/
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Work 996 at home ?
| npteljes wrote:
| Not really, as I've found. Even if you manage to find something
| that's not "made in PRC", you have to realize that many
| products are complex, and some parts will still be made in
| China. The other thing is that I don't see that some other
| places are "better" than China in this way. Are sweatshops
| better in other places for example?
|
| I think what _can_ be done is to consuming less. Buying second
| hand. Learning basic techniques to repair. Things like that.
| kamray23 wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably that buying from outside China might be
| worse, because it will either be really expensive, or it will
| be made in a country with even worse worker protections. The
| other way is to just stop buying those things, which will
| leave you a minimalist with maybe a mattress, and definitely
| no electronics.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| According to the basic argument of
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300244175/trade-wars-are... I
| think stuff like this is a really good sign for employees
| everywhere.
|
| I hope it puts some pressure on Japan and Korea too.
| mathattack wrote:
| I spent time in Japan on a project with an 80 hour per person
| average workload. It was millions of dollars over budget and
| years late. Putting in the hours was cultural around not wanting
| to let the team down, but there was a leadership failure too.
| Crushing people to implement bad (or vague or undocumented)
| decisions made the problem go from bad to worse over time.
|
| My sense is that in tech jobs it just doesn't scale.
|
| There are professions where it does seems to work. Banking
| analysts who expect to go back to school in 2 years crush
| themselves to get Goldman Sachs banking on the resume.
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| The supreme court released several actual cases ruled in favor of
| employees that set precedent for similar cases. The "say" in the
| title is just disingenuous and sad.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A headline only has room for so many words. It was both the
| court and relevant ministry, but clarifying both and what
| exactly they did is the purpose of the article, not a terse
| headline.
|
| Also, there is a bit of a distinction in China between "rule of
| law" and "rule by law", so the question of equal, consistent
| enforcement needs to be proven out a bit as it's early days.
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| > China's top court and _the Ministry of Human Resources and
| Social Security_ on Thursday published guidelines and examples
| on what constituted as overtime work
|
| (Emphasis mine)
|
| See also this line from the state media The Global Times:
| (https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1232602.shtml)
|
| > The Supreme People's Court (SPC) of China and the Ministry of
| Human Resources and Social Security recently jointly released a
| guideline illustrating 10 typical cases of overtime work,
| stipulating that the "996" overtime work policy is illegal
|
| The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security is also
| saying the policy is illegal. The title of the Reuters article
| is perfectly correct.
| duxup wrote:
| Is this enforced then / complied with?
|
| I know that historically Chinese judiciary has little power of
| its own. I'm wondering how likely anything changes here.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Making something illegal is only weakly correlated to companies
| stopping the practice.
|
| I hope this is not just virtue signalling; the CCP has a
| reputation of hitting hard once it makes up its mind.
|
| But the 996 culture seem to be extremely prevalent in many Asian
| countries, it seems, and I wonder if a mere official law will
| change anything. China is _huge_.
| kamray23 wrote:
| There's been recent crackdowns on corruptions, and there are
| required to be government representatives at least supervising,
| but more likely taking part in controlling large businesses,
| public or private. That's in part to make sure that companies
| don't do shady deals that would hurt the party, and partly so
| that worker protections like these can be overseen very
| intimately. Authoritarian? Of course, but it's the only really
| reasonable way of making sure no big companies violate laws.
|
| We've seen the opposite in the US, even with some heavy handed
| measures things like sexual harassment continue to be prevalent
| among large tech companies, especially older ones. Wonder if
| you could strike a nice balance at some point?
| illuminati1911 wrote:
| I've been working in software engineering in China for few years
| now. Never worked for 996 company, but I know many who do.
|
| Most of the 996 companies that I've seen tend to be ultra shitty
| sweatshops delivering less than bare minimum and with less
| security than what a university CS freshman would implement.
| There are obviously exceptions to this, but in China culturally
| speaking, it's often much more important what things look like
| than what they actually are. That's the core essense of 996. As
| long as you seem to be working hard and long time, everything
| else is secondary.
|
| I find it ridiculous how random business managers in EU and US
| say this shit show would be competitive advantage. It's
| everything but.
|
| That being said China has several real competitive advantages
| over western countries, but media rarely speaks about then.
| raincom wrote:
| Besides cheap and slave labor, what are other "real competitive
| advantages over western countries" which China has, but which
| "media rarely speaks about then" ?
|
| This is not a rhetorical question. Just interested to know.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Domestic production of almost everything in the world. This
| is also immensely valuable to innovation because it's easy to
| make new things and test new ways of making things.
|
| Do you expect that "designed and engineered in X, made in
| China" is a sustainable situation when most of those
| designers and engineers have never set foot in the factory
| that makes their product, and never will?
| raincom wrote:
| Almost everyone accept what you say. Somehow, the capital
| class, and the intellectual class (media) heavily discount
| it.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Good move. I wouldn't play games with this type of work and
| extended hours. The nature of the business means a lot of the
| work won't equate to perceived personal value, and that burnout
| and depression will kick in hard inevitably.
|
| They don't want to learn this the hard way, ask those Foxconn
| suicide jumpers. Nothing is a competitive advantage when you are
| a melancholic shell of a person.
| nirui wrote:
| As a Chinese myself, I've been through a lots of this kind of
| paper reading club. And yes, you read the law you then you
| roughly know what is illegal. And clearly, those people in the
| reading club can read paper text in it's literal means, so that's
| a cognitive pass, congrats!
|
| However, let's don't forget that you cannot form labor union
| without blessings from the party. Let's also don't forget that in
| China, company can fire people really easily, they just hide
| those unfair or even discriminatory reasons under the table, no
| one will help you because helping people is too costly.
|
| There is a labor union in China of course, The labor union,
| called ACFTU, or All-China Federation of Trade Unions. I don't
| remember when was the last time they actually sued
| someone/company, maybe never.
|
| Personally, I don't think those paper laws and paper institutions
| are actually there to serve the general public. So I don't even
| care what they've said, nothing will change for the better.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I feel like there are reasons the government might want these
| and other related reforms to activately happen? The more
| corporate interests surely want max exports 4eva, but the state
| doesn't want quasi-private institutions to get more powerful
| and would also like a larger consumer economy to be less
| reliant on the state of the rest of the globe?
|
| People do need to work less to consume more.
| Tarsul wrote:
| Anyone knows if the verdict says what _would be_ legal? The
| _article_ only says 996 is illegal.
| rfoo wrote:
| "Normal" working hours (i.e. 40-hours a week), according to the
| Labor Law?
|
| China, as a country ruled by communist, do have a Labor Law
| favoring employees. They just don't enforce it strictly before.
| For example, you may refuse to work long hours, and if you get
| fired as a result, you can raise a "labor dispute" and you'll
| almost always win. The catch is it would take months to resolve
| and after that, the employer simply pays some severance and
| nothing more.
| enkid wrote:
| Is there any reason to think they will start strictly
| enforcing it? One ruling confirm an already existing law
| doesn't seem like a watershed moment to me until we see it
| changing the way companies are prosecuted for their behavior.
| p_l wrote:
| There is apparently a recent push to go after exploitative
| practices of big giants, including also in terms of labour
| policies (including treatment of delivery workers).
|
| And if you want a cynical reading - the companies that are
| famous for 996 are also the kind of companies that are
| recently getting reminders that they do not guide the
| policy in the country, so it's beneficial for the party to
| actually prosecute them.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| For anyone that does not know:
|
| > _The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996Gong Zuo Zhi ) is a
| work schedule practiced by some companies in the People 's
| Republic of China. It derives its name from its requirement that
| employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72
| hours per week.[1][2][3][4][5][6]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
| opan wrote:
| Thanks. I'd heard of this before, but my first thought when
| seeing three numbers describing time is work/play/sleep
| (commonly 8 of each in the west from what I understand), and it
| wasn't quite sounding right to me for this context.
| SSLy wrote:
| It says so in the article too
| [deleted]
| freebee87 wrote:
| The taxonomy of jobs in china: Local government positions (<20
| hours per week). Relatively low pay. Little job risk . This
| positions are by design very easy (Tie Fan Wan or Iron Rice
| Bowl). There are long vacations and expectations are very low.
| If you want to spend your time, smoking, having lunch, and
| going for walks this is the place for you.
|
| Domestic SME's (20 - 40 hours per week). Moderate job risk -
| usually from business failure. Think of your small town
| dentist. If he is on vacation skiing for 2 weeks, no one will
| complain but business might hurt a bit. Expect Basic, low
| levels of competence.
|
| Regional and Central Government (40 hours per week). No job
| risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. One thing the CCP
| does well is to hire relatively competent people to higher
| levels positions of governance and MOTIVATE them to accomplish
| tasks. You will be surprised how many have a reasonable command
| of English and a daughter with a degree from Oxford.
|
| Division of Non Chinese MNC (40-50 hours per week). Moderate
| job risk. MNC jobs are considered high status in china because
| foreign employers are thought to treat employees relatively
| well. In general they respect local laws and avoid intrusive
| personal questions. Not considered top of the pecking order.
|
| Large Domestic Exporters (50-60 hours per week). Little job
| risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. These are the
| beating heart of Chinese productivity and generally have high
| quality management. Usually has a local flavor of Taylorism.
| Loyalty is extremely important. Expect a confusing bureaucracy
| like any large organization.
|
| Domestic Tech companies (70 hours per week - 996). The pace of
| product development and iteration within these companies is
| INSANE. It is like having a three day hackathon only to
| discover that the team from Missouri solved the problem last
| night while you were out getting pizza. Code quality,
| Engineering Practices, IP development does not matter as long
| as you can crank something out there first. They pay very well
| by Chinese standards and expect employees to live on the
| company facilities. Marriage within the company is encouraged
| as it is thought to foster loyalty. It is common for People
| burn out very quickly from these jobs.
| ailun wrote:
| Should note that this describes white-collar jobs. More than
| half the population works blue-collar or service jobs, and
| few of them are working less than 6 days a week.
| paulcole wrote:
| I was confused by this as well until it was cleared up in the
| first sentence of the article.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| The 996 Github Repo is one of the Top Starred
|
| https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
| vmception wrote:
| Illegal in favor of....?
|
| In accordance with which law?
|
| Was it too much work?
|
| Too little work?
|
| Overtime benefits miscalculated?
|
| Does China's legal system have that much nuance?
|
| The _Reuters_ article doesnt say!
| akomtu wrote:
| CCP starts looking like a US corporation. Their PR department
| says "996 policy is illegal" and lower-rung VPs read the subtext
| and make the policy illegal, on paper, but at the same time
| create conditions that effectively enforce 996 without it being
| an official policy.
| burnished wrote:
| That might be the end result but I don't see why you think
| thats the intent. Literally, what would be the point then?
| tuatoru wrote:
| I had been waiting for the next announcement. This is the latest
| move in a series in service of the overarching policy, "increase
| fertility".
|
| In 2015 the CCP became aware the country was falling off a
| demographic cliff. It has the example of Japan, whose working-age
| population has been decreasing since 1997. And it can see the
| same development in South Korea.
|
| At the time the party responded by altering the one child policy
| to two children.
|
| Since then it's been lifted to three. That was followed by tax
| breaks and offering parental leave. (In minuscule quantities, but
| dilution happens when policy directives filter down from the
| top.)
|
| Once low fertility has become ingrained in a culture, it takes a
| lot more than that to turn it around, though. Especially with
| other anti-fertility head winds (below).
|
| This year the party has:
|
| - put limits on for-profit tutoring and banned teaching the
| school syllabus to under-sixes--the costs of these were seen as a
| major road block to having more than one child.
|
| - publicly compared video games to opium (which probably has
| immense cultural resonance), and acted to limit on-line
| shopping/personal finance-- both alternative uses of time to the
| "delights of domestic society".
|
| - and now the party has acted to reduce the effect work has on
| fertility by helping people to have some time and energy left
| after work. (Which time and energy it would be inadvisable to
| spend on video games or shopping, given the panopticon in China.)
|
| ----
|
| The party will need to go further, though. There are still a lot
| of things in the way of having more than one child. The party
| will have to alter the hukou system so that children can attend
| schools and medical facilities in the cities where their parents
| work rather than in the villages where they officially live. It
| will have to reform the gaokao college entrance exam system.
|
| It will also have to act to curb housing prices (Chinese men
| basically can't get a partner unless they own housing), and it
| will have to raise retirement ages and introduce a pension so
| that people don't have to save so desperately to support their
| parents and then themselves in old age. (Retirement is at 55 for
| women in China--or was until recently.)
|
| I expect raising retirement ages to come soon, maybe in two
| years. However, once a generation has been raised in which one-
| child familes is the norm, it's difficult to lift fertility to
| two or more children.
|
| 1. Japan's working age population:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTJPM647S
|
| 2. Japan's population pyramid for comparison:
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2019/
|
| 3. China's population pyramid:
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2019/
| goodpoint wrote:
| If humanity is to survive on this planet, decreasing
| consumption and pollution and ensuring economical degrowth are
| the first priorities.
|
| Reaching 0 or negative population growth globally is part of
| this.
|
| Getting out of such unsustainable competitive mindset is the
| first step.
| kamray23 wrote:
| Degrowth is not a reasonable idea. Humanity lives for
| humanity, not for the Earth. We just happen to need the
| Earth. Progress is the good way out, for both humanity and
| the Earth.
|
| Humanity could, energy-wise, become green within a few years,
| were it a profitable investment. We have fresh water and
| food, both in global surplus. Pollution-wise, the only reason
| everything isn't recycled is that it's cheaper to not do so.
|
| After we have that squared away, space mining technology is
| currently moving at an immense rate. It wouldn't be
| profitable to do so yet, but if we disregard that, it would
| be possible. That alone takes out most of our environmental
| impact outside of energy.
|
| It's not a matter of us running out of capacity. This planet
| can support 10-12 billion without breaking a sweat. It's a
| matter of us being unwilling to move towards that goal,
| prioritising having constant growth in the short term over
| having sustainable overall growth in the long term.
|
| Sometimes it isn't about simple capital gain, the profits
| made from asteroid mining are not monetary but environmental.
| And yet modern economics, essentialist and ossified, is so
| obsessed with the idea of number go up that we can't go
| there.
| blix wrote:
| Degrowth is probably more likely than humans deciding
| overnight to stop optimizing for profit and short-term
| growth. It just might be unintended.
|
| I'm not sure why we should seek to maximize the
| exploitation of the planet to optimize for total number of
| human beings. This "obsession with making a number go up"
| seems like a very unhealthy goal as a species.
| [deleted]
| kamray23 wrote:
| That's not the point. The point of all society is to
| maximise human enjoyment, to satisfy the needs of humans.
| That's the point of an economy, it's the point of having
| states, it's the point of manufacture and it's the point
| of farming. The only "number go up" obsession that exists
| is making sure there is plenty in this world for humans
| to enjoy, and that includes keeping the Earth safe and
| clean.
|
| Degrowth is nothing but a total betrayal of human values
| for some idea of cosmic justice for what is essentially a
| chaotic clockwork ball hurling through space. Not only
| that but it's misplaced betrayal, since while humans
| might hurt themselves through climate change, the Earth
| will certainly not be affected in the long term.
|
| Climate change is fought for Earth, for humans. Fighting
| it through feudalism makes no sense, and is, at least in
| my view, less likely than humanity investing in long-term
| prosperity.
|
| For degrowth to happen modern society has to damn near
| collapse. You'd have to scale back production massively,
| to the extent that most people wouldn't have jobs to do
| as there's nothing to produce without going over your
| production quota. You wouldn't get much enjoyment out of
| what you have as even a sort of upper lower class
| lifestyle in the west would go well over consumption
| goals. Life would essentially regress towards some
| pseudo-feudal system. Money would eventually lose all
| meaning as people would have to be provided for or mass
| starvation policies would have to be put into place. No
| reasonable species would accept this and giant revolts
| would inevitably break out.
|
| What is far more likely is that states take increasing
| control of production in society and simply rationally
| design it to prevent excess, with markets being thrown
| out the window. The market system has shown itself to be
| fundamentally incapable of rationally planning for and
| preventing climate change and other excesses on a large
| scale.
|
| Whether that means total abandonment of free markets or
| heavy regulation of corporations I do not know, but it's
| nevertheless far more likely than degrowth is.
| blix wrote:
| Degrowth has happened many times before in human history,
| including last year. Almost no one wanted it but it still
| happened. As far as I know, total abandonment of free
| markets has not ever happened, despite many people saying
| they want it. I have a hard time believing something that
| has never happened is more likely than something that has
| happened repeatedly throughout human history and also
| last year.
|
| "Plenty for humans to enjoy" is wealth. The change in
| wealth over time is profit. Maximizing enjoyment is
| maximizing profit. Whether you are talking about
| individual short term profit, or collective long term
| profit, the problems with number-going-up-obsession are
| ultimately the same.
|
| > Money would eventually lose all meaning as people would
| have to be provided for or mass starvation policies would
| have to be put into place.
|
| I'm unclear how this is different than the total
| abandonment of free markets. There's even historical
| precedent.
|
| > You wouldn't get much enjoyment out of what you have...
|
| It seems implicit in your argument that more wealth is
| more human enjoyment. I'm not so sure that is true. By
| virtue of being alive in 2021 and posting on HN, you are
| likely one of the wealthiest humans to have ever lived.
| Do you think you are one of the happiest?
|
| One of the problems with the religion of numbers-going-up
| is that there are always bigger numbers. I think this is
| a pretty bad relgion honestly. Unfortunately it is very
| popular.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > We have fresh water and food, both in global surplus.
|
| This is a bit misleading, if only because what matters is
| not necessarily the aggregate amount of food but getting it
| where it is in demand. It would be an incredible waste of
| resources to ship freshwater from the Great Lakes to
| Northern China, for example. And most of the countries that
| have food security issues have issues not only with the
| amount of food they have, but the means to get food in
| people's mouths in time before spoilage.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I agree. I don't advocate for what China is doing. I'm
| describing what I see.
|
| If a state (country) has "continue to exist forever" as an
| objective, then under that it will have "maintain national
| security in both the short run and the long run" as a sub-
| objective, and part of that is "maintain military strength'.
| To maintain a military requires a population of young adults.
| It always has, throughout history (and probably before).
|
| CCP leaders both know history and are numerate. They can also
| stick with policies for at least ten years.
|
| Again, I'm describing what I see, not advocating for it.
|
| Apart from population momentum, we have the conditions for
| long-run negative growth everywhere in the world except in
| sub-Saharan Africa. Momentum should dissipate in another
| generation. Sub-Saharan Africa seems unlikely to meet the
| UN's population projections for other reasons.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
| tsjq wrote:
| agree with the observation. it was legal when it was benefiting
| them. now when they have other priorities, suddenly this is
| illegal. same with 1-child, 2-child , 3-child policy. now their
| priority is to expand their population into Tibet, Afghanistan
| , Xinjiang, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc new territories: in the
| next 2-3 decades. so, population growth becomes paramount
| priority. So, "drop everything else. make more babies"
| m3kw9 wrote:
| So they just tell employees to leave one minute before 9pm.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| The article didn't mention the real reason for moving away from
| 996.
|
| The current unemployment rate is over 20%. (They call it the
| "flexible market.") And China might be called a Communist
| country, but there's few benefits unless you're a CCP member.
| defaultprimate wrote:
| As if the majority of China has the luxury of only working 72
| hours a week.
| steve76 wrote:
| If people you hate, like big oil or the police ran a tabloid,
| would you believe it? That's what you are reading here. You think
| they are honest? The only thing their leadership cares about is
| the facade of legitimacy. They will say and do anything to get
| it. They do not care about what you care about, GDP, world peace,
| knowledge. They only care about avoiding the gallows and stopping
| a mob of their own people from clubbing them to death in the
| streets.
|
| Your own people hate you. They do not want you around. If you
| really want to help people, leave. Retire to Singapore or
| Malaysia or Brunei or Auckland and learn to leave other people
| alone. They're fine without you. With you is a living waking
| nightmare.
| the_cramer wrote:
| I once had a chinese colleague who came to europe for a few
| years. She always thought we were lazy for working so short and
| every argument i brought up about mental health and work
| efficiency was met with a: "but it works for us".
|
| What i did not understand back then is the absolute
| replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long
| and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.
|
| Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china
| in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner
| or later to europe to "stay competitive".
|
| In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to
| make irrational and/or unethical decisions. And they will find a
| way to circumvent the laws. I am also sure that chinese companies
| will find a way to circumvent the 996 ruling here.
| pizza234 wrote:
| There's a documentary that shows exactly this phenomenon,
| American Factory.
|
| > i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to
| europe to "stay competitive"
|
| I'm a bit more optimistic. In a culture where productivity is
| not the be-all and end-all, staying competitive at the cost
| one's whole life, will not take roots. I think that
| productivity also has different dimensions, which helps.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| What europeans like me who want to try something else do is
| simple: we emigrate to China and see how it is.
|
| We dont all need to all do the same thing, and the biggest
| fallacy of all is that we re in competition with each other.
| We trade more or less efficiently but since doors are always
| half open, heh, just jump if you want.
|
| Can even change with age.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > simple: we emigrate to China
|
| Let us know how simple this works out in practice.
| feu wrote:
| It wasn't especially difficult pre-COVID. I know a few
| people from the UK and Bulgaria who have done so.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Yes. And I know some who returned around 2018ish because
| the oppression was growing a lot.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of
| china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back
| sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".
|
| We rather will introduce tariffs to fight against price
| dumping. We have the mechanism for that and politicians are
| slowly waking up and realizing that China is an enemy that must
| be fought.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Why would it come back? I don't think any research has ever
| shown that working those kind of hours in "knowledge work" is
| sustainable or conducive to high productivity long-term.
|
| I expect the "replaceability" that you mention isn't just "work
| long and hard or somebody else will", but also "work long and
| hard, because you can be easily replaced as soon as you have a
| breakdown"...
| tellersid wrote:
| I am an American but I completely resonate with Confucian
| values when it comes to work and learning.
|
| The most insulting thing to me would be to be called lazy. I
| can see as a society with that many people though this would
| naturally go too far.
|
| In the West, we are not lazy but delusional as a society. We
| are the boxing champion that has quit hard training because
| they think they can't be beat. This is pretty natural after
| being the champ for so long. We don't need to train, we can
| just party and still win. That works until the younger talented
| hungry competitor comes along and you get knocked out. A tale
| as old as boxing, a tale as old as human history.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| Did you just call Rocky IV "a tale as old as human history?"
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| Well, to be generous, Gilgamesh did suffer from a boredom
| so severe that his own people begged the gods to bring him
| an equal. After Enkidu showed up, he spent more time
| adventuring and fighting mythical creatures, instead of
| wrestling the townsfolk and enjoying the perks of prima
| nocta.
| tandem5000 wrote:
| It's an instance of Prisoner's dilemma.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
| simonh wrote:
| They've swallowed an ideological fallacy that simply working
| your pants off for long hours means you will win. The USSR had
| the same disease, if they just worked their people 20% harder
| than the west did then they would inevitably be more productive
| and economically 'win'. It's variation of the lump of labour
| fallacy.
|
| Don't fall for it. It's thinking like this that leads to
| managers optimising for the wrong metrics. Hours worked is
| clearly the wrong metric. Companies don't exist to simply
| employ workers for long hours, and thinking that way leads you
| down the wrong path right from the start. You need to look at
| where the value actually comes from, and this is sometimes
| subtle and not at all obvious.
|
| Here's a challenge. A taxi driver in London earns about 4x what
| a taxi driver in Beijing does, in objective international value
| terms. Why? What factors might lead to that difference? If your
| value system can't answer that question, then it's wrong. They
| do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are
| doing is worth 4x as much, and there must be a reason.
| the-dude wrote:
| Baumol's cost disease :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
| solaarphunk wrote:
| They earn 4x more because the world is not truly flat, and
| there are artificial/natural barriers which hamper
| competition such as; movement of humans, scarcity of taxi
| medallions along with fixed pricing, input costs of a taxi
| ride (cost of living, gasoline + subsidies/taxes), labor laws
| etc.
| rvba wrote:
| USSR was never efficient. People literally did not care about
| their jobs. Especially after stalinism ended, many did the
| absolute minimum. Since everything was state owned it was
| owned by nobody - so nobody cared about maintenance, workers
| often stole from their companies, did not show to work
| because they stood in queues..
|
| They had sayings like: "doesnt matter if you lie or stand,you
| will get 3 thousand at the end" (what meant that there were
| no rewards for those who worked harder).
|
| There could have been some islands of efficiency (perhaps in
| closed cities where workers could get accused of being spies
| if they didnt try hard enough) but for generic workers
| efficiency did not matter.
|
| And I dont even write about inefficiencies of central planned
| system itself, where rewards did not come from market forces
| + falsified statistics on top, so nobody even knew the truth.
|
| Even the communists knew that their system is inefficient,
| which you can see in many places. For example in "aquarium"
| novel by Suvorov one of the spies talks how they run out of
| meat and bread, but the system got so inefficient that it run
| out of people to murder.
|
| USSR didnt work people harder. Political prisoners yes, but
| the normal people were incredibly ineffective. Even films
| made during communism laughed at that.
| stayfrosty420 wrote:
| Sounds a lot like many very large multinationals to me.
| People don't get fired because managers don't want to
| expose themselves to the possible legal ramifications, so
| they just move them to a place where they can cause as
| little damage as possible.
| dron57 wrote:
| It's a very apt comparison to large multinationals, but
| this one had hundreds of millions of "employees". So you
| can imagine how little people cared about their jobs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > the work they are doing is worth 4x as much
|
| This is a purchasing power parity argument; moving people
| around in London is "worth" more because they have more
| money, and money that is more valuable on the global exchange
| rate market.
| owlmirror wrote:
| You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in
| London have more money. Purchasing power is not something
| that manifests itself out of thin air, as well as exchange
| rates of money.
|
| An economy in which the people have multiple times the
| purchasing power must do something right. And moving people
| in that economy around is more valuable than moving people
| elsewhere.
| smokey_circles wrote:
| >You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in
| London have more money
|
| As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it.
|
| Before you all go clutching your pearls: it's beyond
| impractical to even suggest paying it back nor would I
| even want to think about that. Not an option. not
| suggesting it.
|
| But don't pretend it's because you're special. You stole
| it. Just own it.
| randomopining wrote:
| How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your
| gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.
|
| How did your African country get all this modern tech
| that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using
| the internet? You must've stolen it.
|
| Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education
| --> production --> exchange high quality goods for
| currency.
| stayfrosty420 wrote:
| >How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your
| gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.
|
| Explains how a small island in north Europe with a weak
| military and flagging economy is on the UN security
| council.
| t0ughcritic wrote:
| 200-300 years of bankrupting countries like India. But
| they say all is fair in war. So it is what it is.
| nepeckman wrote:
| > How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your
| gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.
|
| Unironically, yes this is how capitalism works. If you
| have resources, you leverage those resources to produce
| goods and services that increase your total wealth. If I
| were to walk into a bank and steal a couple million
| dollars, maybe I could leverage that money into a
| successful business. Maybe so successful that it produces
| inner-generational wealth, so that my great-great-
| grandchildren are on average more wealthy than they would
| have been otherwise. I may have "earned" this money with
| my hypothetical business skills, but it doesn't change
| the fact that I only had the opportunity because I stole
| the money.
|
| So yeah, many enterprising individuals took land and
| resources (and plenty of slave labor) from the
| Americas/Africa/Asia for hundreds of years, and were able
| to leverage those resources into even more wealth, thus
| people in London have more money, thus taxi drivers make
| more money.
| simonh wrote:
| The problem with this is that WW2 wiped us out
| financially, and then post-war nationalisation wiped us
| out economically. ww1 had done a pretty good job on us as
| well, as did the depression between the wars.
|
| The value of the UK economy, since around 1930, has
| increased in PPP terms by about 90%. So there's a
| reasonable argument the value in 1930 was partly down to
| imperialism, although I think industrialisation was a
| much bigger factor. Still, the 90% of our economic value
| we accrued since then certainly didn't come from
| colonialism, so where did it come from?
|
| Look at Japan, yes it had an empire for a few decades
| before WW2, but that was mainly a result of
| industrialisation that had already happened, not a cause
| of it. Look at what's happened in China since it opened
| up and liberalised it's economy. At least they finally,
| finally figured this out.
| akomtu wrote:
| You mean they stole gold and cadmium? There are three
| uses of raw minerals: as jewelry, as something to
| exchange for goods, and as a component of high tech. For
| most of the Africa, minerals are jewelry at most and to
| get goods, you need an advanced nation to produce these
| goods for you. The phone you're using to post these
| comments has trace amounts of gold and cobalt, probably
| sourced in Africa, but the rest - the Internet in
| particular - wasnt created in Africa. And by using goods
| produced in Europe/America/China, you become complicit in
| this arrangement.
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| There are western countries that are wealthy despite
| little to no involvement in slave trade. For example
| Finland. Historical injustices happened between all
| peoples, and Africans were not a special case, but have
| been made into a special case because of race relations
| being very poor primarily in the US.
|
| Your bottom line might still be correct however, wealth
| is a measure of resources and resources are more or less
| distributed in a zero-sum game. Whenever someone won
| something, someone else lost something. The importance of
| the English Empire and their naval dominance isn't
| something to downplay, and something they indeed should
| "own", rather than dismiss.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >There are western countries that are wealthy despite
| little to no involvement in slave trade.
|
| You're actually the first to mention the slave trade in
| the chain -- the discussion was just about wealth. Latin
| America is still also poor when compared to the
| "developed countries" at the top of the economic food
| chain, and their people weren't exported as slaves.
|
| But the economic and political structures left by
| colonialism (both internal and international) meant that
| the people from these countries could never get out of
| that hole. Ultimately, people in Finland live much better
| than in Bolivia because there's a lot more money going
| around to build nice infrastructure, pay for teachers,
| quality goods, food, and so on, and where this money
| comes from can be traced all the way to colonialism.
|
| Nokia couldn't have existed in Bolivia, even though the
| raw materials to make phones can be found there. It lacks
| absolutely everything else that is required to maintain a
| company like that: infrastructure, education, political
| stability. And the reason why this country lacks all of
| these things, is this "historical injustice". It's not
| only that the wealth was stolen, but also the capacity to
| create more wealth was stolen, not just the cobalt, but
| also the hypothetical industry that could have generated
| wealth for the people of the country.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| How do you explain the existence of the Republic of
| Ireland then?
|
| It was definitely colonised, lost all it's forests for
| the navies of the Empire, and yet is actually pretty rich
| today (although we still have a lot of post-colonial
| syndrome, to be fair).
| rocknor wrote:
| It's in the EU? It has proximity to other rich countries?
| It wasn't left in nearly as bad state as ME/Africa/South
| Asia after decolonization? Want more? Just read a book or
| two.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it.
|
| As another African, your logic and morality are a
| disgrace.
| alienthrowaway wrote:
| As yet another African, the logic is pretty solid to me:
| the literal _Crown Jewels_ of the United Kingdom have
| gems plundered from the colonies, most notable is the
| biggest gem of the entire collection: the diamond known
| as "The Star of Africa".
| randomopining wrote:
| And how do the Crown Jewels give any level of wealth to
| the common person of the UK?
|
| Do the Crown Jewels produce billions of dollars daily
| that gets handed out to each citizen?
|
| Or was it actually the British creating ships, goods,
| establishing trading posts, furthering science and
| creating the newest machinery etc... that created their
| wealth? (And still creates it to this day)
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| And since we are on the topic of the South African 'Star
| of Africa', the astute investor should note that those
| muppets in South Africa are busy changing their
| constitution to allow the expropriation of private
| property from their own citizens (never mind evil
| foreigners) a) without compensation, and b) just for
| kicks - without recourse to the courts.
|
| So I ask you: would you be happy if your pension
| administrator sold up in Switzerland and USA invested
| your retirement in South African farms and factories?
|
| It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be
| someone else's fault.
|
| This is how we in Africa roll.
| notpachet wrote:
| Why? I think there's a definite argument to be made that
| a large part of the West's foundation of economic power
| is rooted in a history of colonialism and global
| oppression.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > a large part
|
| Yip, they sure stole a lot of stuff - as of course did
| the Mongols and the Aztecs who are now dirt poor. In
| addition, the Ventians and Swiss never colonised anyone
| and are/were dripping cash.
|
| But your comment is already a lot more nuanced than the
| OP's lazy cliched statements.
|
| A hell of a lot of their wealth also came from, amongst
| other things:
|
| - individual rights - e,g, Magna caerta - no theft
| involved
|
| - invention of limited liability corporations
|
| - cadastas and private property rights (no theft
| involved)
|
| - common law based on precedent (no theft involved)
|
| - investment in mechanised warfare (to keep what they
| made and stole, see Mongols above)
|
| - etc. etc.
|
| Once only has to compare Singapore (colonised by British
| and Japanese) with Ghana since independence in the 1960s.
| Singapore has no water, no resources, no power, is
| surrounded by hostile neighbours, but is absolutely
| loaded. Ghana is resource rich and dirt poor.
|
| You can decide for yourself who implemented the list
| above and who did not. You can also guess who is going to
| keep digging the hole they are in.
|
| But I guess in certain progressive circles, "they stole
| it" passes for a rigourous analysis. [ And they get the
| bonus of claiming the moral high ground of being the
| perpetual victim ].
|
| The OP should read Hernando de Soto instead.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| It has been noticed that resource rich countries in
| Africa actually do worse on average than those without.
| There's a lot of theories as to why: a common one is that
| it leads to brittle economies with all their eggs in one
| basket. If your country is rich in emeralds let's say, it
| doesn't take the entire countries population to mine
| enough to sell, so what does everyone else do when the
| whole economy is built around emerald mining? This leads
| to higher unemployment that's been seen in the mineral
| rich African states. It also means the economy is very
| sensitive to the market of the few goods they are rich
| in.
|
| In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world
| coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely
| ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These
| economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe
| wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have
| helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead
| they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the
| work of imperialism even today.
| randomopining wrote:
| Your great and nuanced answer is being downvoted. Shows
| how insane some of these bubbles are.
|
| They can't face the facts and want to hide their ego
| behind simple cliche statements that don't capture even
| 1% of the reality of history.
| simonh wrote:
| My wife is Chinese and she was taught in the 80s that the
| reason the UK is richer than China was that 100 earlier
| before we stole their best stuff.
|
| Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies
| were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is
| an argument that we're still benefiting from investments
| in infrastructure and social development back then.
|
| That's not why anyone in London today earns more for
| similar work than people in China or Africa though. You
| can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or
| Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the
| Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the
| London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down
| the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in
| the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is
| now 1/4.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Yeah, no.
|
| Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all
| increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour.
| Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used
| into doesn't help.
|
| From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback
| economically. Then you have to play catch-up
| economically. That's where the social dysfunction,
| literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in
| :)
|
| Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the
| deciding factor.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| All the countries doing well today either were
| historically imperial, ie., most of Europe, America,
| Japan, China, Russia, or were or are now connected to
| imperial countries as 'allies' like South Korea. Any
| remaining difference is explained by these imperial
| powers continuing to project power gained through
| violence by soft means: dominating culture and
| international trade. The calculus really is that simple.
|
| The case of Britain vs China isn't a particularly
| interesting one in this dynamic: it's just the dynamic
| great powers have always had within their group. The
| older state has more momentum but is sunsetting. Their
| wealth still comes from the exact same place, they just
| haven't quite equalized yet.
| simonh wrote:
| Japan did have an empire for a few decades in the early
| 1900s but there's no way any benefits from that persisted
| into the post-war period. Anyway their industrialisation
| was a cause of their imperial success, knocking over
| their neighbours that had failed to develop, not a result
| of it.
|
| I see you avoided mention of South Korea or Taiwan.
| Israel is another example. I'm actually pretty bullish on
| Iran if they could kick out the clerics, that country has
| massive potential.
|
| I think it's fair to characterise China as an imperial
| power, but how much of their current economic power
| actually comes from controlling say Tibet or Xinjiang?
| Those are marginal backwaters. They get a bit of forced
| labour and cheap vegetables. Maybe some minerals, but
| nothing they couldn't have bought fairly cheaply from
| Australia.
|
| Do you actually, genuinely think not having their
| peripheral controlled territories would have prevented
| China developing? Seriously?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| It definitely is the reason why. Part of what sets
| compensation in London is the cost of real estate, and
| those prices have their origins in the stolen wealth.
| simonh wrote:
| Property values have risen 30x in the last century in PPP
| terms. Colonialism might have had an impact on the
| starting value back then, but the other 97% of the
| current value was accumulated since then and came from
| somewhere else.
|
| If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th
| century colonialism you then need to explain the
| development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South
| Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global
| power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation
| 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything
| worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is
| free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco
| from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.
| rocknor wrote:
| Sure, the UK has certainly not been free riding from its
| profits. But the UK wouldn't be nearly as rich as it is
| now without the initial investment that came from
| plundering colonies. Innovation doesn't come for free,
| wealth is needed to finance it. People say the physical
| resources that were stolen don't matter, but that's
| absolutely not true, they matter a lot, even to this day
| (see how the media is talking about the Taliban sitting
| on trillions of dollars of minerals in Afghanistan).
|
| For example, if not for India, Britain would be
| absolutely destroyed after WW2 and would be far from
| their current position in the 21st century (assuming
| allies still somehow win, big if). India was Britain's
| cash cow and is the reason why it survived the war.
| simonh wrote:
| We did very well out of plundering colonies, yes, to our
| shame. I don't think it has any relevance to our economy
| now though. Compare us to Germany, Austria and Sweden.
| They never had significant empires. Do you think we would
| be massively poorer now compared to those countries if we
| hadn't had the Empire? Is the only reason we can compete
| with them now the fact that until the 1950s we had India?
|
| Germany put the lie to imperial supremacy in 1940 when
| they comprehensively but-kicked France and Britain. They
| proved that industrialisation is what mattered and by
| then imperial mercantilism was a distraction. We were
| only saved by the English channel, and yes thanks to
| India. The fact we had India undoubtedly saved us, but in
| a last ditch final card up our sleeve that kept us in the
| game kind of way. Not in a trump card that meant Germany
| never had a chance from the start kind of way.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > but the other 97% of the current value came from
| somewhere else.
|
| It the value literally came from somewhere else
| (geographically), funneled through the financial district
| and spread to the local economy. London is the bay area,
| but for bankers.
|
| The City of London has been laundering money for
| centuries. Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet
| oligarch money sloshing about, and the Square Mile
| doesn't ask too many questions about source of funds. Not
| too long ago, HSBC was slapped on the wrist for
| laundering cartel money.
| simonh wrote:
| "Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch
| money sloshing about".
|
| This keeps getting brought up but it's inconsequential at
| the scale of the total economy. As I pointed out
| elsewhere already on this thread, total Russian inward
| flows to this country accounts for about 1% of foreign
| investment. Now yes absolutely, foreign investment is a
| significant factor in the UK economy, about 20%. That
| makes a big difference, but Russian oligarch funds are
| not a significant part of that, they're just a
| politically and socially highly visible one that gets
| talked about a lot.
|
| The reason London is a centre for laundering money is
| that it's a massive mainstream finance centre. So yes,
| you're on the right track, but you're obsessing over a
| small forest footpath and missing the mainstream economic
| motorway right next to it.
|
| US FDI into the UK is more than 30x that from Russia.
| That from the EU is even bigger. This is the stuff that
| moves the needle.
| ativzzz wrote:
| > Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power
| in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80
| years ago
|
| Japan achieved this by looking to countries like England
| as an example and becoming an imperialist and colonizing
| parts of Southeast Asia - kicking out some of the
| European countries who held those colonies in the
| process.
|
| So yea they did the same thing to get wealthy - stealing
| resources.
| simonh wrote:
| Japanese expansionism was enabled by their
| industrialisation, not a cause of it. Yes they wanted
| access to resources, but it would have been dramatically
| cheaper to just buy them than incur the massive costs of
| conquest. They expanded because they thought that's what
| you do to succeed, but as the post war period has shown
| that's just not the case and never was. Anyway the war
| wiped them out, there's no way any benefits of their
| territorial expansionism before the war carried over into
| the post-war period.
|
| Look at Germany, they never had any significant empire,
| but they still brought rest of Europe including the
| imperial powers to their knees in 1940. That conflict
| showed that the imperial mercantilism of the previous
| centuries just wasn't relevant anymore.
|
| If imperialism was so great, there's no way Germany
| should have conceivably been able to roll over the
| imperial superpowers of France and Britain. The only
| thing that saved the UK was the English Channel. What
| mattered was industrialisation, along with economic and
| financial liberalisation. Every country that has done
| well in the last 100 years, except a few resource states
| like those in OPEC, has done so this way.
| pjc50 wrote:
| To be fair, quite a lot of the London wealth more
| recently has been stolen by Russians, or is the rightful
| property of murderous feudal monarchs in the middle east.
| We're an equal opportunity laundry.
| quotz wrote:
| If Europeans were to argue about theft and slavery
| between themselves we would have endless wars and
| constant World War scenarios. Europe, since Ancient Greek
| time, was at war with itself literally all the time. I
| believe not a single day has passed in the history of
| Europe were there wasnt war waged up until modern times.
| Slavery and war treasures were omnipresent. its just the
| name of the game.
| rocknor wrote:
| Bad argument, not even comparable. Colonization of
| Africa, Asia and Americas was orders of magnitude worse,
| and more importantly, incredibly recent. Which is why the
| lingering effects are still there.
| simonh wrote:
| Well of course there are lingering effects. Sure. They're
| just not having macroscopic economic impact today.
|
| If Europe was able to develop off the back of exploiting
| African resources, how come in the several generations
| since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of
| African resources? What about all the developed countries
| that never had any significant empire? There are plenty
| of them.
| rocknor wrote:
| > They're just not having macroscopic economic impact
| today.
|
| Nope. Sorry, you can't whitewash the facts so easily, us
| from the former colonies won't let you!
|
| https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism
|
| > If this is right, then a third of income inequality in
| the world today can be explained by the varying impact of
| European colonialism on different societies. A big deal.
|
| > how come in the several generations since, Africa
| hasn't been able to develop off the back of African
| resources
|
| Who says it hasn't? I invite you to look at graphs at
| https://gapminder.org/tools. You must avoid the natural
| binary thinking tendency, there is a whole spectrum
| between "developing" and "developed". Don't forget that
| factors like geographical/religious/linguistic etc affect
| speed of development. Why are black people in the US
| still not doing well, despite living in the richest
| country in the world? It is hard to get out of the
| vicious cycle of poverty.
|
| > What about all the developed countries that never had
| any significant empire
|
| Hmm, sneaky attempt at changing goal posts - I never said
| colonization was necessary for development!
| hippari wrote:
| I believe the comparison isn't adequate here since the
| British got massive advantages after WW2.
| simonh wrote:
| Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the
| Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were
| economically smothered under a nationalisation programme
| that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness. At least
| we got the NHS (no small thing) and a passable social
| security system out of it. The economy we have today is
| the one Maggie re-engineered in the 1980s. Even the Blair
| government had the good sense to not dare touch it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the
| Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were
| economically smothered under a nationalisation programme
| that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness.
|
| .. and on all those metrics China came out _much_ worse
| (the civil war, no marshall plan, proxy war with the US,
| communism), as well as _not_ having the massive advantage
| of having been an industrial power long before the war.
|
| This article dates the takeoff to 1978 (Deng), which
| seems reasonable:
| https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-
| economist/a...
|
| Perhaps the question should be "at what date in the
| future do we expect the cost of a taxi in London and one
| in Beijing to equalize"?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Beijing? Maybe 2050, maybe sooner. 200 km away in
| countryside outside Beijing vs 200 km away countryside
| outside London? Probably much longer.
| refurb wrote:
| People underestimate just how bad Britain was financially
| after WW2. The one thing that hit home for me was Britain
| still had a good ration system in place until the early
| 1950's (obviously fewer and few items as time went by).
| patrickk wrote:
| Britain subsequently benefited from transforming itself
| from an imperial power to a financial power. Good
| documentary on it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uM2cdhfAGA
|
| This is the reason that there's so many rich Russians
| knocking about e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comme
| nts/p83ljc/offshore_adv...
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| How can you look at the history of the British trade
| companies and not see how intertwined imperialism and
| what we today call 'finance' are?
| bserge wrote:
| They were a financial power long before. It kinda came
| with the territory, being a global empire.
|
| They did well to hold on to it, though.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| It is more profitable, not more valuable in any usual
| sense of the word.
|
| By the same token you could say that moving money for the
| mafia is more valuable than preventing violence and
| disease in poorer societies.
| simonh wrote:
| Profits are customers saying thank you for the value they
| are getting. So, London is a criminal enterprise that
| provides no real value, or is parasitic, or at least it's
| reasonable to compare it to one?
|
| I suspect the root issue here is what we consider to be
| value, or what activities are valuable and how value is
| generated. The common critique of capitalism is based
| (often unknowingly) on the Marxist theory of value which
| sees the vast majority of economic activities as
| parasitic of value, particularly financial activities,
| and if that's the issue here sure I'm quite willing to
| debate on that.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Moving money for ruthless violent people is profitable if
| done right, but value destroying for society.
|
| Value, whether measured in safety, shelter, nourishment,
| entertainment, ownership, infrastructure, sense of
| belonging or whatever you wish, is best built when you
| can trust the people around you and thus focus your
| efforts on what is valuable rather than trying to prevent
| being hurt or robbed.
|
| Note that above I didn't count money as valuable, since
| it isn't intrinsically.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > So, London is a criminal enterprise that provides no
| real value, or is parasitic, or at least it's reasonable
| to compare it to one?
|
| As a former Londoner, absolutely yes. London as a city is
| extremely parasitic, especially when it comes to time and
| standard of living. It does provide value when you're
| either so poor or find it so hard to get a job that
| working there provides you enough value, or you earn such
| "screw you" money that you can afford to live a
| comfortable life there. But for anyone outside of those
| groups, it's best avoided unless you're just visiting for
| the sights.
| bserge wrote:
| They had a ~200 year headstart and furthermore, they
| helped establish the current systems worldwide.
| burnished wrote:
| Uh, rampant theft? Colonialism? Why are so many other
| countries historical artifacts located in London, again?
| lozenge wrote:
| It might be something to do with the centuries of
| colonialism where the natural resources, labour and human
| lives of entire countries was stolen for the economic
| benefit of the United Kingdom.
| z2 wrote:
| For instance, having a century headstart in
| industrialization and fast economic growth? It actually
| returns to a longer scale version of having accumulated
| wealth through working a long time...
|
| Also taxi driving isn't exactly the most efficient of
| markets to compare value. London taxi drivers for example
| have a unique barrier to entry to become a taxi driver
| via an onerous road memorization test ("The Knowledge"),
| and that has nothing to do with the general British
| economy "doing something right."
| akomtu wrote:
| What headstart? Africa existed when vikings were roaming
| the European waters.
| kansface wrote:
| The industrial revolution started in Britain.
| akomtu wrote:
| Why didn't Africa start it a century before? Otherwise it
| sounds like "industrial revolution" was like a deity that
| chose to descend onto Brits.
| [deleted]
| lozenge wrote:
| Careful now - why does a cosmetic surgeon in London s
| exclusive Harley Street earn PS1,000,000 while a doctor
| restoring sight and correcting cleft palate and fistula in
| Africa earns 5% as much? Do you think their work is worth
| less?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| People do spend millions of dollars to make themselves feel
| better, if they have the capability. That shouldn't be
| surprising in the modern world.
|
| Assuming it's not illegal money and no coercion was
| involved, then by definition the customers must have
| believed that the cosmetic operations were worth it, at
| least at the point of purchase. Since cosmetic surgery is
| much less burdened by regulation, externalities, and so on,
| I would say the prices charged are reasonably close to the
| market clearing price.
|
| The surgeons in Africa may or may not be subject to greater
| distortions depending on the local market.
|
| Though I imagine cosmetic surgeons specifically in Africa
| are paid about the same relative to their skill level,
| staffing level, and facilities?
| lozenge wrote:
| I'm not surprised, just amazed people would say it's
| "(more) valuable" and the UK must be "doing something
| right" without a second thought as to whether they're
| confusing financial value with moral value, or whether
| the transfer of money really represents a transfer of
| value.
|
| Spare me the Econ 101, Harley Street is a status symbol,
| the doctors there are not more highly paid because
| they're objectively safer or more skilled.
|
| I guess we could call Africa's history of conflict,
| exploitation and colonialism, and usurious loans from the
| World Bank to leaders who aren't interested in their
| citizens' welfare, a distortion of the local market.
| Droobfest wrote:
| It's a matter of risk that I'm paying for to avoid, not
| absolute quality. I would not wager my life on a random
| doctor in Africa even while 90% of doctors there might be
| more skilled than in London. I'm paying to eliminate the
| risk of encountering the worst 10%. In that light, yes I
| would personally expect the doctors in London to be able
| to avoid the worst outcomes better on average. Whether
| that's warranted is another discussion.
|
| This goes for loads of stuff. I would wager a $30 meal to
| be fresher than a $5 meal on average. I'm not saying
| there aren't any $5 meals that are fresher than some $30
| meals, but just that the $30 has a lot lower chance to
| make me sick.
| burnished wrote:
| I think you're confusing a sometimes reasonable heuristic
| (you can get what you pay for), with some kind of
| underlying or real value.
| simonh wrote:
| Of course there are different forms of value that are not
| fungible. Moral or human value as independent of financial
| value.
|
| The point I'm making is that the PS1m came from somewhere.
| Now yes sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation
| or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the
| scale of say the UK economy. We're talking about the
| economy in general and what makes on economy more valuable
| than another one in economic terms.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or
| whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale
| of say the UK economy
|
| A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a
| while the money laundering starts to add up:
| https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-
| money-l...
|
| The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness
| and predictability, achieved by a comparatively
| incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest
| in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't
| UK crime.
|
| Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are
| _not_ above the state and can get clobbered when they
| become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma.
|
| (A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the
| relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does
| that say about the regime there?)
| simonh wrote:
| Stuff like that sucks, absolutely, but again it's not a
| huge factor to the UK economically. That money passed
| through, it didn't land in the UK. The impact on us
| economically was probably in the 10s of millions. Total
| Russian investment into the UK is only about 1% of all
| foreign investment, which itself is 20% of GDP. So 0.2%
| of our economy is linked to Russia at all.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s
| of millions
|
| That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea
| player. There's probably been more than PS10m of
| donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try
| again with a more realistic figure.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-
| donors...
| simonh wrote:
| It depends where the money landed, that's where the big
| fees would be made, but just shuffling it around, I'd be
| very surprised if it was more than that.
|
| Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F
| of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like.
| Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely
| consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or
| Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern
| economy functions.
|
| The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge
| cases, because they are things you can get enraged about
| and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will
| be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really
| works.
| [deleted]
| rocknor wrote:
| > They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work
| they are doing is worth 4x as much
|
| A London taxi driver is not paid more because his work is
| somehow more valuable than a Beijing taxi driver's, it's just
| because everything in London is expensive. That's just basic
| economics. Read an economics book.
|
| How did everything in London get so expensive? Read a history
| book about the last few centuries.
|
| Seems like you're just some typical western chauvinist with
| no real argument.
| [deleted]
| logicchains wrote:
| >What i did not understand back then is the absolute
| replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long
| and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.
|
| That's rapidly changing as the birthrate is falling and the
| population is ageing.
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Is the birthrate still falling now that the "one child"
| policy is no more?
| harryh wrote:
| History has shown us that as societies get richer / more
| productive people work less. Here is a graph of this in the US:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/US...
|
| This makes sense. As people get richer, they use some of their
| wealth to "purchase" more leisure time. There is no reason to
| think this won't happen in China, just like it has happened in
| other places.
|
| I think your fear is unfounded.
| throwaway769879 wrote:
| Who's to say the causation behind this correlation doesn't go
| the other way? Some people take more free time, think of more
| efficient ways of working, and get richer. That in turn
| encourages others to emulate them.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I'm skeptical that decline is caused by increasing wealth
| rather than by demographic changes like women entering the
| workforce and a larger portion of the population being
| retirement-aged.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > History has shown us that as societies get richer / more
| productive people work less.
|
| For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich
| enslave more people and consolidate power, and then
| ultimately try to be worshiped as gods until the masses push
| back enough, and then become content with simply having
| absolute earthly power.
|
| Maybe this trend is over, but given the amount of effort into
| putting out "God Emperor" memes in the US, my guess is that
| some people are at least willing to still try at it.
|
| At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at
| 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.
| harryh wrote:
| _For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich
| enslave more people and consolidate power_
|
| This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world
| in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large
| increases in personal freedoms as well.
|
| _At any rate, I 'm not sure a graph from the US starting
| at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends._
|
| The trend is consistent with other datasets:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
| flerchin wrote:
| I've got my finger on the pulse of spicy memes, and I've
| never seen a God Emperor one. Is this some kind of Trumpist
| thing?
| [deleted]
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Honestly, I kind of feel the same way. I'm an American living
| in Europe and it's frustrating for me at times dealing with
| people who don't want to work.
|
| I don't think the Chinese model of work until you drop dead is
| good but maybe something in the middle?
| tomp wrote:
| Just because you _want_ to and have the resources to replace
| anyone anytime, doesn 't mean you can _actually_ do that.
|
| In complex codebases (i.e. pretty much anything except "we're
| managing a Shopify store" (and probably even then)) you're
| lucky to be able to onboard someone in a few _months_ , forget
| about _days_!
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