996, GitHub, and China's digital workers rights awakening
chanind.github.io
chanind.github.io
This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
[1] https://twitter.com/copiesofcopies/status/111403968059961344...
Edit: if this is a glitch from trying to combat bots Tweeting the URL, that just means you can trigger automatic censorship of any URL with a bot farm.
Having said that, if they were intentionally trying to block this then using their anti-spam mechanisms would be an obvious way of doing so, so I think it's definitely a possibility that this is some accidental side-effect of something else rather than a simple intentional block.
- It works fine from web interface, problem is specific to Android - The problem doesn't show up for "123.icu" so it seems specific to 996.icu
To block Github 966 pages specifically means the domestic browsers are pre-filtering URL requests before they're made. And that means these domestic browsers are pre-filtering all URL requests, HTTPS or not, VPN or not.
Perhaps all forms on pages loaded by these browsers are also being eavesdropped.
Safe to say any secure experience under these browsers is compromised.
I believe that proxy does have other more benevolent uses than censorship, which is why people use those browsers in the first place.
Of course I imagine there would be license problems.
CNPM is now better known as https://npm.taobao.org/
What's there to prevent private organizations censorships?
It was fairly easy to bypass; I did it with a SSH-tunnel other people do it with VPN. It seem like a completely normal thing (amongst Chinese and certainly expats) to have a VPN.
I am pretty sure since this 996-protest movement concerns tech workers that it will spread with no problem.
Also it will probably get resolved in some manner since working 996 obviously is beyond peak productivity.
[0] http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2019-04/11/nw.D110000re... (Chinese)
In a healthy software "marketplace", there would be plenty of browser competition and such blocking would be totally ineffective. It wouldn't matter if companies had the power to censor the internet or not because people could just switch.
for wechat, it open link in its own broswer too.
I could change phone and delete wechat. but do it cost too much.
There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.
There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.
I think the privatization of surveillance is much scarier than the privatization of censorship. To escape the latter, I can just visit my local library, whereas the former is growing at such alarming rates that it might just make that impossible very soon. The chilling effects are real.
Imagine if every single law on the books is enforced 100% of the time. No leeway, no margin for discretion.
You underestimate the ability of cultures to self-censor and convince free-thinkers to leave.
Plenty of people in North Korea are afraid to speak out, for fear their neighbors will rat them out. Same goes for speaking against royalty in public in Thailand.
That said, I do think the First Amendment was born out of practicality. Censoring speech, even in the internet age, is not a good growth strategy when your competitors censor less. People will do their best to get to the most free place.
Most "live free or die" types wouldn't tell someone struggling against government repression, "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave your country?" Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states. It may seem histrionic to complain about much free-market censorship now, but the vise will tighten as firms consolidate and anything threatening to the bottom line will become increasingly difficult to disseminate to a wider population.
> Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states.
Yup -- and a quick reminder (for the people in the back) that Google unilaterally controls what more than 3 billion people find when they search for information. This is a larger impact than any government in the history of humanity -- and unlike any other government in the history of humanity, Google has no constitution or laws which require it to be accountable to its citizens (or users, in this case).
You might argue that some regimes like China or the USSR only had theoretical protections for their citizens (with abuses by the government being commonplace and unpunished), but Google has no such protections to even pretend to follow. And like most independent nation-states, Google feels no pressure to obey other nations' laws if it's inconvenient for them.
They probably meant liberalism. 'Liberalism' has multiple meanings. To my knowledge, the US is unique in equating 'liberal' with 'the left'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_State...
Of course, I would prefer an amendment to guarantee this, but it's less tenuous than other precedents.
Securing a private channel is a very different problem altogether.
Unfortunately this would also mean spreading the sort of crap as debunked on Snopes.
Usually, if the official opinion is negative about this campaign it will never show on any propaganda.
I cannot find the original newspaper online, but there are several mentions from some websites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
https://qz.com/1589309/996-icu-github-hosts-chinese-tech-wor...
Let’s get to the root cause.
- An article from VC https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+moritz+ft+996&ie=UTF-8&... (first result; paywalled, but okay to read via google search results)
- A 996 podcast from VC https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/996-podcast-by-ggv-capi...
Edited: update the FT article url
It's as sickening as one might expect. One more thing to think about the next time the VC crowd decides to remind us of the supposed evils of unionization and labor movements.
People seems don't to remember Github was blocked several times in China before. Each time the developers united to file complaints to central government to get it unlocked.
Still today all gist.github.com is blocked. http is blocked. God know when will github be totally blocked.
Maybe you were confusing these two for a different page that still exists?
Overworked employees a probably cheeper per hour too.
You/we do not have problems of the same scale/severity, but they are still the same problems.
This is the argument that things are good in one place because they're slightly better off than another place where things are worse. The status quo of working hours in the US are far from ideal.
Just be sure to double check their comments and documentation to be sure it's readable. My coworkers have always appreciated when I've helped make their stuff more readable.
- Traversing the Great Firewall is slow and unreliable. Having team members on either side of it wouldn't be great for collaboration.
- I seem to remember reading about somebody complaining that sending money to Chinese citizens from abroad can be very difficult. I don't recall the details though.
Huawei is #1, with hours even worse, labeled as "9106". Alibaba is #2. Xiaomi is also there.
Many Chinese tech companies even have time cards for salaried employees to make sure they are in the office enough, as well as cheer leaders and such to keep them motivated past dinner time.
I have done 996 for a while in china, and it wrecks your social life, as now all of a sudden you have no free evenings and only one day in the weekend to balance fun stuff with weekly chores. Meeting friends outside of work is nearly impossible. Also, when near a release, expect to 'give your best' for the company and work on sunday as well.
You do however get 2-hour lunch breaks (i.e. nap time for your chinese colleagues), and about half a hour for dinner which you can also get at or near work.
My life is not a way to transform calories into money for someone else, nobody's should be - stand up for your rights.
I worked seven days a week for two months. We were paid double salaries and some perks, but no amount of money would have convinced us to keep that schedule longer. It was absolutely crazy.
This is selective enforcement of law.
Triple hourly pro-rata pay is only for working over official statutory holidays, otherwise overtime pay is 1.5 pro-rata hourly rate for working days and double hourly rate for 'rest days' (this would include Saturday or Sunday for a Monday-Friday employment contract).
Personally my opinion is that coding is not like the assembly line where more hours mean more things that's produced, but more lines of code can mean absolutely nothing (sometimes can even be a negative). However, looking at the recent progress in China, I am wondering what percentage of that is attributed to the 996 working culture, or is it to do with something else?
It is also traditional in Chinese work culture to have a nap after lunch, which provides a break and helps with staying later. Dinner is also usually early (6pm) so 9am-9pm days mean a lunch break and a dinner break.
Working 6 days a week has been quite standard in Asia. I remember Korea moved to 2-day weekends only a few years ago, and it's hard to change work culture.
It's probably also compounded by the fact that in China there is no day off for shops, restaurants, banks, etc. Everything is open 7 days a week by default, which is great as a consumer but probably means pressure on staff.
Now my question is, is the assumption of productive hour ratio real or does it start high and end low? And if my assumption of the flat productive ratio is true, then does it actually yield any good results?
That's not the case. Hourly productivity decreases at some point.
The law of diminishing returns is at play here. Working longer hours leads to higher overall output up to a point as the marginal increase diminishes.
Then, at some point you are too tired and produces bad software that will cost to fix.
If your employer pays you a flat rate then it is profitable to make you work long hours up to the point when you start screwing up. If they pay you by the hour or if they pay you overtime, rationally they shouldn't push you beyond the point where your hourly output is too low to justify your pay.
A quick Googling for "productivity vs hours worked" led me to this:
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/10/hours-worked-an...
But what we are talking about here specifically is the software development industry, where quantity does not always mean quality. So herein lies the problem that potentially a lot of our beliefs that "more hours worked means diminished return" could just be based on bad data analysis.
996 isn't a matter of productivity (other than perhaps indicating exceptionally poor productivity). Productivity is closer related to how much output you generate in a given unit of time.
Brace yourself Chinese, the Germans are smashing you when it comes to productivity with their $48,000 GDP per capita and 30 hours per week of work.
A balanced mixture of high value output and quality of life (fewer hours worked) is the ideal. If China had an epic GDP per capita, it'd be worth considering the merits of how they're doing things. As it is now, they're still losing horribly. The premise properly should be that 996 dies - it becomes an absurdity, a relic of development - as they push up the economic ladder. If they can't escape the middle income trap, that may never happen.
Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?
If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a F500 without too much difficulty. Normal 9-6, 5 day work week, public holidays plus 10-15 days discretionary holiday per year, stability over fast-pace, middle class income (8,000 Yuan per month for 0-2 years experience, 20,000 per month in a Tier-2 city for 5 years experience; for reference rent for a newish 2 bedroom apartment within 20 minutes walk to the office would be about 3000 Yuan per month).
The BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) pay more, 2x or 3x, and are the glamorous places for fresh grads to work. Good luck getting in though.
Want-to-be BATs are probably the worst employers. They lack the pay and prestige of BATs, lack the stability and sane working culture of F500s, and tend to have terrible management that lack conviction and realistic goals. Without a BAT or F500 early in one's career, it's hard to break away from want-to-be-BATs.
I know nothing about Games development, so no comment there.
There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic. Working in a Tier-1 city will mean rents are way higher, purchase of property probably unattainable, and wages probably less than double those mentioned above.
I hope that answers part of your questions.
And that when a trained factory worker salary is about to break 15000...
It's there a lot of collaboration with Japan in Chinese IT? NEC?
Is product ownership or management seriously considered a better job in China? At almost all places I worked at in EU middle management/product ownership is considered a less desirable position.
And in this case, only a handle of companies in China offer work-life balance, most of which are owned by foreign capital (e.g. Google, Microsoft and IBM). They are very hard to get in, even harder than their US counterparts, because of the much smaller headcount and much larger pool of candidates.
Good. Oppression should make a country less succesfull.
Maybe in absolute terms but their per-hour income is lower. They're working 1.8 times longer than a 40 hour week but not earning 1.8 times as much as they would when working in e.g. Europe.
mind-boggling.
I guess it means you owe loyalty to whatever authority you get: father, teacher, employer, emperor. Respect them, or they will crush you.
To keep the name, they had to attach it to a different interpretation.
when it comes to respecting the authority,
「王侯將相,寧有種乎!」is a pretty common value to Chinese people. can be partially translated as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman？--John Ball".
If that is the common value to Chinese people, It's been too long since the last revolution.
Could you take another stab at translating or explaining that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazexiang_uprising
The people who was drafted for army was moving to the designated place. But due to the flooding, it is obvious they can't reach the place by the deadline. The penalty to miss the deadline is, by any means, death.
By facing the certain and unfair death penalty ahead of them, they decided the uprising. Saying.
王侯將相寧有種乎, "The king, loads, generals or ministers, Is there the seed for them?(no it isn't)"
In the end, they(the leaders, 陳勝 and 呉広) couldn't complete the the revolution. But the uprising movements continues and 秦 era was ended soon after.
> mind-boggling.
The CCP feels threatened by any kind of idependent political organization that's not the CCP or directly under its thumb. This includes students that actually take Marxism seriously:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/world/asia/china-maoists-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/asia/china-student-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/world/asia/chinese-univer...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/world/asia/china-marxist-...
The party is now busy purging CYL. The few CPC candidates that came through that route to CPC were driven out of politics, down to village mayor levels in the middle of nowheres. 刘剑 kicked from a post in a far away Hami, 余远辉 in Nanning
19th CPC really has close to no people younger than fifty, and is the oldest CPC by average age after 12th or 13th CPC.
However workers’ rights movements and unions get reported by Chinese media are extremely uncommon.
I'd love to be proved wrong, but I doubt it.
- Chairman Mao Zedong