996 working hour system
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Also, I think sleeping at work, taking a nap while waiting for something to run, or waiting on another team are encouraged. Excuse the link drop, but if you want to see some pictures of tents set up for sleeping scroll down to the bottom here:
https://corecursive.com/software-world-tour-with-son-luong-n...
To me, from Son's experience, some of it sounds like giant tech campuses in NA, but with competitiveness and cutthroat performance reviews taken to it's logical extreme.
I'd love to hear your stories if you've worked at ByteDance, Alibaba, or any other similar company. What was it like? What do we get wrong from the outside?
Also your experiences could be a fit for my podcast. Hit me up (see profile).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39457728 ("HN: 4-day week made permanent for 89% UK firms who took part in Worlds biggest trial")
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/14/countries-that-are-embracing... ("4 countries that are embracing—or experimenting with—the 4-day workweek")
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/companies-around-the-wo... ("Companies around the world adopt four-day work week pilot programs to meet growing demand from Gen-Z and millennial employees")
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... ("Schools across the U.S. are trying a 4-day week. Why? To retain teachers") (My note: ~1000 US school districts have moved to a four day week, as they are unable to retain teachers otherwise)
https://www.police1.com/colo-pd-extends-32-hour-work-week-pr... ("Colorado police dept extends 32-hour work week program after successful start")
In North America there were and are a number of companies that operate or operated (pre-layoffs etc, ZIRP free money RIP) on a 4 day work week. You can search "4 day companies" and you'll find a list. Some companies still operate on a 4 day week, so it wasn't necessarily a ZIRP-era only thing.
US congress or someone in government proposed a 32 hour work week -- unlikely to be passed of course or get any traction any time soon.
But in general, there's growing mainstream sentiment towards trying and exploring shorter work weeks.
If AI/AI-enabled-capitalists doesn't enslave us, those grandiose promised AI productivity gains may push sentiment further in that direction.
So "moving towards" is a fair description.
Firstly all tech companies are doing layoffs, meaning less jobs available -> harder to get jobs -> people are willing to work more/get payed less.
Both US and EU are aggressively pulling in muslim and african immigrants. Again creating pressures to find jobs. This time mainly in blue collar work.
This and cost of living ballooning I don't see how we are going toward 4day anything.
Its the opposite, the employers' position is strengthening and they will be squeezing the employees.
https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2024/kpmg-2024-ceo-outlook-p...
Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South-East Asia, South/Central America and Africa all work much shorter hours than East Asian nations.
The long hours of Japanese work culture are true, but simultaneously, there's a lot of wasted time. Japan evens praises sleeping at the office, when you're clearly getting no work done.
This might be limited to white-collar office workers; no idea about people on the factory floor.
China hasn't really needed to put too much downward pressure on salaries.
If they are not getting the same throughput why would they support this change?
I can be productive for 12-15 hours a day when the conditions are just right, but usually they aren't and after a few hours I need to switch to something less productive than actual coding.
Do employers really see any measurable improvement in volume (let alone quality) of output after 30 hours a week?
I would argue that 90% of employers cannot effectively measure productivity. I have worked in call centers where metrics are tracked - which of course I learned to game - allowing me to work the same hours while making 50% above my peers based upon bonuses.
Knowledge workers are a different type of job with somewhere >50% being fake jobs that exist only because companies have capital and managers and head count means success.
You've got a guy sitting at his desk at 8:55PM on a Saturday night. Impressive. We all know he hasn't been doing anything worthwhile since some time back on Thursday, and you've been wasting electricity on him afterward.
Because in corpo you are always easily replaceable.
So you don't get the refresh, the first 1-2 companies which employs you get the most benefit because you are not drained yet, but companies later in the line got a used battery almost completely drained -- and that's why China also has the 35 yrs old rule.
Did it arise out of some data-driven research, or is it mostly just the result of cargo-culting, where one successful company had such hours/schedule, and the other companies just followed suit?
But it's bad for the employee, and bad for the companies down in the line because the employees would already been drained. That's why there is an implicit or explicit 35-yrs old deadline in the industry.
The phrase I associate with and cringe at is "all hands on deck". Oh, you didn't know that project A's deployment will wipe out project B's testing in the lower environment? All hands on deck. Oh, you didn't realize your novel idea of deploying 40000 processes to update the databases will result in a denial of service attack on our own servers? All hands on deck. Oh, you didn't get knowledge transfer from the last bunch of contractors who were let go and now you can't figure out how they deployed A into abstraction layer B which has a dependency on C and no documentation exists? All hands on deck.
There's no organised labor in China; all unions are banned, except of course for the communist party.
Isn't that what the Communist Party is supposed to be?
Capital interests have been working hard to erode these over the last 80 years with notable success, but the importance of legislative victories cannot be understated. Early 20th century labor relations were egregious all around the world, and they did not improve because capitalists developed a conscience. Many places went straight socialist. We saw how that went. In America, we didn't need socialism because we had Roosevelts. This worked out better for all involved.
We could probably use another Roosevelt.
The say goodby to sanity, family, and hobbies.
I suspect the greedy business executives in the west insisting upon a race to the bottom on cost etc. have more to do with it.
It would be pretty funny to see Capitalist America twist Communist China's arm into un-fucking their labor relations. The irony would be palpable. Alas, this is going to be one hell of a tough sell in Capitalist America precisely because we are Capitalist.
All labor laws can be bypassed by importing; it's a natural economic consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization . Only restrictions on trade can slow the equalisation of wages across two countries.
If you want the macroeconomics assessed in detail and the usual apologetics evaluated against evidence, I refer you to "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
Do they?
I don't think this is true? And the trend seems to be down. Looking around me, my car, phone, home appliances, and most of my furniture were not made in China. My Macbook probably was, but I just read that Apple is moving some production to other countries (like Vietnam).
A lot of random things I own like hand tools were made in China, but they tend to be relatively low-technology products commonly manufactured in many places.
I could be an outlier; certainly there are many electronics items (screens, gaming devices, phones, etc) made in China. But it's not obvious that they're "beating" the competition. Would love to see meaningful statistics.