After working for that company for awhile... The entire goal is to look busy, so people create work and don't accomplish a whole lot. 10-12 hour days are expected whether or not you have work to do, or if your work efficiently. The Chinese are also very suspicious of anyone that is not Chinese, and you're very much considered an outsider and will be informed on a need to know basis if that's the case. They're wildly successful inside China, but that's likely more do to government protected Monopoly than actually having a product that works. The best part of working there is when I pointed out builds with failing tests were making it to production, and the architect in charge told me that they can still release, it just decreases the 'quality score'.
"If you come into Starbucks in the morning and you are told you can't buy coffee because their staff hasn't arrived, will you accept that? Even the Europeans won't accept tardiness."<p>It's often done that someone appeals to examples from other cultures that might not be entirely accurate. Being a bit late, particularly if you live in a city with bad traffic, is absolutely accepted. Also, who in the UK hasn't heard the "we don't have train drivers" excuse?<p>The thing to think about is why there's demand for this sort of corporate leash. I guess there's a lot of bosses who distrust their employees. A friend of mine works for a firm from home one or two days a week, and it turns out they check whether your mouse is moving.<p>I run a tech team that's 100% work from home. I think if I insisted on GPS and face recognition it would quickly get miserable for everyone.<p>There's something I call the "ghost rower" effect. If you've ever rowed a boat (think Oxford and Cambridge) it's possible to move the oar in such a way that you look like you're rowing, but you are not really contributing to the boat moving faster. It works because someone on the shore can only check that you're sliding back and forth, and your oar is in the water.<p>Most modern desk jobs allow the same. You can show up, you can have Excel open, you can attend meetings. All without doing anything useful.<p>If you want more ghost rowers, install DingChat.
<i>On top of this original feature, the company has added a wide range of functions that include automatic expense claims, a clock-in system to monitor the whereabouts of employees, as well as a "daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks.<p>As DingTalk has grown, many Chinese office workers have vented their frustrations online about the service, saying it is inhumane and destroys trust.</i><p>"Inhumane and destroys trust" doesn't sound too far off the mark to me. But it's not so <i>very</i> different from working in an open office with daily standups, and that's become pretty well-accepted in technical fields over the last few years. I hope we see some changes -- more trust and less demand for pervasive visibility -- but it's hard to be terribly optimistic on this point right now.
My office uses it in China. We use some of the features like the clock-in and the one to file expenses. My company fines you if you clock-in late on the app, but won't hesitate to use the "ding" feature to send you SMS/phone calls after 9PM that records the time seen/confirmed.<p>Overall it's more a company/cultural issue, but the app certainly makes it easier to pressure employees to always be on.
Man the setup in that first photo looks terrible office wise.<p>>Instead, Wu's team sought another niche, tackling a common managerial complaint in China: workers who fail to reply to messages and later feign ignorance.<p>So they built a messaging platform to hassle people... about other messages?<p>That seems brutal.
>Like WhatsApp, DingTalk lets senders see if recipients have read messages, but it also has a "ding" feature that can bombard recipients with repeat notifications, text messages and phone-call reminders.<p>“Sorry boss, you’re breaking up. “<p><i>hangs up phone and turn on airplane mode</i><p>Either that or “accidentally” leave your phone on silent after a meeting.
Considering where it's from, I wonder to what degree all of the messages are funneled in plaintext through a centralized censorship engine. What happens if you start pasting excerpts of the wikipedia article for Tiennamen square to your coworkers?
[...]"daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks [...] Despite the grumbling, Wu believes the service will translate across borders and cultures<p>He is right, managers will love this - it's just daily standup (everyone loves it, so agile!) on steroids. I'm pretty sure that it will be added to "western" tools within months.
So let me get this straight, a new 'free' version of Slack that sends all your companies internal communications straight to Chinese government servers. Now they don't even have to hack us, we're giving it to them voluntarily.
I feel grateful for my old age and limited future participation in the workforce when I read these stories. Anyone that thinks North American companies will have ethical problems with these technologies just isn't being honest.
BusinessInsider now redirects Tanzanian users to <a href="http://pulselive.co.tz" rel="nofollow">http://pulselive.co.tz</a> which doesnt resolve. This website is such garbage.