I'm beginning to suspect that the 996 schedule (and its equivalents in other cultures) aren't actually about productivity; they're about devotion. Devotion isn't something a CEO can explicitly ask for, but a 996 schedule is, so that becomes the expectation even if it actually has a neutral-to-negative impact on productivity.<p>Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were not his "brothers".<p>The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line... and I have no idea why. I don't buy the explanation that all of this is just "dumb". Something is up with this.
It’s interesting to compare the Bloomberg article with this one from the South China Morning Post, titled “Alibaba founder Jack Ma says companies forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’”. Two articles reporting on the same statements and drawing completely different conclusions. It’s getting harder to find the truth.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-says-companies-forcing-staff-work" rel="nofollow">https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...</a>
I find 12 hours a day to be too much. And 6 days a week is throwing the mental health of a person off a cliff.<p>I’ve frequently found, personally and observing others, that productivity drops after 6h of continuous work especially if it forces you to think a lot (which is pretty much always in software - you still need to apply your brain to connect the plumbing between APIs)<p>Anything after 6h should either be menial work, cleanup or something else. I’ve found it is usually better to postpone any intense work to the next day. As a solo founder who tried to keep up 12h+ days, I’ve had the same amount of productivity by shutting down my day after 7h. You usually end up stretching things into hours for what would take a couple of minutes with a fresh brain.
I'm actually kind of afraid to comment because I'm generally afraid of the Chinese government and I have a feeling they like Jack Ma and also like wage slavery just as much as him. Plus even if there is no government involved Jack Ma has quite a lot of power because of his money.<p>But I feel this is a moral issue. The thing is, the system of employment is the evolution of plain old fashioned slavery. That is where Ma is coming from. He believes that he owns those people. Class is still a very strong part of global society.<p>Just look at the etymology of the word 'employ'. It means using something. Earlier it came from<p>late 14c., implien, emplien "to enfold, enwrap, entangle"<p>The thing that is really tough about this is that it's a subtle form of violence as the vast majority of people (even programmers) are in fact dependant upon keeping their jobs.<p>So in fact the forced overtime is forced labor and is a human rights issue.<p>I think it's going to get worse rather than better because AI, robotics and automation in general are gradually picking up steam.<p>Maybe we can be optimistic though and imagine a time where using people ("employing" them) is recognized as unethical. Maybe we will have that luxury someday if we have machines that are smart and dextrous enough to replace human workers. That probably won't end class structures on it's own though.
Jack Ma's comment on this matter is full of logical fallacy. Forcing employees to stick to the 996 schedule with no overtime pay is not equivalent to someone finding their own passion and work restless towards their own goal. He somehow mixed up these two completely different things while avoided talking about the lack of overtime pay or even basic respect for employees in many corporations.<p>Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.<p>I understand sometimes people might need to work a bit overtime to get things done or have on-call duties. We all do, but working 12 hours a day/6 days a week is not sustainable whatsoever. Of all these Chinese entrepreneurs, none of them mentioned even the slightest of their total rewards systems, which makes me think they are avoiding this topic on purpose and all their comments are attempts to put out fire while keeping the status quo, sneaky indeed.<p>To be honest, if someone I manage constantly works crazy hours with no rest for a long period of time, voluntarily or not, I won't even let him/her push any piece of code to production.<p>Fried brains == Disaster<p>Edit: had a discussion with some of my friends from China on this. One of the common arguments is "why are developers whining about work conditions while tons of other occupations such as factory/delivery workers and nurses work long hours with lower pay?"<p>First of all, other occupations having bad work condition does not justify the legitimacy of 996. This is yet another common logical fallacy when it comes to arguments like this. Also, how can people assume workers of other occupations are fine with endless long hours? Did anyone consider the possibility that they never had a systematic way to express their dissatisfaction and just tried going along with it for as long as possible before they were burnt out and got replaced?
Can someone explain to me how you can be productive for 12 hours on a single day?<p>When I do concentrated programming work, I can maybe do 4 hours, at best 6 hours. It seems I can stretch it when doing more mundane work when I know what needs to be done. But this time is seriously reduced when I have to think about architecture or more complex stuff.<p>The literature also point into this direction, where writers and serious thinkers do these kind of few hours (also see Cal Newport on deep work).<p>I know John Carmack said you can be more productive when you can do more easy tasks to fill up the day, but it ends somewhere.<p>I have a master degree in computer science, and during the exams, my head was full at 20:00. Nothing could get in after that. I know people who could study until 3 in the morning. But you know what, after questioning them, they didn't do shit in the morning.<p>At work, I always had great reviews and my employers loved me (I'm almost 40 now). I always felt I was slacking off because I worked too little. But then I understood, if I work so little and get great reviews, what are those other guys doing?<p>So 12 hours a day? You are just lying to yourself. Those people are slacking off like crazy, and probably can't get anything done during the day. And at the end of the day, they are angry at themselves that they didn't do shit and wasted most of those 12 hours slacking off.<p>But I am sincerely asking to prove me wrong. Is it possible to work 12 productive hours a day? I was always searching for this how some people claim to be able to pull this off. But after investigation, they never really were able to do this.
When people with equity asks regular employees with salaries to work their ass off unsustainably it is just very insensitive to the inherent difference between them.<p>If owners and top executives were doing an amazing job directing the company then front line employees would not even have to work that hard because the company already has a strategic advantage.
I'll work those hours, no problem. You will, however, have to make it worth my while.<p>Oh, what's that? You want to pay me the same total compensation as any other company, but make me spend twice as many hours working?<p>No thank you. I'll seek employment elsewhere.
Those who can stick with a 996 are either stupid or desperate (I assume mostly desperate with enough stupid sprinkled in to keep this going). This idea of working your life away for a piece of shit like Ma needs to die. The culture in such places is absolutely toxic and frankly disgusting, not to mention detrimental to the final product. It's amazing to me that this is the norm in much of Asia and the US. I don't know what exactly is wrong with cultures who share this stupid idea, but it's something very serious. The desperation that drives people to almost kill themselves for work is incredible. It seems to be a form of self enslavement. The alternatives must be truly horrific for people to do this to themselves. They definitely are in the US and I imagine they are worse in China. I think people probably know this and don't need assholes like Ma to not only demand this enslavement of themselves, but also to demand that they enjoy their own enslavement and torture. What a scumbag.
'“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.' says a billionaire...<p>That's a pretty wild assumption, especially coming from a billionaire, but I guess he needs to justify treating his employees like crap to himself somehow.
I assert that there are a great numbers of CEOs who would absolutely love their employees to be working 996 without overtime pay, only most of them won't admit it directly. We cannot expect CEOs to be paragons of virtue - part of the reason they succeed because they discard virtue in favor of profit. Having said that, the solution is not simple. In places like China, it's probably up to the government.
Jack Ma will be surprised to find out that it doesn't matter how many hours you spend at the office. Actual productive activities will total only 2-3 hours per day.
So spending 12 hours per day at the office actually means more time for social media, news sites, gossip, etc
(i'm not going to dwell on the negative effects of his comments since they're well understood - less time spent at the office = better productivity).
I'm bit worried about the person(or the group) manning the 996.ICU github.
The page states,"This is not a political movement".<p>But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which maligns the reputation of China.
Jack Ma is right about working overtime and have work consume your life when 'passion is not limited to monetary gains', but more often than not, these people that are full of passion realise that it was the wrong choice all along, esp considering how short a healthy life is. The regrets people have on their death bed isn't of not having worked hard, but not having had more time for friends and family.<p><a href="https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/" rel="nofollow">https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/</a>
I sometimes think that there's only ever been one economic model - slavery. Various excuses are periodically found to justify it, like aristocracy, caste system, slavery, Gulag, meritocracy, passion, etc. - ultimately, as a society, we do not want fair wages to be given to workers, so that we can consume more, cheaper goods, and glorify a few billionaires as super(wo)men.
I wonder how many processes are not automated because of peer pressure of 996. Heard stories about when India was just opening as a outsourcing hub, people would use notepad to create HTML pages. As that means more billable hours. No syntax highlighting, macro and other support. Something similar must happen for 996 to be practical.
Leaving aside the questions around the ethics of 996... is this kind of schedule actually effective? Do companies that work knowledge workers like this actually outperform competitors?
Jack Ma is an idiot for doing this for very simple reasons. It's a country of 1 billion people. His company has 5 billion dollars in revenue, they pay their developers like 30k USD. Burning out your brightest is a stupid business strategy. They can afford to hire many more people as they have plenty of money to afford to do so. It's like some stupid idea of machismo. Like be a man! Yeah fuck that noise.<p>It's in fact physically sickening to subject people to this. As they are sitting 12 hours a day for 6 days a week and then probably sleeping all day on the 7th to recover.
>Richard Liu, chief executive of Alibaba arch-foe JD.com Inc., said in a recent post on his WeChat moments that, while he would never force staff to work a 996 schedule, people who slacked off were not considered his “brothers.”<p>Holy cow! People went ballistic when Elon said in his post that the employees should hold up for the sake of the company.
Time is the most important thing that exists, it's sad to see people promoting this lifestyle. The most problematic it's that some Chinese millionaires are buying/investing in companies across Europe, and probably sooner than later they'll try to force that culture in European companies
The prevalence of 996 shows why China is able to start so many strong tech companies. Discontent reflects the rising awareness for standard of living and ethical or not also sort of implies rising labor costs in future.
Pretty interesting discussion. Working in IT and being surrounded by technology means that it's hard to stop 'working' per se. Coding on the weekend for side projects/hobbies while balancing actual 'work' means I'm clocking quite a few hours every week myself banging away on my keyboard.<p>No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours. I think awareness of the issue is great as it appears more or less systemic in China to work long hours.
Sorry sir, where are the "1 million US jobs" you promised?<p>But it shouldn't be surprising, since his company is so used to milking the "millions" of sellers.
Meanwhile in China, a 27 years old programmer died suddenly. Is this the bliss Jack Ma talked about?<p>Camera captured video: <a href="https://www.bilibili.com/video/av49491980/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bilibili.com/video/av49491980/</a>
Passion of his employees is very well observable from garbage quality products they make: trashy APIs, utter trash SDKs, broken endpoints, outages, broken user stories.<p>Amazon also treats its employees like shit but at least their products are usable.
Is it only me or is there an established cause as to why people who become successful search for reasons and 'motivational' phrases, like, 996 and passion or Move fast and break things, to attribute their success to?
In some way our brains doesn't seem to be wired for getting rich and famous, most people go very wrong. Being a good and intelligent human being is very different from having just a lot of money and luck.
On one side one really needs people working 24/7, on the other I can't get why this would be a requirement. The best development progress is reached when people code for about 30 hours a week.
> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.<p>And this is why I got disillusioned with the "you should be passionate about your work" mantra. Capitalist companies exploits it for the own benefit.
Unfortunately China is a repressive country where economic prosperity is anti-correlated with happiness:<p><a href="https://outline.com/mnyw6K" rel="nofollow">https://outline.com/mnyw6K</a>
I’m so sick and tired of this guy. His story, his persona, his company, everything. Can the media just stop giving him the attention he so obviously craves? What a sad person.
The only interesting things about this outrage are the questionable (again) quality of Bloomberg content and the fact that so many people here on HN are triggered and feel victimized by how Ma is running his company on the other side of the globe, to the point where there they are spewing insults and expletives.<p>Does HN need this sort of traffic and comments? I think not. Please don't post/upvote dubious Bloomberg clickbait.
996 sounds like a paradise. We startup founders work 24/7. We are either working or thinking about work related stuff when not sleeping. Not that we don't know work-life balance is good for health, but you just can't stop dwelling on it if you have a devotion.