
Always-on Alibaba office app fuels backlash among Chinese workers - lnguyen
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-ding-always-on-alibaba-office-app-fuels-backlash-among-chinese-workers-2018-8
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exabrial
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'.

~~~
donttrack
If it works, it works. I remember standing at the base of the new Tencent
double tower, when it was being constructed. They were almost done with the
concrete skeleton and the beams looked all crooked standing there looking up
at the structure - each column on each floor was slightly misplaced compared
to the previous one. I am no construction engineer, but I believe they should
have been placed in a straight line, but maybe I am wrong..

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Chinese construction leverages concrete by a fairly unskilled work force. To
make up for the safety problems with that, they overbuild a lot, so precision
isn't very necessary, but the building will deteriorate a lot faster without
much more maintenance. So a newish building in China that is only a few years
old will often feel much older than that, but at least it won't fall down.

Similar construction is utilized by India, and exported to other countries
that utilize Indian construction labor (Singapore, Dubai, ...). Really it is
just a trade off that soaks up cheap labor, which is very much in these
country's best interest ATM.

~~~
616c
You explained what people used to tell me how GCC buildings didn't last as
long thanks.

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atomical
GCC?

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amaccuish
I assume Gulf Cooperation Council. UAE, Saudi, Quwait etc

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lordnacho
"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."

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you want more ghost rowers, install DingChat.

~~~
baybal2
Believe me or not, we installed a computer vision powered check in system at
our office. They are surprisingly cheap.

~~~
paulie_a
It might be surprisingly cheap but seems incredibly miserable to work there.
It shows that the company does not trust their own employees and is a sign of
bad management.

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maxxxxx
It depends how the check in is used. When I worked in Germany we had time
cards and the main purpose was to make sure you worked only 35 hours a week or
you got overtime paid. It was more about not trusting management.

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dasmoth
_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.

As DingTalk has grown, many Chinese office workers have vented their
frustrations online about the service, saying it is inhumane and destroys
trust._

"Inhumane and destroys trust" doesn't sound too far off the mark to me. But
it's not so _very_ 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.

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stephengillie
A lot of these have automated analogues in American companies.

> _automatic expense claims_

\- Expense claims seem like a smart thing to automate.

> _a clock-in system to monitor the whereabouts of employees_

Zendesk, ServiceNow, and other issue tracking ticket systems provide numerous
metrics about user activity, including a timer for each ticket. Many tech
support shops use the total ticket time, divided by 40 hours, as your
"utilization", and target an 80% utilization, or you're productive for 32 of
40 hours per week.

> _as well as a "daily report" function that requires workers to list
> completed tasks._

This could be an automated report in the system above. Or it could be
mandatory release notes, but daily is excessive for that. This sounds like a
daily standup, over email.

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bb88
Those aren't terrible per se, but I think the relentless immediacy of you're
manager's chat or request would get annoying, especially on a weekend or
holiday as the article discussed.

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stephengillie
At my last job, we were expected to monitor the Slack channel, and jump in to
help - when we were off shift, at the store, day off, vacation - oncall was
the first person paged, then whoever was awake. And this is to answer customer
phone calls and emails needing cloud technical support, and the occasional 3am
VPN tunnel rearchitecture.

On the other side, when the line laying union threatened to strike, they told
us we'd be working 12 hour days and help out laying line during the strike.

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EZ-E
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.

Overall it's more a company/cultural issue, but the app certainly makes it
easier to pressure employees to always be on.

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Kagerjay
China is really weird. They already have the bigbrother level of social media
in place (social media credit scores), this just takes it a whole another
level now. They are really heading towards a dangerous unethical path right
now, and with google's censorship engine that just brings more worry honestly.
China is paving the future of George Orwell's 1984. When other countries see
how successful China is at doing this, others will potentially follow suit

~~~
projektfu
6079 Smith, W. Yes, you! Bend lower!

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duxup
Man the setup in that first photo looks terrible office wise.

>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.

So they built a messaging platform to hassle people... about other messages?

That seems brutal.

~~~
exabrial
Yep. And 90 degree office temps are not uncommon.

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ulfw
This is an app that will not work in the west. And frankly it shouldn't. It's
an insult to the intellect of an employee.

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Animats
It will probably be a feature of Slack within a year.

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brown9-2
Hard to think of a feature that could destroy whatever good will Slack has
with users (if it still does) then a feature that lets you “ping” and notify
someone else endlessly.

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dictum
Slap some copy about empowering end users/workers and some illustrations of
people with heads much smaller than the rest of their bodies, and it's ready
to bring about a new VC round.

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gruez
>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.

“Sorry boss, you’re breaking up. “

 _hangs up phone and turn on airplane mode_

Either that or “accidentally” leave your phone on silent after a meeting.

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yzmtf2008
Not to defend ding, but how is that different from PagerDuty?

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chillydawg
Pagerduty is specifically for on call staff who's job is to respond,
immediately, to alerts.

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chaosite
And it's expected that they only respond when they're "carrying the pager",
that is, on their on-call shift.

One of PagerDuty's features is figuring out who's the right person to page
right now.

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walrus01
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?

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junnan
This seems to be allowed in WeChat. But such text will be blocked if you try
to send it in a group chat. I guess CPP allows you to talk privately but not
publicly in a 300 people group.

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gaius
By that means they can easily identify dissidents without allowing them to
spread their message too far

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pxtail
[...]"daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks
[...] Despite the grumbling, Wu believes the service will translate across
borders and cultures

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.

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wincy
Status Hero was used this way at my last job. My manager would have it opened
at all times in his office. And I just got fired, so I guess it "worked". The
only way to accomplish the tasks fast enough was to work weekends, and once I
quit working on weekends (which I was told "of course you don't have to work
weekends!), they got rid of me within a couple weeks. Really terrible place to
work.

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pentae
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.

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majewsky
Fun fact: This is how Slack looks from a European perspective.

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yardie
That is also how it looks when someone has a SaaS hosted in AWS. Then wonder
why potential clients are asking for self-hosted.

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msie
It's good to remember we are all human. We all have the same limits as
workers.

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JudasGoat
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.

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gagabity
BusinessInsider now redirects Tanzanian users to
[http://pulselive.co.tz](http://pulselive.co.tz) which doesnt resolve. This
website is such garbage.

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ttflee
I have added a DingTalk line to my checklist for next job interview.

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llampx
At this point if you are in the EU or the US, you will probably make them look
it up more often than not, contributing to this app's growth.

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shabda
Anyone else getting a 404 on this page now?

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Boulth
Only if it redirects you to your local business insider, that's pretty bad I
would say.

