
Jack Ma Again Endorses Extreme Overtime as Furor Rages On - bryanwbh
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/jack-ma-again-endorses-extreme-overtime-as-online-furor-rages-on
======
human20190310
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.

Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't
adhere to it were not his "brothers".

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.

~~~
rwallace
Your conclusion is absolutely correct.

The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a
leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy
to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let
alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to
dominate other apes on the African savanna.

But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our
brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function.
They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when
successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was
adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented
anywhere in our neurons.

So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell
put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is
the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually
opposed.

~~~
bigred100
Lately I have the vague opinion that half-baked scientific reasoning and the
tendency to come up with evolutionary just so stories is a horrible detriment
to modern society. Humanity has come up with a reasonable way to interpret
human behavior by human standards through the humanities. I feel content to
evaluate other humans by human standards rather than speculating on how he’s
actually highly adapted for the African savannah. If he acts like an ape, he
belongs in a zoo.

~~~
mac01021
What is the nature of that horrible detriment to society?

There are myriad ways that humans tend to make bad decisions in the course of
modern life. Psychology and evolutionary biology currently provide the best
answer to "why".

If you want to understand yourself well enough to be able to avoid having
marketers and advertisers make your most important life choices for you, or
want to raise your children to think critically about statements they hear
even when it means overcoming confirmation bias, or want to think about how to
help society escape detrimental Nash equilibria that lead catastrophic global
warming, a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior seems to me to be
clearly better than simply operating under the wildly simplistic assumption
that people always behave rationally in the pursuit of well defined goals.

~~~
bigred100
Well, my personal opinion is that a better understanding of human nature will
come from the traditional means (interacting with people, study of literature
and history and human institutions, and, even more controversially, maybe even
religion) than trying to analyze human behavior from the point of view of apes
dominating each other. I don’t think anyone with any reasonably sound theory
of human nature would hold the assumption of “people [behaving] rationally in
pursuit of well defined goals”.

------
cjw3
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.

[1]:
[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alib...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3006127/alibaba-
founder-jack-ma-says-companies-forcing-staff-work)

~~~
rqs
It will be easier to understand if you've followed the movement.

Most of those companies are not _forcing_ their employees to work 996 on
paper. But if you don't, then first, your team leader will give you some hint
to ask you to stay longer. If you still don't, you will be fired for any
number of reasons (KPI is too low for example).

Because of that, the company actually don't need to _force_ it's employees. It
just keep giving them tasks which cannot be finished without work 996, plus
some peer pressures (One of it is "Boss's still here, you can't leave").

Jack Ma's "forcing staff to work overtime are ‘foolish’" statement is
basically the same thing: You need to fight for your own future. On the
surface, it's correct, but underneath it, he's trying to make you believe
Personal strive === Overwork.

It worth notice that Jack Ma also said "If you love your job, 12 hours is not
very long" (“如果你热爱（工作），其实12个小时不算太长”[0]) just days ago. Hit: If you don't work
12 hours a day, you don't love your job.

Some background: Jack Ma is a lair who also likes to pretend to be a Life
Advisor, he will sometime throw out some bullshit to convince others to
sacrifice for him. You need to read between lines.

> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their
> passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.

You see what's going on here :)

[0] [https://finance.sina.com.cn/china/gncj/2019-04-12/doc-
ihvhie...](https://finance.sina.com.cn/china/gncj/2019-04-12/doc-
ihvhiewr5310241.shtml)

Edited to fix some grammar problem. Hope that will make it easier to read.
Thanks for pointing out :)

Yes, I fixed it again.

~~~
drukenemo
Nice comments, but may I suggest that you check your spellings before posting?
Lots of things I had to interpret what you meant to say based on mispellings.

~~~
rqs
Sorry, I'm not a native speaker, that may lead to some problem because Chinese
grammar can be very different to English. Maybe I should start to use
grammarly from now on.

Sum up the post:

1\. What Jack Ma is trying to do, is equalizing Personal strive and overwork
(for him).

2\. In China, company have many ways to _force_ employees stay in long hour
without literally say so. For example "When boss don't leave, you don't
leave", and/or giving out tasks that you can't finish without overwork.

~~~
alistairSH
I have to assume drunkenemo is trolling because your English is as good as
many native speakers (at least when it comes to casual online communication).
There are signs you aren't a native speaker, but nothing that makes your post
hard to understand or in any way distracting.

~~~
rqs
Maybe that's because I got my English mode fully warmed up during the editing
process. Don't blame drunkenemo :)

------
inapis
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.

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)

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.

~~~
zorked
People in workspaces with crazy work hours pad the remaining hours with
meetings, email, going from here to there and back here.

Humans only work so many hours a day. Outlier humans who can work more won't
waste their talent/superpower at an employer where their extra time isn't
compensated.

~~~
stkdump
I have to say (as a person currently on a 25-30 hour work week), that I often
times find meetings to be the most exhausting part of my job, especially when
I am very engaged in them. Coding is like meditation compared to that (thought
I couldn't dream of doing it more than 50 hours per week for more than a week
or two).

------
ilaksh
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.

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.

Just look at the etymology of the word 'employ'. It means using something.
Earlier it came from

late 14c., implien, emplien "to enfold, enwrap, entangle"

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.

So in fact the forced overtime is forced labor and is a human rights issue.

I think it's going to get worse rather than better because AI, robotics and
automation in general are gradually picking up steam.

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.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Not sure applying old English words or even western ideas onto a completely
different culture helps here.

~~~
rsln-s
Some things are fairly universal and pertain to human condition in general,
even if expressed in very western framework.

------
stuffedBelly
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.

Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" (from
JD's CEO) or lazy is utterly disgusting.

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.

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.

Fried brains == Disaster

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?"

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?

~~~
rococode
> Labeling people who demand reasonable work-life balance as "slackers" or
> lazy is utterly disgusting.

Worth clarifying that the "slackers" comment came from JD.com's founder
Richard Liu, not Jack Ma.

edit: removed comments on whether he endorses it or not since it seems like
there are contradicting statements from him. My current impression is that he
disagrees with forced overtime but wants his employees to work similar hours
voluntarily (although I suspect this is a common sentiment among business
execs).

~~~
stuffedBelly
I actually read Jack Ma's initial memo on this matter in Chinese. His stance
was pretty clear that he endorses 996. He later "clarified" that he disagrees
with this sentiment after people became enraged by his words.

------
koonsolo
Can someone explain to me how you can be productive for 12 hours on a single
day?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

~~~
theprotocol
I've had trouble finding a workplace that understood this. Even on the days
where I put in 5-6 hours of high quality work I'd attract the suspicion of
managers.

After that they typically begin to "check on me" regularly to make sure I'm
not "slacking." This would go on long-term.

I have never worked anywhere where this didn't happen.

~~~
yvdriess
What I think is fundamental is that employees are not payed for their work,
but for their time. The implicit thought pattern is that they feel they own
your time.

~~~
theprotocol
You're right. However, being there and doing low-impact work like planning the
next day in my head yields the same suspicion.

------
the_jends
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.

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.

------
mabbo
I'll work those hours, no problem. You will, however, have to make it worth my
while.

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?

No thank you. I'll seek employment elsewhere.

~~~
mywittyname
I agree with you, but I suspect the people in China subjected to these
inhumane work hours don't have the option for a job with better working
conditions. I would not be surprised in companies were colluding such that the
996 is the default work week.

------
mnm1
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.

------
spinach
'“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion
beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.' says a billionaire...

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.

------
iliketosleep
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.

~~~
alkonaut
Exactly that is why there are laws (in China I guess not). I can't work more
than 200h overtime in a year or 48h in 4weeks (meaning that after four 52h
weeks I can't do anymore overtime), regardless of whether I'm paid for it or
not. So after two 996 weeks my manager would be in criminal territory if I
don't get two very short weeks afterwards. In my experience, this seems to
actually work too. Crunch time is replaced by slipping or hiring, as it
should.

These laws don't require that anyone _forced_ anyone to do it - the manager is
literally responsible to make sure people don't work too much. Obviously this
will happen occasionally anyway, but now it is at least llegal.

~~~
your-nanny
where are you?

~~~
alkonaut
Sweden

------
kmlx
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).

~~~
lazyjones
> _Jack Ma will be surprised to find out that it doesn 't matter how many
> hours you spend at the office._

Yes, the richest self-made man in China will soon be lectured by a random
commenter on the Internet about how he got it all wrong.

~~~
kmlx
is this a joke? Jack Ma obviously doesn't read comments off the Internet.

------
helloindia
I'm bit worried about the person(or the group) manning the 996.ICU github. The
page states,"This is not a political movement".

But, the Chinese govt won't ignore for long, any kind of movement which
maligns the reputation of China.

~~~
earenndil
If the chinese gov't wants to protect their reputation, wouldn't they do
better to abolish 996-type working conditions?

~~~
k_sze
You only need take a look at what's happening to human-rights lawyers and the
victims of the melamine-contaminated infant formula scandal in China.

------
ignoramous
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.

[https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-
dying/](https://bronnieware.com/blog/regrets-of-the-dying/)

------
sn41
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.

~~~
fuzzfactor
Imagine if you will, a textile mill in North Carolina in the year 1864.

Unpaid labor performing most of the factory's value-added activities, along
similar lines to how the cotton was raised agriculturally on nearby
plantations.

Company accountant complains about "$9,800 of total labor cost" for the year,
which is about $800 more than it was the year before. "When is it going to
end?" is often heard, even though the actual workers recieve no payment and
never have, there is still a fundamental cost of labor even in a pure slavery
situation.

Another year comes & goes, the Civil War ends, slaves are emancipated, and the
factory is then required to actually divert some cash directly to the newly
christened "employees" for the first time, in the form of a regular paycheck.

The accountant has never been so grumpy. "Looks like we're going to have over
$15,000 in labor costs this year, thanks to the plumb fool Yankees."

And life goes on.

When is it going to end?

Anyway, I prefer to work a 12-hour day because I get more accomplished than
would otherwise be accomplished over two 8-hour days. Relatively speaking,
someone else's 16-hour project which takes them two workdays and completes no
sooner than 34 hours after assignment, can often be completed in only 12 hours
after assignment if all energy is directed continuously until completion.

For those that do not have that much ability to focus, I understand.

------
negamax
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.

------
anbop
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?

~~~
onion2k
I spent a good chunk of my twenties working a schedule of 8 hours coding at
work followed by 6 hours coding on a side project, with my entire weekend on
the side project as well. I didn't have any sort of social life (largely by
choice but also because I was remote working in a tiny rural village).

It was massively effective. I wrote a ton of great code. I made enough money
to quit working for several years and do a startup. When you're young,
moderately fit, and ambitious you can crank out a _ton of code_.

However, the important point is that it was my choice to do that. You can't
ignore the ethics because that's what makes it wrong - asking people to do it
while (even silently) implying bad things will happen if they don't is
_deeply_ unethical.

~~~
gexla
A side project is much different than a work project. You got your eight hours
of work and got to go home and do whatever you pleased. In this case, it was
to write more code. Having to corral your brain into the singular focus of an
employer's project against deadlines, feedback (sometimes crazy talk,)
updates, documentation and other distractions is different.

I can happily crank out code all day if it's something I'm doing for myself.
As soon as you add the employer, it immediately starts doing my head in. It's
completely different work. Some employers are better than others in this
regard I suppose.

------
devoply
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.

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.

~~~
jedberg
It sounds like he's really smart. There's a billion people. He can just keep
burning them out and there will be more begging to be treated that way. The
only way to solve this is with regulations -- this is where capitalism breaks
down. With that many people, it won't matter if he burns through them.

~~~
roenxi
If you assume you have a huge reserve of capable people, then that will clamp
down on wages, but as a manager you still want to optimise the productivity of
the employees they have.

Extreme overtime doesn't sound like a good idea. May as well hire 2 shifts of
people and pay them half as much; aim for higher per-hour performance. 9-9-6
isn't going to get you very much per hour of labour time, the employees will
be zombies.

4 shifts of people will get you 24 hour 7-day coverage if you want continuous
production if that is what the business needs. Just hold per-hour pay as
constant as possible using the reserve of willing workers as leverage.

~~~
jedberg
I think you missed my point.

------
Abishek_Muthian
>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.”

Holy cow! People went ballistic when Elon said in his post that the employees
should hold up for the sake of the company.

------
pmcpinto
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

~~~
lnsru
Europeans still remember working 6 days:
[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wochenarbeitszeit](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wochenarbeitszeit)
(German only). Official workweek in Germany is 6 days even now, but tech
workers tend to work 35 hours than 55. I doubt this is possible in close
future. Maybe that’s why salary range ends at 100k€.

------
ackbar03
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.

~~~
theseadroid
Strong copycats yes. Strong innovation tech companies? I dont think so.

~~~
ackbar03
You need to take another look at the landscape bro... This was true a few
years ago but less the case now

~~~
theseadroid
I almost look at it everyday mate :D Most of my classmates are in China. And I
still go back to visit my family like once a year.

There are attempts to innovate. But I think all the 996 and censorship and
other policies to make the populace compliant is working against true
innovation.

They can take an existing idea and execute with great efficiency. High speed
trains, subways, electric vehicles. They are good at mixing ideas from both
Western countries and Japan/Korea and other parts of the world. I like that
part a lot. But original, novel ideas that will actually work? Not really. The
culture there is not structured to promote/refine good ideas.

------
tedk-42
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.

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.

~~~
techsupporter
The thing is, from my perspective, you're not "working," as in giving your
time solely to your employer, on your weekends when you're banging away on
your keyboard on side projects.

> No-one's putting a gun to my head to work these hours.

That's true, and so you can stop doing it or change what you're doing on your
off time whenever you like and have no ill consequence for it. For these
workers, they don't have that option. Either be at the keyboard, dedicated to
the employer, for the requisite time or be fired.

We see a lesser version of this in the US IT industry a lot. People are
nominally employed for 40 hours per week but management only puts a priority
or good focus on the people who do the "above and beyond." Sure, you might
officially only be paid for 40 hours most of the time (special circumstances
excepted), but when management only gives raises and promotions to the people
who are consistently e-mailing at 9:30 at night and slinging code on Sunday,
the real rules stand out very quickly.

------
gigatexal
Are all the employees on call SREs? If not: wtf is he thinking?

------
AFascistWorld
Sorry sir, where are the "1 million US jobs" you promised?

But it shouldn't be surprising, since his company is so used to milking the
"millions" of sellers.

------
m0zg
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!" – Upton Sinclair.

------
mx06v
Meanwhile in China, a 27 years old programmer died suddenly. Is this the bliss
Jack Ma talked about?

Camera captured video:
[https://www.bilibili.com/video/av49491980/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/av49491980/)

------
miaklesp
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.

Amazon also treats its employees like shit but at least their products are
usable.

------
farhanhubble
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?

------
black-alert
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.

------
srouhaewaehy
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.

------
arvinsim
> “Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their
> passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.

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.

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digianarchist
I'll do 996 for my company (at least for a few months a year) if they give me
a 45% (40 hours -> 72 hours) salary increase.

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rajacombinator
Alibaba/express/whatever has some pretty jank technology. Maybe they should
try working smarter instead of harder?

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fouc
No actual meat in this article. Just one short comment. Where's the rest of
his comments on the topic?

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redleggedfrog
I've seen the code 12 hour days makes. The only benefit Ma is getting is the
feeling of power.

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gHosts
So tell which companies _aren't_ run by shit heads and I'll vote with my
dollars.

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sgt101
Quite a lot of Romans endorsed slavery and gladiators. As Lenin said - first
look who benefits!

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rick22
554 was most productive from personal experience without lunch break.

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a_imho
What about other sectors? What time do non tech workers work in China?

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YjSe2GMQ
Unfortunately China is a repressive country where economic prosperity is anti-
correlated with happiness:

[https://outline.com/mnyw6K](https://outline.com/mnyw6K)

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ngcc_hk
Inhuman. Sad.

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objektif
What a load of horse shit. This guy became propoganda arm of the chinese
communist party.

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iamleppert
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.

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lazyjones
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.

Does HN need this sort of traffic and comments? I think not. Please don't
post/upvote dubious Bloomberg clickbait.

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thetechlead
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.

~~~
warent
Unless you're trying to start, say, a space flight business or a car company,
working absurd hours is just stroking ourselves to feel special about the
supposedly coveted "startup founder" persona. It's a really boring, old meme
at this point. I'm a "startup founder" with a profitable SaaS business, but I
also have unrelated hobbies and friends outside of that bubble.

~~~
thetechlead
Not that I don't have hobbies and friends. I routinely take week long beach
vocation to make myself physically isolated from work. Just can't stop
thinking about it daily and it's a hellof joy returning to my cubicle start
working.

