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?
996 is fine if you're a founder of a company. It's not okay for ill-compensated workers that will never become billionaires.
We don't have much time on this planet. Why should he expect others to be droning slaves for him? People should enjoy what little life they have, not spend most of their time as cogs in a machine.
You have production access to the company’s most important relationships. If you’re falling asleep in meetings or just unable to exercise emotional intelligence, that seems pretty bad for the company.
EDIT: falling asleep in meetings is bad, not good.
I think it's worth defining what "fine" is in this context.
It's fine in as much as it's your gig, it's on you to decide what is right or not. If you believe that working extreme hours at the cost of your own wellbeing and rational performance will end up being a benefit to you in the long run then it's "fine" for you to make that choice and you either reap the benefits of suffer the consequences and hopefully learn from it.
It's not fine to project your notion of drive and passion onto people who are employees and expect them to match your personal standards when the potential rewards are magnitudes different.
I always wonder about cases where a person's work depresses them as such that they start self-medicating (for example, with alcohol). Would that still be self-imposed, or a result of the circumstances?
I'm not an investor, but if I were an investor I would want my stewards of capital to be awake and aware and full on. Airline pilots and professional drivers (truckers) have mandated rest, for a reason.
I'm an investor and former VC-backed founder and I'd like my stewards of capital, who are typically the best work force in the early days of startups, to work more than 40 hours. I'm sure that they do in the overwhelming majority of successful startups.
I work in finance and am sorry but you don't sound like a legit investor if you measure the effectiveness of your capital towards startups by work hours. What about their revenue models, plans for growth, talent structure and market niche? Why do you expect them to work longer hours as long as they have deliverables on time? Also, working longer hours may introduce potential compliance/HR costs (mental/physical problems due to overwork, people leaving due to work-life balance issue), which could be deadly for early startups.
> I'm sure that they do in the overwhelming majority of successful startups
You would need to back up this statement with evidence and show positive correlation between longer work hours and success of startups.
You can prove me wrong by actually arguing/answering the questions I had but instead you fell into Tu quoque...don't think this is how a healthy argument should be.
> someone who develops software and pretends to be some sort of financial expert
Your assumption is baseless and does not help your argument. Commenting on HN does not mean someone develops software for a living. HN is open for everyone.
> You're just wasting time and space with your insults and rhetoric
I engage in arguments but where do you see insults?
I know very well you can read comments and profiles. I've had an HN account since 2011 and it gave me enough time to become well versed in finance. Plus I call myself software engineer because I work in quantitative finance and software engineering is big part of it. I'm also a CFA charterholder and not putting it on my HN profile doesn't make me less versed in finance.
It's ok if you don't want to engage in arguments, but don't assume you know someone by simply skimming through their HN profiles.
Truckers are mandated (in the USA) to do 60 hours in 7 days, which is more than 40 hours. If your founder works 96 hours a week for 6mths what do you think their state of mind will be?
I worked 96 hours a week for eight weeks finishing off my dissertation. I finished it, but basically went crazy - I needed some time off, which was good because I crossed the line. Startups used to be like that I suppose, but now it takes far longer to cross the line to an exit than it used to, are you making the best use of the human capital you are deploying?
> Truckers are mandated (in the USA) to do 60 hours in 7 days, which is more than 40 hours. If your founder works 96 hours a week for 6mths what do you think their state of mind will be?
What does that have to do with anything? 60 hours is 50% more than 40 hours, it's regulation and not science and it's a totally different job with different risks.
> are you making the best use of the human capital you are deploying?
If they are working 40 hours or less, the answer is "no" with 100% certainty. Above that, it depends.
Well - the example I used was set to 60 hours not 40 - which was a number that you used.
On the other hand are you sure that you are reasoning correctly? Have any of the companies that you have worked with failed because the founders have worked too little?
What was the least working that you saw? What was the outcome and the driver there?
> Well - the example I used was set to 60 hours not 40 - which was a number that you used.
So what is your conclusion from this? That 60 hours are too much? Or is it OK to work 60 hours (i.e. more than 40)? Why bring it up if your example basically confirms that my expectations aren't unreasonable?
> Have any of the companies that you have worked with failed because the founders have worked too little?
Yes. And I know a couple more.
> What was the least working that you saw? What was the outcome and the driver there?
15-30 hours/week. No product after a few financing rounds. Lack of grit. Also, very poor decisions.
There is a difference between regularly working 50-hour weeks and setting those up well, and always working 72-hour weeks, which doesn’t leave you time to do the life-admin, exercise, cooking, and sleep you need to keep a clear head.
Founders are already 'working' more than that. They are typically thinking about their company with every waking hour.
With that said, it doesn't mean they are not getting plenty of sleep. What it means is that when they are not sleeping, they are probably working. At the gym, they are probably thinking about work. At social events, they are probably thinking about work. Etc... It's just the nature of getting a company off the ground.
Ali Baba is the Amazon of China. It is enormously profitable. I assume that in return for working so hard, the employees are paid quite well, or else they would find better jobs.
I guess the unsupported claim that they're "ill-compensated" out of the blue was what annoyed me.
It looks like the average senior software engineer salary at Alibaba is around $30k.
That's well above the average annual salary in China, but it's about average for a software developer, and no one is going going to become a millionaire working for those wages.
Also long hours are normal in China. If your choice is to work for one of 50 companies that all have insane schedules, it's hardly informed consent.
If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.
There's no way Alibaba is giving away 15% of their revenue in stock grants, so I'd take that with a huge grain of salt. Regardless the vast majority of their employees aren't going to become millionaires working there.
>If long hours is the industry standard, to me that is exactly informed consent. I mean, no one will be surprised by the standard workplace arrangement.
That's not what informed consent means--informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent. If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent.
The logical conclusion to this argument is that there is literally no limit on how bad you make your working conditions so long as everyone else is doing it. A century ago it was common to pay employees in company scrip and to not pay them enough to live so that they ended up permanently indebted to the company. It was the standard work environment in many places so by your argument all the employees freely consented to it.
Your consent argument makes no sense to me. We're probably too far apart to communicate, but I'll make an attempt:
I agree that "informed consent has to be voluntary or it's not consent".
But this is absurd: "If 72 hour weeks are standard and your choice is long hours or being unemployed, it's not informed consent."
Note that you can replace "72 hour weeks" with "40 hour weeks" or "10 hour work weeks" without changing the argument. I'm guessing your silent assumption is that anything worse than your current middle class American expectations are by definition inhumane. This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.
To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.
There is obviously a large gray area between coercive and completely consensual when it comes to employment. Even 40 hour a week employment in the western world isn't completely without coercion in every case--only if the person has other alternatives.
>This implies that poor people across the world can't consent to anything.
In many situations they can't. When the power differential between 2 people is too great, there can be no consent. If the president asks an intern to sleep with him and he tells her she is free to walk away with no repercussion, there's still an element of coercion to the proposal.
>To me, as long as you can freely walk away from something, you are there by consent. No other definition makes logical sense.
How far does this belief go? If you come across a dying man in the desert and offer to sell him water in exchange for everything he owns, I'd say that's obviously not a consensual agreement. Despite the fact that he can freely walk away from it.
That's like if you said "what if everyone won a lottery". You know full well this sweatshop bullshit produces very few millionaires, and millions of burn-outs.
January 31, 2012 — State laws against mandatory overtime hours for nurses are effective, researchers reported in an article published online August 29, 2011, in Nursing Outlook.
"Nurses routinely work long shifts, often as long as 12 hours straight," said Carol Brewer, PhD, RN, FAAN, a professor at the School of Nursing, University at Buffalo, New York, in a news release. "These laws were intended to prevent hospitals from piling mandatory overtime on top of such shifts, a practice that research shows can increase the likelihood of mistakes."
As a doctor you are 1 mistake away from potentially killing somebody, which can easily end up you being in jail, your license permanently removed and life ruined. And lets be honest, most doctors have killed by negligence/mistake in their lives, this is pure statistics and reality that few want to admit. After screwup everybody just hopes family/hospital will not investigate and move on.
Treatment of medical staff, mainly doctors is pretty ridiculous compared to easy life we (most of us) have in IT. What I mean by example - the by far the biggest employer - university hospital is forcing employers overtime, nightshifts which are properly debilitating, and not 1, but easily 4-5 in a row. At the end of such a row, the doctor feels drunk and sluggish when discussed with.
Which 3rd world country do you think I discuss? One of the biggest hospitals in Switzerland.
I have tons of stories from friends of us - like cantonal hospital in Bern, where chef of whole department set up the badge-sharing system that forced his doctors to share badges over weekend with others who didn't work,so they could do more overtime (unpaid of course) because the Swiss laws prohibited them from doing so, and entrance badge system was programmed accordingly). You don't want to participate, good bye (also to your career in whole country). 2018 story.
My advice - stay healthy, just don't go to hospital unless you have to. At the end, just drop dead.
with researchers likening the performance of someone awake for at least 17 hours to that of a drunk person.
those who worked shifts 12.5 hours or longer were three times more likely than others to make an error in patient care.
From your comment:
My advice - stay healthy, just don't go to hospital unless you have to. At the end, just drop dead.
The natives in Africa put a stop to the Ebola epidemic with a few policies to limit the spread. For starters:
1. If you got sick, they quarantined you. You were not to leave your hut. They would leave food on your doorstep. If three days of food piled up, they burned the hut to the ground without going inside to check if you were really dead or not.
2. They told their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital." Because you would show up with something fixable, like a broken leg, and die of Ebola contracted at the hospital.
They also put up road blocks to control who could come into their territory. There may be a few other things I'm not remembering.
I have a serious medical condition. I haven't seen a doctor in years. When I was seeing a doctor for it, the waiting room was always full of sick people and it was one of the more hazardous things I did. I sometimes spoke with people online who told stories that (for example) their kid with the same condition as me had picked up MRSA in their last hospital stay.
We need some better models. The current system seems inherently flawed in important ways.
Worked at Alibaba. Not trying to defend the company, just offering my observation.
They do work much longer hour as compared to most American companies (like Google, I worked at too), even longer than the average Chinese ones. However, 9-to-9 doesn't mean people work 12 hour straight and nobody forcing anyone to stay at work until 9. Chinese work schedule includes 30 minutes to 1 hour extra napping time at noon, and Alibaba has on-campus canteens and facilities so employees go gym/game after dinner then back to work a little longer before leaving.
When I was working there I usually leave right after dinner so the actual work hour was around 8.5-9 hours a day. And our team never work on weekends (except for around 11.11 the annual shopping craze). However I do work at night and weekends at home, voluntarily.
The keyword is "voluntary". Alibaba doesn't have this problem but many other companies do. The fact anti-996 has gained tons of attention makes me doubt it's just an immature movement started by a couple of crybabies.
Definitely not immature. People have all the right to do so, and Chinese laws protect labor rights. And I do agree that the reason you are working overtime and whether it's voluntary make a big difference.
But does it matter if you work continuously 9-9?
If I stay on premise 9-9 I still regard that as work -- that still is my time that I'm selling to the company.
Can you raise a child if you are away 9-9?
You wake up at 7AM, return home at 10PM, how is that even considered a life worth living?
> But does it matter if you work continuously 9-9? If I stay on premise 9-9 I still regard that as work -- that still is my time that I'm selling to the company.
In many countries, lunch and dinner breaks are unpaid time - in theory you are free to go home and do whatever you want. In China, noon break can be two hour long including napping. And the free dinners of IT companies are actually incentives to lure you staying longer on campus. Of course you can leave earlier or even on your own schedule if raising a child, however, for young people most prefer staying overtime enjoying free facilities companies provide them, like food and gyms they have to pay off-campus otherwise.
I feel it's also worth noting that a lot of local Chinese folks don't really have many "hobbies" or many other reasons to not be at work socialising with their colleagues and doing company organised activities. It's culturally quite different to the West, where people often have things going on outside of work.
I think that Jack Ma his trying his best to reduce the Chinese population. Today Chinese population is already almost shrinking, and policies like that will make sure that having a child will be left out of the equation. Can you imagine having a child with such a work schedule? Even if one the partners stays at home, it will mean that you will barely now your child (a few hours on Sunday).
What is strange is that the communist party realized that this will be a big problem in the future, but don't link that to company policies like that...
While I agree that it's not for everyone and people should have a right to decide how they spend their time, I think it's detrimental even for those who claim it is good for themselves.
If you actually ask, "Who is this for then?" -- I think you'll be hard pressed not to answer "For the young, socially less inclined(men)", just like drugs are for certain demographics or polygamy is for certain demographics, teenage marriage can work for certain people and so on (sorry if my examples are too extreme).
And by accepting such horrendous work hours you are pressuring people who actually want a better work-life balance, that's why I think it's better for society in the long run to forbid such (predatory) practices.
I think you have to compare to this other organizations with up-or-out mentality like the big name consultancies and so on.
The point is not to offer a "sustainable worklife". The whole point is to chew through fresh graduates as fast as you can. They are fuel for the fire. And China has many, many hungry and young graduates.
It's kinda fair to say this out loud. People know what they are getting into. Some people actually enjoy this and thrive in such a high strain environment. The losers are the people who think they have to do this to "prove themselves" and just suffer and burn out.
Those who survive get promoted, and perpetuate the culture.
The only pathology I see is that if people think this is the only way to run a technology company and start aping the practice - which is a likely outcome.
> 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).
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.
"My current impression is that he disagrees with forced overtime but wants his employees to work similar hours voluntarily"
If your boss says they want you to work overtime 'voluntarily', what do you do? Doesn't sound very voluntary, and middle managers actually doing the enforcement aren't going to treat it like that, especially when they get targets.
Sounds almost funny in light of how much the company is messed up on tech side.
It has one of the biggest tech workforce in China, but they can't make Taobao frontpage work moderately well. It is almost as if they felt "giving up" on that.
Having worked with them on their DC project in 2016, I can attest that the rest of the company is not different.
They are constantly loosing managerial cadres, and almost all Alibabers I knew can attest of the company feeling "ungoverned" and "in state of Brownian motion"
Well you have got all the logic correct except that there are millions upon millions looking for 'cushy' IT jobs in developing world. So when IT worker complains about being burnt they can be replaced before they even spell 'overtime'. This is true in India, China or Korea. At least these are ones I am directly aware of.
Also as much employee or employers claim that they are developing and maintaining a hugely complex systems. Most of it are age old 3-tier applications. Employers can easily replace most of the grunt workers with another lot. Average employees know this and that's why they put up with these demands. It is not like companies are lining up to hire run of the mill CRUD devs in these countries. I personally know many folks once they are laid off it would take anywhere between 3-12 month to get next job.
So what remains are few exceptional developers/engineers who can negotiate better benefits and working hours independently with companies. Companies absolutely do not feel any need to extend same level of respect and perks to everyone.
> 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.
When the excuse is feeble, it's because it isn't an excuse, it's just an expression of indifference
Well, 996 is good thing to balance the imbalance. There are plenty of people looking for positions with good pay, and for those who can afford to worry about 'quality of life', they can simply move on to other positions and have other people enjoy these good paid jobs. So everyone will have their chance to get exploited and move on afterwards. Once most people are happy with what they have, no one would work for 996 companies and things will change. It is exactly the same thing as manufacture jobs moving to Asian countries. It is very good for Asian workers.
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?