> At the time of writing, the 996 website isn’t blocked in China, but greedy tech companies have decided to block it themselves. Tencent’s Wechat refuses to open the site, as does Alibaba’s UC Browser and Qihoo’s 360 browser.
This is what you get when you give companies to power to censor information…
Apparently tweeting the 996.icu website from the official Twitter Android/iOS clients causes it to refuse to send at all. You don't even need to be in China to see the result, because it blacklists the link globally. It allows the link on web and 3rd party clients, though.[1]
Edit: if this is a glitch from trying to combat bots Tweeting the URL, that just means you can trigger automatic censorship of any URL with a bot farm.
This is very unlikely because it seems to be something that happens in the official client rather than server-side. Spammers are unlikely to use official clients and blocking them there doesn't make any sense.
Having said that, if they were intentionally trying to block this then using their anti-spam mechanisms would be an obvious way of doing so, so I think it's definitely a possibility that this is some accidental side-effect of something else rather than a simple intentional block.
An anti spam feature should not links typed by real humans on purpose. Lots of popular links are shared on twitter and don't get blocked via anti spam. This seems like something deliberate, even if the global part of the impact is a deployment error.
I've been saying this for years: censorship, like many things, has been privatized. Things like the First Amendment in the US are inadequate for the modern age, because the majority of our discourse touches multiple intermediary businesses on its way between individuals.
There is no "just herpderp yourself" when communication and publication in our digital society involves information coming in contact with a handful of middlemen who can tamper.
Hmm, mass communication wasn't easy back in the time the First Amendment was written and the problem was "we don't have enough free communication". You could just as well argue that it wouldn't exist if written today.
There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house. The first amendment was always about public discourse.
You can't have a policeman in every house, but you can have an Amazon Alexa.
I think the privatization of surveillance is much scarier than the privatization of censorship. To escape the latter, I can just visit my local library, whereas the former is growing at such alarming rates that it might just make that impossible very soon. The chilling effects are real.
No country does that, they just set examples of people who break draconian laws, which is effective as long as you don't count all the people trying to leave the country.
> There were never practical limits on 1:1 communication even in the worst dictatorship because you can't have a policeman in every house
You underestimate the ability of cultures to self-censor and convince free-thinkers to leave.
Plenty of people in North Korea are afraid to speak out, for fear their neighbors will rat them out. Same goes for speaking against royalty in public in Thailand.
That said, I do think the First Amendment was born out of practicality. Censoring speech, even in the internet age, is not a good growth strategy when your competitors censor less. People will do their best to get to the most free place.
Bingo. Liberalism is ill-equipped to promote free expression in any meaningful sense, because the principles it presumably holds sacred play second fiddle to the central tenant of the philosophy: private property.
Most "live free or die" types wouldn't tell someone struggling against government repression, "If you don't like it, why don't you just leave your country?" Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states. It may seem histrionic to complain about much free-market censorship now, but the vise will tighten as firms consolidate and anything threatening to the bottom line will become increasingly difficult to disseminate to a wider population.
I think there's a case to be made that public discourse regularly happens on private property and that private organizations that provide public forums as a service must respect speech rights.
Of course, I would prefer an amendment to guarantee this, but it's less tenuous than other precedents.
There is an old court case, Marsh v Alabama, where the Supreme Court indicated that the more a private property owner opens their space for public use the more the public's constitutional rights matter.
I assume you mean libertarianism, not liberalism? While some liberals might have libertarian views (and vice-versa) they are very different concepts.
> Yet they do this all the time on corporate communications channels, some of which have populations bigger than most real-world states.
Yup -- and a quick reminder (for the people in the back) that Google unilaterally controls what more than 3 billion people find when they search for information. This is a larger impact than any government in the history of humanity -- and unlike any other government in the history of humanity, Google has no constitution or laws which require it to be accountable to its citizens (or users, in this case).
You might argue that some regimes like China or the USSR only had theoretical protections for their citizens (with abuses by the government being commonplace and unpunished), but Google has no such protections to even pretend to follow. And like most independent nation-states, Google feels no pressure to obey other nations' laws if it's inconvenient for them.
To block the 996 Github presence on Github would mean to block Github, as Github is served via HTTPS. That's not viable as Github is far too useful to block (IIRC it and StackOverflow were blocked a couple of years ago but then unblocked due to uproar from the tech industry).
To block Github 966 pages specifically means the domestic browsers are pre-filtering URL requests before they're made. And that means these domestic browsers are pre-filtering all URL requests, HTTPS or not, VPN or not.
Perhaps all forms on pages loaded by these browsers are also being eavesdropped.
Safe to say any secure experience under these browsers is compromised.
I really wonder if someone could start a GitHub repo mirroring, e.g., news articles that are censored by various governments. Could be a nice way of making censorship difficult.
They don't. They "blacklist" block by ip-address. At least that was what seemed to be going on the last time I was there.
It was fairly easy to bypass; I did it with a SSH-tunnel other people do it with VPN. It seem like a completely normal thing (amongst Chinese and certainly expats) to have a VPN.
I am pretty sure since this 996-protest movement concerns tech workers that it will spread with no problem.
Also it will probably get resolved in some manner since working 996 obviously is beyond peak productivity.
SSH-tunnel will quickly degrade in throughput if you use it to breach the GFW. Some kind of traffic analysis I think. You need other tools to bypass GFW consistently.
I remember watching a TV show on dr.dk through SSH in China. Not because the GFW blocked dr.dk but because dr.dk didn't allow foreign IP-addresses to watch some of their shows.
For what it's worth, I just tried opening the supposedly blocked site using Wechat, in China, on a Chinese phone (xiaomi) with a Chinese mobile plan (China unicom) and it works fine. Not sure if that's because it was never actually blocked or because they realized blocking it was a bad move and rolled it back.
The block has been (mostly? I guess) lifted. If national news paper[0] joined the discussion, nobody dare to keep the blockage. Especially they (the web browsers) was lying about the reason of block.
In a healthy software "marketplace", there would be plenty of browser competition and such blocking would be totally ineffective. It wouldn't matter if companies had the power to censor the internet or not because people could just switch.
That's not how it works. In a truly free marketplace, eventually one, two or three winners would emerge over time and they would have an order of magnitude more capital than the rest of the players. Using that capital they can be light years ahead in terms of capabilities due to compounding effect which allows them to make some uncomfortable changes (like tracking or enforcing sister products or building walled gardens) while continue to maintain monopoly. A switch is available to customers in theory but can never be exercised without significant loss in terms of experience and/or direct money for the customer. In other words, no truly free market is actually healthy from this perspective. This is a mathematically provable by modelling events as pure random chances and players starting all equally. Eventually system will evolve to have handful of players accumulating exponential gains and resources enforcing Pareto's principle.
well. i have a huawei phone, which open link using its own browser. I have not found a way to use other broswer as default. I bet most of Chinese phone does the same.
for wechat, it open link in its own broswer too.
I could change phone and delete wechat. but do it cost too much.
The FT article is paywalled, but accessible if you search the title and click through via Google.
It's as sickening as one might expect. One more thing to think about the next time the VC crowd decides to remind us of the supposed evils of unionization and labor movements.
And collateral freedom converges to no freedom. That wikipedia page used to have list of available working "domain fronting" list, and not it's all gone.
People seems don't to remember Github was blocked several times in China before. Each time the developers united to file complaints to central government to get it unlocked.
Still today all gist.github.com is blocked. http is blocked. God know when will github be totally blocked.
That wikipedia page never had any domain fronting lists according to its edit history. It does and seemingly has always had a link to the Domain Fronting page in the "See also" section. Looking over the Domain Fronting page I also don't see any proof in the edit history that any list has been removed.
Maybe you were confusing these two for a different page that still exists?
Thanks! I learned a very useful new concept. I wonder if there’s a collateral loss of freedom, too. For example when people from the west are against Google or Apple censoring stuff, we lose all of their services—because they either censor or get censored-resulting in a loss of freedom unrelated to political contents.
I would like to see something similar in the U.S. Unfortunately, I don't see a path to resolution anytime soon, both for U.S. and China. In the past 20 years, I have only seen society become more and more corporation-friendly.
I don't even understand what the point of 996 is. I work normal hours and I find by the last hour I'm mentally done and I become totally unable to do anything more, staying extra hours would get nothing extra done.
There is no point other than opportunism. The same reason kids were working in textile mills last century and why housing costs are multiplying now in the western world.
But a greedy company acting purely in self interest wouldn't want this because you are getting less productivity by making sure your employees are constantly tired and never getting anything done.
To get the full picture you need to shift perspective and see humans more as resources. When a resource doesn’t produce enough anymore it gets replaced.
I think it’s a symptom of double digit growth. China does not have enough experienced and qualified managers and executives. So this stupid shit like this flies.
You/we do not have problems of the same scale/severity, but they are still the same problems.
This is the argument that things are good in one place because they're slightly better off than another place where things are worse. The status quo of working hours in the US are far from ideal.
Not 996, but some of the h1bs from India go through something similar 5 days a week. Many of them have to attend 'offshore calls' with the team in India which usually starts around 10 pm and goes till midnight, in addition to the regular 9-5 work. One h1b guy I know had his schedule like this - attend early morning 1-1.5 hour meetings at 6.30 am on 3 days of a week, work from 9/9.30-4 (sometimes 5 or 6), attend offshore calls from 10pm that sometimes go beyond 12 am. He worked like this for almost 4 years.
The recent Google employee protests against their Dragonfly project give me hope that there might be a similar push by tech workers in the US, but it could also just be an isolated incident.
For those of us who employ developers remotely and ask for a sane number of hours per week (usually 40), does this mean there's an opportunity to hire great developers from China who would like to have better work/life balance? Where would I start?
A sane number of hours per week is far below 40. In France, we have a 35 hour work week. I am sure we can (and I think we must) go lower without losing much. Less hours for better hours.
My experience of working for a massive company in france was we had a "35 hour" workweek, which cadres would regularly ignore. They were typically doing 8:30-7pm or 9pm-7pm.
Two things that seem like they might be impediments:
- Traversing the Great Firewall is slow and unreliable. Having team members on either side of it wouldn't be great for collaboration.
- I seem to remember reading about somebody complaining that sending money to Chinese citizens from abroad can be very difficult. I don't recall the details though.
Sending out money from china can be a real pain. The government requires a contract be on file. I’m dealing with this right now on the receiving end as US citizen. Apparently there are certain cases like paying US engineers which get rubber stamp approval, but there’s been some inconsistencies in payments that make me wonder if it’s partly due to invoices being higher than expected than the contract on file.
I think hacknews is good place. the barriar is english. chinese developer who visit hacknews pass the english requirement and usually are interested in software development.
I agree. I work for a Chinese company in Shenzhen. There are a few software developers I cannot speak with face-to-face, but almost all are decent through text and patient enough when I need clarification. And if they are actually visiting sites like HackerNews, or contributing to StackOverflow they likely are more than proficient enough to work with.
Just be sure to double check their comments and documentation to be sure it's readable. My coworkers have always appreciated when I've helped make their stuff more readable.
I'm a Chinese developer. Yes, English is a high barrier for most Chinese developer to get in touch with developers out of China. I can read, write without any problem but talk is hard for me as I have no chance to talk to any English speaking people.
When I visited in 1999, my friend’s mom had to work on saturdays, and pretty late everyday at that. This mostly went away but popped back up in Chinese tech industry for recent times.
Many Chinese tech companies even have time cards for salaried employees to make sure they are in the office enough, as well as cheer leaders and such to keep them motivated past dinner time.
I didn't know they had a phrase for long working hours until I read this.
I have done 996 for a while in china, and it wrecks your social life, as now all of a sudden you have no free evenings and only one day in the weekend to balance fun stuff with weekly chores. Meeting friends outside of work is nearly impossible. Also, when near a release, expect to 'give your best' for the company and work on sunday as well.
You do however get 2-hour lunch breaks (i.e. nap time for your chinese colleagues), and about half a hour for dinner which you can also get at or near work.
Wow, that's a brutal work schedule. Hard to believe it's the norm. Isn't there enough demand that tech workers could elect to work elsewhere if their employer enforces this?
I was never on a schedule this bad but when I was doing regular overtime (~52 hrs/week, the worst weeks coming in at 60) I found that my work drained me physically to the point where I just lost all ability to enjoy my life and do... anything - I just sort of collapsed through a work day into the next work day with a blearily remember transit ride and face-stuffed-with-pizza home time between it. As one of the two back-end developers I put my foot down regarding more OT and got out of that job as soon as I had a solid alternative.
My life is not a way to transform calories into money for someone else, nobody's should be - stand up for your rights.
That was an old joke with caffeine instead of calories.
I worked seven days a week for two months. We were paid double salaries and some perks, but no amount of money would have convinced us to keep that schedule longer. It was absolutely crazy.
To clarify, 40 hours was explicitly guaranteed only for civil service staff. For private sectors, working hour is unspecified. However working 996 without compensation is illegal. In theory the employer has to triple hour fee for >40h over time.
Overtime in mainland China is hard-ceilinged at 36 hours per month (1.5 hours per day...). Beyond that is illegal, which is likely in large part why 996 companies don't like the spotlight in the current 'who knows' game of who Beijing/Xi will selectively select to be made an example of.
Triple hourly pro-rata pay is only for working over official statutory holidays, otherwise overtime pay is 1.5 pro-rata hourly rate for working days and double hourly rate for 'rest days' (this would include Saturday or Sunday for a Monday-Friday employment contract).
Most of the tech firms do this kind of brutal work schedule, so there are only very few choices left in the market, which are mostly foreign or national enterprises.
The working hours is one thing. What I am most curious about is does more hours being put in mean more/better work output; ie does the 996 work culture actually means a higher output, even if by a slight margin?
Personally my opinion is that coding is not like the assembly line where more hours mean more things that's produced, but more lines of code can mean absolutely nothing (sometimes can even be a negative). However, looking at the recent progress in China, I am wondering what percentage of that is attributed to the 996 working culture, or is it to do with something else?
9am-9pm really is the period of presence in office. It's always that way in countries where the stats show high "working hours".
It is also traditional in Chinese work culture to have a nap after lunch, which provides a break and helps with staying later.
Dinner is also usually early (6pm) so 9am-9pm days mean a lunch break and a dinner break.
Working 6 days a week has been quite standard in Asia. I remember Korea moved to 2-day weekends only a few years ago, and it's hard to change work culture.
It's probably also compounded by the fact that in China there is no day off for shops, restaurants, banks, etc. Everything is open 7 days a week by default, which is great as a consumer but probably means pressure on staff.
So a 40 hour work week does not mean 40 productive hours. Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your work time, then 40 hour work week means 16 productive hours per week, whereas 996, 72 hours a week means 28.8 productive hours per week.
Now my question is, is the assumption of productive hour ratio real or does it start high and end low? And if my assumption of the flat productive ratio is true, then does it actually yield any good results?
> Let's say that you are only truly productive at a flat rate of 40% of your work time
That's not the case. Hourly productivity decreases at some point.
The law of diminishing returns is at play here. Working longer hours leads to higher overall output up to a point as the marginal increase diminishes.
Then, at some point you are too tired and produces bad software that will cost to fix.
If your employer pays you a flat rate then it is profitable to make you work long hours up to the point when you start screwing up.
If they pay you by the hour or if they pay you overtime, rationally they shouldn't push you beyond the point where your hourly output is too low to justify your pay.
Look, I completely understand what you are saying, because it's something I believe as well. However, what I am trying to find out more is whether this belief is correct or not and whether anyone has done any actual studies.
This is the way it is. Anyone who's worked in the industry (or any industry?) knows from experience that this is the way it is. I'm sure that there are data available.
A quick Googling for "productivity vs hours worked" led me to this:
Unfortunately there are quite a few problems in the report:
1. it measures productivity by GDP, which itself is not a great measure
2. it compares Greece vs Germany, and fails to mention that they rely on completely different industries; Greek - agriculture, Germany - manufacturing
But what we are talking about here specifically is the software development industry, where quantity does not always mean quality. So herein lies the problem that potentially a lot of our beliefs that "more hours worked means diminished return" could just be based on bad data analysis.
There is a reason why companies cannot just lower employee's salary and hire more people instead of pushing people to work more time: that is, once you give people these option, people will go to choose to work for companies with higher pay and more overtime. That's a choice. There is a reason your salary is a lot higher than any other people, and there is a reason it is a developing country.
Interesting observation from Germany: I have encountered some reports about 996 in main-stream media in the past weeks. However, the spin was that Chinese workers are proud to work 996, or demand not to work MORE than 996 - in essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with their productivity.
> in essence: Brace yourselves Germans, the Chinese people will crush you with their productivity.
996 isn't a matter of productivity (other than perhaps indicating exceptionally poor productivity). Productivity is closer related to how much output you generate in a given unit of time.
Brace yourself Chinese, the Germans are smashing you when it comes to productivity with their $48,000 GDP per capita and 30 hours per week of work.
A balanced mixture of high value output and quality of life (fewer hours worked) is the ideal. If China had an epic GDP per capita, it'd be worth considering the merits of how they're doing things. As it is now, they're still losing horribly. The premise properly should be that 996 dies - it becomes an absurdity, a relic of development - as they push up the economic ladder. If they can't escape the middle income trap, that may never happen.
Do Chinese workers not have the flexibility to avoid working for companies that force these schedules on them? I know next to nothing about working life in China, but wouldn't workers generally gravitate to the companies that value work/life balance?
Is working for these companies just worth the prestige for some?
Yes, and no. IT development is one of the best paying professional jobs in China, commanding 3x to 8x a typical office worker's salary.
If you have skills, experience, or for a fresh graduate an interest, in what in the US would be considered a mainstream enterprisy (Java, Angular, .NET) and passable English or Japanese language skills, you can get a position in development with a Fortune 500 or as a contractor to a F500 without too much difficulty. Normal 9-6, 5 day work week, public holidays plus 10-15 days discretionary holiday per year, stability over fast-pace, middle class income (8,000 Yuan per month for 0-2 years experience, 20,000 per month in a Tier-2 city for 5 years experience; for reference rent for a newish 2 bedroom apartment within 20 minutes walk to the office would be about 3000 Yuan per month).
The BATs (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) pay more, 2x or 3x, and are the glamorous places for fresh grads to work. Good luck getting in though.
Want-to-be BATs are probably the worst employers. They lack the pay and prestige of BATs, lack the stability and sane working culture of F500s, and tend to have terrible management that lack conviction and realistic goals. Without a BAT or F500 early in one's career, it's hard to break away from want-to-be-BATs.
I know nothing about Games development, so no comment there.
There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic. Working in a Tier-1 city will mean rents are way higher, purchase of property probably unattainable, and wages probably less than double those mentioned above.
>There is a big age ceiling. 15 years experience doesn't pay much better than 5 years experience and will often be met with questions about why not able to move into product ownership of management, but that's another topic.
Is product ownership or management seriously considered a better job in China? At almost all places I worked at in EU middle management/product ownership is considered a less desirable position.
It does, thanks for taking the time. I would definitely be gunning for the "mainstream enterprisy" positions over the BAT wannabes given the option, but as some have said, sometimes the choices aren't that straightforward or open.
Chinese people are too many compared to the resources affordable to them. The US people are in the contrary position. That difference is the source of many differences between the two country.
And in this case, only a handle of companies in China offer work-life balance, most of which are owned by foreign capital (e.g. Google, Microsoft and IBM). They are very hard to get in, even harder than their US counterparts, because of the much smaller headcount and much larger pool of candidates.
Actually, I don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge.
Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.
Maybe in absolute terms but their per-hour income is lower. They're working 1.8 times longer than a 40 hour week but not earning 1.8 times as much as they would when working in e.g. Europe.
>> Ironically, given that China is a communist country, workers’ rights movements and unions are extremely uncommon
> mind-boggling.
The CCP feels threatened by any kind of idependent political organization that's not the CCP or directly under its thumb. This includes students that actually take Marxism seriously:
Yeah, kind of interesting phenomenon. It is now the left of the party that is being marginalised, and they actually are the ones who are more active on Internets: banyuetan, CYL journals, utopia, caogen...
The party is now busy purging CYL. The few CPC candidates that came through that route to CPC were driven out of politics, down to village mayor levels in the middle of nowheres. 刘剑 kicked from a post in a far away Hami, 余远辉 in Nanning
19th CPC really has close to no people younger than fifty, and is the oldest CPC by average age after 12th or 13th CPC.
China is not a communist country, it's a “communist with Chinese values” country. I don't know what it means, but every time the topic is brought on the table, this is the official stance from the Chinese Communist Party.
I guess it means you owe loyalty to whatever authority you get: father, teacher, employer, emperor. Respect them, or they will crush you.
It means socialist country with Chinese style or Chinese variation. What it really means is that whenever needed, rules and values are bent and interpreted to the advantage of the ruling party. I am disgusted by it. That is doubly unfortunate because I consider myself Chinese, yet I consider myself fortunate compared to the millions in China because I am in a free country.
China was a pure communist country before the reform.
To keep the name, they had to attach it to a different interpretation.
when it comes to respecting the authority,
「王侯將相,寧有種乎!」is a pretty common value to Chinese people. can be partially translated as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman？--John Ball".
The people who was drafted for army was moving to the designated place. But due to the flooding, it is obvious they can't reach the place by the deadline. The penalty to miss the deadline is, by any means, death.
By facing the certain and unfair death penalty ahead of them, they decided the uprising. Saying.
王侯將相寧有種乎, "The king, loads, generals or ministers, Is there the seed for them?(no it isn't)"
In the end, they(the leaders, 陳勝 and 呉広) couldn't complete the the revolution. But the uprising movements continues and 秦 era was ended soon after.
It's quite understandable how it happens, in China like most single party countries the average person has no political power, if they have no power then they can't exercise any rights or hope to gain any.
The idea of communism is that government is your employer and you trust your government to re-distribute product of all labours fairly among all participants. Given that workers unions exist as an adversarial or at the very least opposing power to employers, they are explicitly not allowed in communism because otherwise (in theory) you hurt government's ability to meet its goals for fair redistribution. Another reason they are not allowed is because they can potentially create new workers movement overthrowing present government. Also, things like work hours, overtime, holidays are non-negotiable because now you are supposed to be working for all your comrades, not just yourself. If country happens to have only 1/10th of doctors and if doctors are now need to work 18 hours shifts, that's what they need to do for same pay.
No, that is state capitalism. It is where all communist revolutions seem to get stuck. Seems to be a bit of a fixed point and the idea that you can transition through this to the workers owning the means of production is deeply flawed.
I think there was a similar thing in USSR: there were no independent workers' unions and a worker in a capitalist country had better chances to protect their rights. There wasn't anything like 996 though and people mostly didn't work overtime.
I don't see this going anywhere. Anyone seriously pushing this will just be replaced. Chinese companies will probably take the US approach and just ignore/cover up the whole thing, or make some handwavey pithy gestures.
“At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate to the interests of the nation and the masses. Hence selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight are most contemptible, while ... working with all one’s energy, whole hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.”
I don't think github is proper place to discuss workers rights. First if China gov block Github eventually, The whole programmer in china would lose a good place to share, learning knowledge.
Second, In China, programmers are looked as mid-class, what most of them earn are as ten times as what other persons who work at other area earn. we can't because they speak loudly, then think they are right. they 996 just because they earn much more.
