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Overtime Complaints? China's JD.com Boss Criticizes 'Slackers' (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Richard Liu, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc, has weighed in on an ongoing debate about the Chinese tech industry's grueling overtime work culture, lamenting that years of growth had increased the number of "slackers" in his firm who are not his "brothers...." Liu, who started the company that would become JD.com in 1998, in the note spoke about how in the firm's earliest days he would set his alarm clock to wake him up every two hours to ensure he could offer his customers 24-hour service -- a step he said was crucial to JD's success...
The '996' work schedule, which refers to a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. workday, six days a week, has in particular become the target of online debate and protests on some coding platforms, where workers have swapped examples of excessive overtime demands at some firms. Liu said JD did not force its staff to work the "996" or even a "995" overtime schedule. "But every person must have the desire to push oneself to the limit!" he said.
JD disputed reports that the company would be cutting up to 8% of its workforce, but did say "We're getting back to those roots as we seek, develop and reward staff who share the same hunger and values... JD.com is a competitive workplace that rewards initiative and hard work, which is consistent with our entrepreneurial roots."
JD's investors include Walmart and Google.
The '996' work schedule, which refers to a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. workday, six days a week, has in particular become the target of online debate and protests on some coding platforms, where workers have swapped examples of excessive overtime demands at some firms. Liu said JD did not force its staff to work the "996" or even a "995" overtime schedule. "But every person must have the desire to push oneself to the limit!" he said.
JD disputed reports that the company would be cutting up to 8% of its workforce, but did say "We're getting back to those roots as we seek, develop and reward staff who share the same hunger and values... JD.com is a competitive workplace that rewards initiative and hard work, which is consistent with our entrepreneurial roots."
JD's investors include Walmart and Google.
JD's boss: Shut up plebe! Now lift me up in my palanquin.
That's what the boss is asking for. Not that I'm a fan of the CCP, but sooner or later the CCP is going to do something about it, not after the goodness of the chairman's heart but to prevent a backslash on the high-value-added service industry (that happens to be effing critical for its end goals of economic growth.)
Even by China's standards, JD's boss sounds like a damned asshole. It takes a lot of effort to stand out like that.
In Japan, kids rarely get to see their fathers at all. At best, once a week. At worst, he lives in a different apartment close to work, and work is his family. Especially "successful" ones.
In China, I figure they'd just save the additional step, and sleep, work and eat right at the factory.
It's the "being a cog in a machine without hierarchy" mindset, that they wrongly associate with communism. (China is not communist. Because if you look it up, the whole point of communism is self-sufficient communes with no central leadership. *Very* overlapping with US libertarianism.)
I know several people like this guy. In the case of my friends, they're not exploitative - they're incredibly nice people who pay and treat their employees well. They just happen to be very hard-working and dedicated to their jobs. The most successful one runs a multi-million dollar company. He described his workday to me once and he's basically constantly glued to a screen reading up on any new news that may be relevant to his business sector. Even during meals he'll be reading up on something. He typically goes to sleep past midnight, and wakes up around 4:30. His wife tells me that when they're on vacation, she has to constantly pull tablets and the phones out of his hands because he'll try to sneak in some work, rather than enjoy the vacation and time off. (After she confiscates his phone and locks it in the hotel room safe, he tries to steal his kids' phones so he can do more work.)
Anyhow, people tend to imagine that everyone else is like themselves. And workaholics tend to assume that everyone else could work as hard as they do, not realizing that most of us aren't blessed to be doing jobs that we love enough to want to spend most of our waking moments doing it.
Are you a boss? Do you supervise other employees? If you don't then you don't know. You underestimate the difficulty of work you haven't performed.
Me, I tried being the boss a couple of times. It's hard! You can't get qualified people when you need them. You're lucky if you can get qualified people before you need them when it's hard to justify the expense. And you can't keep them. They move on when they're ready.
Hiring a bunch of juniors is a disaster, especially smart juniors. They don't know what they don't know but enough of them together convince themselves that they do. Easy way to lose your seniors is to hire more juniors than the seniors can ride herd on.
Meanwhile the big boss never wants to hear that he can't do what he wants to do because you can't hire enough staff to make it happen... not even if you pay more because there just aren't enough competent people in the field looking.
So here's a lesson: don't tell the other guy how easy his job is. You don't know, he knows you don't know and to him you just look like a fool.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
My old boss used to say "if you work overtime, your planning was bad and it's your own damn fault. I never asked you to work overtime, I just asked for a realistic planning." It certainly taught me to plan better.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
That's success. Clock-watching is failure. No different than non-trivial amounts of overtime is failure.
That's success in a business sense, perhaps. However, I value success in a family sense. When I leave on time, I get to sit down a bit, then cook for my family. They value this greatly. I've had discussions with a manager, where he would say I'm not a team player. When in actuality, I'm a teamplayer just not for the company profit.
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