[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”.

[hitekker]

Ironically, this comment comes across a denial of human nature.

I think it’s wrong to assume that evolutionary psychology and sociology are mutually exclusive.

[bigred100]

To force an analogy that I think is frankly stupid but may sort of work here, I believe that almost everyone who is an engineer or programmer or something is going to be much better served by thinking of intuitive notions of continuity, linear approximations, etc. when trying to do or apply calculus than by imagining infinite seas of power sets of the empty set and building up from ZFC axioms to dedekind cuts

[mevile]

This is my favorite all time comment on HN. Thank you for these words. I agree!

[arkitaip]

"Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape."

Amazing phrase.

[BigJono]

Keep in mind these are all salaried workers. From an economics point of view, companies don't need to get anywhere near a linear increase in productivity from those extra work hours. They just need to not get negative gains from burnout or apathy.

All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.

Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.

[regularfry]

It's simple: you can pay a "passionate" person less, and generally subject them to worse working conditions, and they won't leave.

[jpking]

I don't think that these 12 hour days are full of productivity. My partner spent some time in the summer as a researcher at a key lab in Shanghai. She observed that researchers put in long hours (if the boss was around) but often spent time on their phones and repeated experiments mindlessly.

Kai-Fu Lee discusses this culture in the Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next. He suggests that many of the workers will be the only ones in their family who have high paid office jobs. The rest work in factories, farms and other manual labor. Thus, they see an opportunity to be successful and lift their family out of poverty.

[hylaride]

Reminds me of a few business trips I did to Korea about 8 years ago. Loooooong hours, but lots of 'make work' projects and redoing everything because a manager didn't like or approve of some minor subset.

[jpking]

The redoing my partner saw was often because an experiment didn't result in what the researcher expected. Rather than try to figure out what went wrong (or why their expectations were wrong), they'd spend lots of time repeating exactly the same thing.

[scruple]

That's equal parts hilarious and frightening and sad at the same time.

[matz1]

>but often spent time on their phones and repeated experiments mindlessly

For some people this is called breaks.

Yes, you shouldn't do 12 hours full working, you should take sufficient number of breaks in between.

This will fit the 996 system.

[jpking]

You could look at it that way. Hours of time would be spent like this toward the end of the day so why not just go home?

In addition, mindlessly repeating experiments isn't a break.

[matz1]

During breaks you can go home as well

What constitutes a breaks of course different for each person. Maybe some prefer go to gym instead or going for coffee, or simply just strolling around.

[colejohnson66]

> During breaks you can go home as well

Not always true. In the US, you can be required to stay on premises, but it must be paid.

[thetechlead]

> 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.

That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.

[scruple]

Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani / Theranos / Bad Blood. Blind devotion to "the mission." "We're saving lives!" or "We're changing the world!" is pretty easy to sniff out as cultish posturing, IMHO. I blame it on the cult of personality, personally.