Mike Moritz slams politically correct tech culture, praises Chinese work ethic
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
So of course it’s easier to say certain things over there than it is over here. That’s the difference between a society where tensions are high because we’re actively trying to work through the challenges faced by our minority groups, and one where there are no tensions because the concerns of minority groups are completely suppressed.
It’s also myopic to mistake forced social harmony for principled open mindedness. My extended family is from a South Asian country, and let’s face it—people say things that could, among Americans, get them in trouble. That’s not out of open mindedness. Try bringing up a cousin possibly being gay and see how open minded everyone is.
Very well put!
Americans think they are surrounded by racism, they have no idea what that actually means.
Brazil, Thailand, UK, France, Poland, Mexico, Canada, and Egypt are right out from my own experience.
This EXACTLY. Of course there is way less culture clash in China, cultures that aren't China explicitly get beat the hell down. That's not a solution, and I think China is going to be a lesson for the rest of humanity within the next 30 years or so as to why just telling everyone to shut up or they'll be killed isn't a sustainable long term solution to social harmony.
In China, there is the objective of China, where there is a singular focus on what is good for the people and the country. Groups that would take away from this to empower their own group are viewed as attacking the collective.
America until the middle of the 1960s or so was like this to a large extent. Various minorities (Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans) entered the country, kept separate identities for a while, but eventually integrated into the whole. The death of John F. Kennedy signaled the end of a unified America and the birth of a far more divided house.
Today, America has fractured into a litany of squabbling sects. In China, you have the Chinese. In America, what used to be called "Americans" are now called whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Arabs, gays, straights, bisexuals, pansexuals, transexuals, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, globalists, Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews. There are feminists and men's rights activists and Black Lives Matter and the Alt-Right. Each sect wants the spotlight; it wants advantages over other groups (masked with euphemisms like "equality" or "recognition" or "reparations"); and it views the overall identity of the country as an oppressive enemy that must be fought.
That is not to say one condition is better than the other. These seem to be natural cycles nations go through. John Glubb notes the Byzantines squabbling amongst themselves over their divisions as the Ottomans blew holes in the walls around their city in 1453. [1] Byzantium, like America, had been the world's greatest super power at one time too. It seems likely the slide into infighting and decadence is a natural state of every nation advanced in the cycles of civilizations.
But of course, a people that spends its time tip-toeing around and arguing about what labels to use to refer to this group and who can use that word and who can't use that word and how many of which group you have to hire to not get sued has very different priorities and will achieve very different outcomes than a people that is relentlessly focused on a more singular, unified objective, other things being equal.
In America's case, I suppose the question is: do the benefits of diversity (which has become a sort of national religion over the past two decades) outweigh the costs?
The test case of American "maximum diversity" vs. Chinese maximal industriousness may prove as close as we'll get to a controlled study on how these two very different national priorities stack up against one another head-to-head on the world stage over the coming decades.
Place your bets now folks....
Basically, we're seeing the same complaint today.
The word he is looking for is “entitlement caused by excessive privilege.”
The reason people in China work that hard is that there are many people in poverty who would also like to work very hard for those jobs and very little safety net.
I should also mention once again: The United States is nowhere near as racist or sexist as these countries as mentioned above.
However the common opinion is that the United States is extremely racist and sexist. To people who genuinely believe this: You have no idea what the rest of the world is like, please travel.
The things I have seen folks from China openly saying and doing in business make the United States look very fair.
However when you look at countries we materially support (in their carrying out of racist actions) like Israel, liberals do care very much. So it does seem like there's some consistency there.
I actually agree with Moritz on some points, but this... all I can say is, from an employee perspective, this only makes sense IF you're going to get rich as a result. And the average startup employee does not get enough equity to get rich even in the event of a successful exit, so there's no reason to do this kind of stuff. Well, OK, maybe if you just plain enjoy coding (or whatever) to the point that you want to work 12-14 hours days. But I suspect that's a very small number of people.
Seriously though, unless you're being paid MEGA-BUCKS or have MASSIVE equity there is just no reason to work yourself to death.
Does he himself work from 8am until 10pm?
I share pretty much the same experience. Five to six hours of coding is a good day in terms of work for me.
The flip side to this: we may soon have to do just that, merely to maintain our status-quo.
SV engineers are getting paid 2-5x what engineers in China are making. Over the long-term, this is an unnatural state of affairs, and can only be maintained by continually extending our competitive edge. If engineers in China are catching up on talent, earning a fraction of our wages, and working twice the number of hours, it's only a matter of time before we see a regression-to-the-mean.
An an employee myself, I don't begrudge any of my colleagues wanting to minimize their work-hours and maximize their quality-of-life. But then again, I can hardly begrudge an employer/investor deciding to partner with someone who's willing to sacrifice quality-of-life and go the extra mile for her job.
If you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can maximize quality-of-life, while still pulling in the big bucks, milk it for all it's worth. But don't expect it to last forever.
Still, you're right to say that
If engineers in China are catching up on talent, earning a fraction of our wages, and working twice the number of hours, it's only a matter of time before we see a regression-to-the-mean.
however the details work out.
What a delightful fellow. I wonder if he’s going to lead by example, or if he thinks 14-hour days are only for underlings.
But don't tell him what happens if he ever tries to take his money OUT of China, we can let that be a "fun" learning experience for him.
Sucks that conference speakers are being "checked" for political affiliations. Why not let the topic stand on its own?
But of course, everyone is free to not listen to people that don't support them in some way. It's a delicate line.
> "grumbling about the need for a space for musical jam sessions."
What? I have to believe that isn't common and it's being used as a "see how lazy/unprofessional/undedicated _everyone_ in SV is"
On sites like reddit you often see reasonable arguments shot down based on the author's political leanings gleaned from their comment history. The chilling effect is made clear when you see people having to preface their commentary with "I hate x, but... {insert argument here}"
For example before reddit we didn't have popular fascist subforums hosted on the same site as a liberal politics subforum, where people could cross-post and PM between them.
Look, there's genuinely important discussions to be had right now. If he wants his son to grow up addicted to a social network he interfaces with through a screen, or his daughter to be subjected to casual sexism, because it'd hurt some engineers' feelings to be confronted with that toxic reality, then cry me a river. I for one am glad to see someone making a stand, some of the discourse we see now is meaningful and I'm happy for it. (far from all of it, don't get me wrong. but a lot of these discussions are way overdue and we shouldn't throw away the baby with the bathwater).
That having been said, this article really looks like one of those 'we paraphrased 5 minutes of nuanced commentary into a shitty one-liner'. I'm sure I'll still disagree with his more elaborate views, but I get the feeling there's more to his argument than this article supposes.
Because the former is just cover for the latter, which is the real concern. He, like most of his type, wants his underlings to work as much as possible for as little as possible without any complaints. This has become annoyingly hard to enforce in the US, so off to a dictatorship where the drones don't have those options.
Nor is it good for employee retention, but apparently there is no concern for employee retention.
https://www.ft.com/content/42daca9e-facc-11e7-9bfc-052cbba03...
I get some of the investor's complaints about pc culture, and at the same time I wonder if this guy considers the ideal corporation one where an "employee" literally "works" 24/7, never leaves his/her desk for anything thanks to IV tubes for food, digestion, and medications to keep oneself constantly awake; and the bio-energy of the employee is harvested to supply energy for the office building.
Quite the recipe for individual and societal flourishing...
Why do we even have to have a discussion when all he complains about is how they work for 12 hours? They copied every SV company the moment it hit off, no real innovation besides the recent AI advancements. What good would come off by copying that model?
"Top managers show up for work at about 8am and frequently don't leave until 10pm. Most of them will do this six days a week — and there are plenty of examples of people who do this for seven. Engineers have slightly different habits: they will appear about 10am and leave at midnight."
This dude wants his fellow Americans to work at least 84 hours a week, if not a "modest 7 day work week" of almost 100 hours. Life is too precious for that sort of nonsense and I can only hope that this fellow and those like him lose their power and capability to influence society.
It is interesting to contrast this investor's cliches about working 12 or 14 hours day as a key to success and Chinese work ethic with what an actual Chinese business leader as to say on that topic:
“My grandfather worked for 16 hours a day. He thought he was very busy. We work eight hours a day for five days a week and we think we are very busy. But in the next 30 years, people will work only for four hours a day and four days a week”
meanwhile in the official chinese media, we get a pretty different picture. I wonder what the chinese communist party thinks of westerners assuming their people are willing to work like slaves.
(and this is regardless of culture or nationality) betting on those who are sitting on their chairs longer is just "traditional" corporate shortsightedness
If Mike wants to fund a Mythical Man Month play against efficient workers, I wish him the best of luck. I don't think it will work but I'm interested in the results.
Sounds legit.
I don’t really know if it’s the WHOLE of tech (or just how it’s reported), but it definitely feels like a downer right now.
As a tech liberal dreamer, it’s totally getting to me.
I want to read about interesting new solutions to problems, but at the moment it seems mostly like negative press about Uber.
Obviously it’s responsible to call it when conpanies do bad things, but is tech really unethical on the scale of pharma or agrobusiness or fast food? Doesn’t seem so. ( I get that they’re tech press so they’ll only report on tech, but context would be nice).
Feels like the optimism is gone?
The PC problem is a result of prosperity without corresponding effort. I hope the correction is a kind one.
I'm not saying political correctness is bad, and I don't think this guy is saying that either. He's just stating the facts and I would like to also just state the facts.
There are way more conflicts and drama and scandals in America because Americans are much more "woke" than citizens of other parts of the world. Again, this is not a "bad" thing, but if you look at what this is causing, same americans are tearing down successful and ambitious american entrepreneurs who may have achieved something really great.
Let me use Uber as an example, since I know you guys will downvote me anyway. The founder of Uber got kicked out and now Uber is struggling. When Uber was struggling to grow in China, Americans were busy criticizing Uber for all kinds of things. This probably didn't help them in any way. You will say companies like Uber and the founder deserves it and unethical companies like Uber should not be left to survive.
And I agree with the sentiment that unethical companies are bad, but again, I'm just going to state the facts.
If you look at "less woke" developing countries around the world, they don't have this sense of social justice because they don't have the luxury. So they do whatever is possible to increase their GDP.
That's why a lot of developing countries are corrupt. But guess what, that's how these countries and companies from these countries grow. Companies like Samsung have always had very tight relationship with their government, and most people--while they never actually witness the corruption--kind of acknowledge that something like that happens behind the scenes. The woke Americans will say that's bad and that shouldn't happen, and samsung should be taken down, etc.
But at the end of the day, this is how developing countries actually accumulate their riches and this is how the top performing companies from these countries reach the top and end up growing globally.
They will one day become the "woke" ones as much as Americans are, but until then, they will become richer and richer and soon be a threat to the U.S. economy.
This has nothing to do with ethics, justice, or whatever. This is just how it has always been, and that's how it will be.
If you look at what's happening with China, it really IS taking over the world. A lot of top cryptocurrency projects and companies are from China. Most influential hardware are increasingly coming from China. All this while the ADD silicon valley founders and VCs are pouring money into fad technologies and having a serious identity crisis.
They don't have that sense of social justice for a number of reasons. Having lived in the developing world, one big component is that the legal system is not set up to prevent exploitation of the many by the few who are rich. Corruption and exploitation are entrenched because the culture accepts it and those crushed under it don't feel they have the power to change it.
There's more than enough money in many developing nations to significantly raise the standard of living for the average citizen, but those taking the lion's share of the spoils have no interest in changing that system.
> That's why a lot of developing countries are corrupt.
No, a lot of developing countries are corrupt due to weak rule of law and an entrenched culture of back-scratching. The corruption is not there simply because they are relatively poor countries.
So for example, in Latin America, Brazil's GDP is around $1.8 trillion, and Costa Rica is at $57 billion. Yet Costa Rica performs MUCH better on international corruption scale. And there are plenty of examples of that. Look at Russia versus some of it's former satellite states. Corruption is much worse in Russia than it is in Georgia, even though Russia is a much bigger economy.
It really is about the strength of institutions and rule of law. Being a developing nation doesn't mean that out-of-control graft is inevitable.
But that's not what the comment was about.
As I understand it, China has a gender imbalance and there are not enough women. Men therefore must be successful to find a wife. This could help explain some of the difference in work ethic, as one of the primary human motivations is to reproduce.
It’s extremely simple: everybody wants to be successful, and right now because of many reasons, Chinese think they can be successful by working hard. This is the Chinese equivalent of American dream, that one can pursue happiness by working hard.