Always-on Alibaba office app fuels backlash among Chinese workers | Hacker News Reader

Always-on Alibaba office app fuels backlash among Chinese workers

businessinsider.com

165 pointslnguyen84 comments

After working for that company for awhile... The entire goal is to look busy, so people create work and don't accomplish a whole lot. 10-12 hour days are expected whether or not you have work to do, or if your work efficiently. The Chinese are also very suspicious of anyone that is not Chinese, and you're very much considered an outsider and will be informed on a need to know basis if that's the case. They're wildly successful inside China, but that's likely more do to government protected Monopoly than actually having a product that works. The best part of working there is when I pointed out builds with failing tests were making it to production, and the architect in charge told me that they can still release, it just decreases the 'quality score'.

> The entire goal is to look busy, so people create work and don't accomplish a whole lot.

That's been my experience working for a large financial company. Except the part about 10 hour days. That wasn't expected.

If it works, it works. I remember standing at the base of the new Tencent double tower, when it was being constructed. They were almost done with the concrete skeleton and the beams looked all crooked standing there looking up at the structure - each column on each floor was slightly misplaced compared to the previous one. I am no construction engineer, but I believe they should have been placed in a straight line, but maybe I am wrong..

All structural elements have geometrical flaws, and in concrete structures tolerances are measured in centimetets/inches. Alignment issues may result in problems if they are not addressed in design time (i.e. buckling) but that sort of scenario is very basic. Even european construction standards directly address geometrical flaws. They may look ugly but they're not exactly a problem.

Breaking a build, however, is a major problem.

I assume they would be more than a few inches off to be noticeable by the OP.

Maybe not the case if they looked crooked, but having irregular placement of construction elements is a valid way to decrease tendency for self resonance through different vibration modes being dampened by the mismatched distances.

An irregular structure can be useful for improving earthquake resistance, or sway/vibrations in high wind situations.

Chinese construction leverages concrete by a fairly unskilled work force. To make up for the safety problems with that, they overbuild a lot, so precision isn't very necessary, but the building will deteriorate a lot faster without much more maintenance. So a newish building in China that is only a few years old will often feel much older than that, but at least it won't fall down.

Similar construction is utilized by India, and exported to other countries that utilize Indian construction labor (Singapore, Dubai, ...). Really it is just a trade off that soaks up cheap labor, which is very much in these country's best interest ATM.

You explained what people used to tell me how GCC buildings didn't last as long thanks.

GCC?

I assume Gulf Cooperation Council. UAE, Saudi, Quwait etc

ADV China youtube channel has covered this with some great video of new construction problems in China (not implying the problem is only there):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E

It could be a design and what you were missing is a glass facade that would align its missing symmetry.

This would make sense based on this picture : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Tencent_... There are a lot of angled windows on one side that would be awkward looking without the facade.

Here's a photo of the thing pre facade http://2016.ctbuh.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Tencent1.jp...

Just did a google of the tencent building. Wow.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/07/inside-new-tencent-headquart...

Very common bias. WeChat and other messaging apps are leaps and bounds more innovative

How? Do you mean in their core features (chat related), or all the extra stuff the bundle in the app (payments, apps, etc.)?

WeChat has basically everything built in. Messenger has been trying to copy features from them, to no adaptability avail. Watch the video of Zuckerberg saying how they need to catch up to Chinese messaging apps.

This is not a bias, this was my experience. I hope conditions are better where you work. It's very sad to see people away from their families that much just to save face.

No, what you're talking about is stereotype. You have one experience and apply it to everyone.

Imagine if you said that about black people: "black people tend to..." It's unacceptable in polite society, if you're socially aware

well the basic rule of Chinese office work it's too arrive before your boss and leave after him, what you actually do in time between it's irrelevant (most likely Taobao/JD shopping or gaming)

That’s the basic rule of _any_ office work outside software. At least if you want to get ahead.

It's called facetime culture. It exists everywhere.

https://hackernoon.com/how-can-we-kill-facetime-culture-once...

No different than many of the other enterprise chat apps. Amazon Chime is some of the buggiest software I've ever used.

"If you come into Starbucks in the morning and you are told you can't buy coffee because their staff hasn't arrived, will you accept that? Even the Europeans won't accept tardiness."

It's often done that someone appeals to examples from other cultures that might not be entirely accurate. Being a bit late, particularly if you live in a city with bad traffic, is absolutely accepted. Also, who in the UK hasn't heard the "we don't have train drivers" excuse?

The thing to think about is why there's demand for this sort of corporate leash. I guess there's a lot of bosses who distrust their employees. A friend of mine works for a firm from home one or two days a week, and it turns out they check whether your mouse is moving.

I run a tech team that's 100% work from home. I think if I insisted on GPS and face recognition it would quickly get miserable for everyone.

There's something I call the "ghost rower" effect. If you've ever rowed a boat (think Oxford and Cambridge) it's possible to move the oar in such a way that you look like you're rowing, but you are not really contributing to the boat moving faster. It works because someone on the shore can only check that you're sliding back and forth, and your oar is in the water.

Most modern desk jobs allow the same. You can show up, you can have Excel open, you can attend meetings. All without doing anything useful.

If you want more ghost rowers, install DingChat.

If the staff haven’t arrived who is telling you this?

The entire analogy makes no sense. That person has never been to Starbucks nor to The West. If they had been to France or Italy they would see things very differently! Countries with a relaxed way of life that nevertheless get things done and deliver a high standard of living to their citizens.

Believe me or not, we installed a computer vision powered check in system at our office. They are surprisingly cheap.

It might be surprisingly cheap but seems incredibly miserable to work there. It shows that the company does not trust their own employees and is a sign of bad management.

It depends how the check in is used. When I worked in Germany we had time cards and the main purpose was to make sure you worked only 35 hours a week or you got overtime paid. It was more about not trusting management.

Our recruitment is not selective, we have a lot of random youngsters to whom we are their first workplace. By Chinese standards, our pay for junior employees is stellar.

We have near 0 attrition rate for established cadres. With a single exception being our an outstanding mechanical engineer who once was in charge of molds and plastic, he now owns his own business.

And that is over 5 years. We have quite a lot of trust for each other.

> It's often done that someone appeals to examples from other cultures that might not be entirely accurate.

Or we just learn to work around it. For example, I never schedule something right when a business is supposed to open Paris. I've been bitten multiple times while trying to pick up a rental car. There's also the some part of the city always on strike, but that's a slightly different issue.

And yeah, trains schedules in the UK are suggestions while in Germany they follow them with precision. I saw a UK comic in Munich one time and he had a bit how when he asked the train ticket person if the train was usually on time she didn't even understand the concept of it being late. :)

I think it's worse than ghost rowers. DingChat allows managers to task employees with tasks that aren't related to the bottom line, because it makes the assumption that the manager's time is more valuable than the 10 employees he's managing.

In the old days when manager's used to rely upon memos, and paper reports, that meant the manager had to plan out his time as well as his employees time to get something done. Now, DingChat encourages managers to demand for things instantaneously, employee's time be damned. And if you're an employee with a toxic manager, god help you.

On “ghost rowers” - sometimes people go too hard on port or starboard and we need to even things out before running into a moored sailboat ;)

On top of this original feature, the company has added a wide range of functions that include automatic expense claims, a clock-in system to monitor the whereabouts of employees, as well as a "daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks.

As DingTalk has grown, many Chinese office workers have vented their frustrations online about the service, saying it is inhumane and destroys trust.

"Inhumane and destroys trust" doesn't sound too far off the mark to me. But it's not so very different from working in an open office with daily standups, and that's become pretty well-accepted in technical fields over the last few years. I hope we see some changes -- more trust and less demand for pervasive visibility -- but it's hard to be terribly optimistic on this point right now.

Also, using gps to track on site time and a task tracker are things that myself and other do completely voluntarily, so I feel like it’s a stretch to call it inhumane to enforce this. Though I get there is a different sentiment towards it when it’s required compared to just being a personal choice of convinience.

A lot of these have automated analogues in American companies.

>automatic expense claims

- Expense claims seem like a smart thing to automate.

> a clock-in system to monitor the whereabouts of employees

Zendesk, ServiceNow, and other issue tracking ticket systems provide numerous metrics about user activity, including a timer for each ticket. Many tech support shops use the total ticket time, divided by 40 hours, as your "utilization", and target an 80% utilization, or you're productive for 32 of 40 hours per week.

> as well as a "daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks.

This could be an automated report in the system above. Or it could be mandatory release notes, but daily is excessive for that. This sounds like a daily standup, over email.

Those aren't terrible per se, but I think the relentless immediacy of you're manager's chat or request would get annoying, especially on a weekend or holiday as the article discussed.

At my last job, we were expected to monitor the Slack channel, and jump in to help - when we were off shift, at the store, day off, vacation - oncall was the first person paged, then whoever was awake. And this is to answer customer phone calls and emails needing cloud technical support, and the occasional 3am VPN tunnel rearchitecture.

On the other side, when the line laying union threatened to strike, they told us we'd be working 12 hour days and help out laying line during the strike.

My office uses it in China. We use some of the features like the clock-in and the one to file expenses. My company fines you if you clock-in late on the app, but won't hesitate to use the "ding" feature to send you SMS/phone calls after 9PM that records the time seen/confirmed.

Overall it's more a company/cultural issue, but the app certainly makes it easier to pressure employees to always be on.

Just get a second phone?

China is really weird. They already have the bigbrother level of social media in place (social media credit scores), this just takes it a whole another level now. They are really heading towards a dangerous unethical path right now, and with google's censorship engine that just brings more worry honestly. China is paving the future of George Orwell's 1984. When other countries see how successful China is at doing this, others will potentially follow suit

6079 Smith, W. Yes, you! Bend lower!

Could you suggest your China office to get a better manager? Because this seems terrible.

Your 'but' makes it seem likes there's going to be an argument against your first point, but it just enforces it.

Should be an 'and'.

Man the setup in that first photo looks terrible office wise.

>Instead, Wu's team sought another niche, tackling a common managerial complaint in China: workers who fail to reply to messages and later feign ignorance.

So they built a messaging platform to hassle people... about other messages?

That seems brutal.

Yep. And 90 degree office temps are not uncommon.

This is an app that will not work in the west. And frankly it shouldn't. It's an insult to the intellect of an employee.

Oh it absolutely would. Most chat clients let you “buzz” another user in the 90s. And Amazon times the movement of its warehouse workers down to the second already. You will see this at a least one major Western company by the end of the year, I’ll wager.

It will probably be a feature of Slack within a year.

Except perhaps (haven't checked the APIs recently) the "time read" feature, I'm pretty sure most of it can be done today with Slack apps. Certainly, "Standup" apps which replicate the "log what you did today" feature are two a penny (and, to be fair, if I'm on a project which needs fine-grained synchrononization, I find this infinitely preferable to physical standups...)

Hard to think of a feature that could destroy whatever good will Slack has with users (if it still does) then a feature that lets you “ping” and notify someone else endlessly.

Slap some copy about empowering end users/workers and some illustrations of people with heads much smaller than the rest of their bodies, and it's ready to bring about a new VC round.

It practically is a feature, you can see whos offline and who is not. Its just done manually now not automatically.

But there's other alternatives to slack, such as Zulip

I will give you a raise, if you let me track you, so I can make sure you get enought sleep and exercise!

Dingtalk actually has a feature that lets you record steps/exercise even though I never used it

I'm not so sure. If people really cared about tracking to that level, you'd think the modern web wouldn't be possible. And those people aren't even your employees.

People will sell their privacy for far less than we imagine.

And it's not just the modern web. Anyone remember the Outlook plugs that gave you smiley faces, when in reality it was ubiquitous tracking and advertising malware? Your privacy for an emoji.

You haven't worked for large companies then ;-)

>Like WhatsApp, DingTalk lets senders see if recipients have read messages, but it also has a "ding" feature that can bombard recipients with repeat notifications, text messages and phone-call reminders.

“Sorry boss, you’re breaking up. “

hangs up phone and turn on airplane mode

Either that or “accidentally” leave your phone on silent after a meeting.

I haven't had to turn my phone off in a long time on planes. It's like that problem went away.

...Is airplane mode going to be like the save icon where I have to explain to my kids why an airplane means shutting off all comms?

phones and tablets don't contribute an issue to the aircraft operation. Finally the industry got called on their BS and you can do what you want, and buy their in flight wifi.

Not to defend ding, but how is that different from PagerDuty?

Pagerduty is specifically for on call staff who's job is to respond, immediately, to alerts.

And it's expected that they only respond when they're "carrying the pager", that is, on their on-call shift.

One of PagerDuty's features is figuring out who's the right person to page right now.

I think the main difference is psychological. A dedicated emergency pager application contacting whoever is on call at that moment will lead to quite different usage than a targeted super-buzz feature integrated into a normal messenger application.

Pager duty is typically on a rotation shared between the team members, so ur on call like one week out of 8 or so. Not 24/7, no location tracking, only real issues that impact the product, etc.

And then your boss will ask you why your phone is on silent/in airplane mode. Don't think the app can't or won't track such juicey details ;)

Considering where it's from, I wonder to what degree all of the messages are funneled in plaintext through a centralized censorship engine. What happens if you start pasting excerpts of the wikipedia article for Tiennamen square to your coworkers?

This seems to be allowed in WeChat. But such text will be blocked if you try to send it in a group chat. I guess CPP allows you to talk privately but not publicly in a 300 people group.

By that means they can easily identify dissidents without allowing them to spread their message too far

Oh, wow, really? Interesting. I'll have to try that later. Is it all group chats or ones over a certain size?

[...]"daily report" function that requires workers to list completed tasks [...] Despite the grumbling, Wu believes the service will translate across borders and cultures

He is right, managers will love this - it's just daily standup (everyone loves it, so agile!) on steroids. I'm pretty sure that it will be added to "western" tools within months.

we had some good success with it, and it ended up spun out to its own project later: https://squashreports.com

where it excelled was in keeping tangentially connected teams up to date with each other, since each team tended to have closer lines of communication - it helped for the overall direction.

where it didn't help was to replace a standup directly.

Status Hero was used this way at my last job. My manager would have it opened at all times in his office. And I just got fired, so I guess it "worked". The only way to accomplish the tasks fast enough was to work weekends, and once I quit working on weekends (which I was told "of course you don't have to work weekends!), they got rid of me within a couple weeks. Really terrible place to work.

So let me get this straight, a new 'free' version of Slack that sends all your companies internal communications straight to Chinese government servers. Now they don't even have to hack us, we're giving it to them voluntarily.

Fun fact: This is how Slack looks from a European perspective.

That is also how it looks when someone has a SaaS hosted in AWS. Then wonder why potential clients are asking for self-hosted.

And, that is how Slack looks from here in Russia ;-)

Honestly, SaaS, even if it is operated in your own country, makes me feel gross. I try to stay away from anything I can't self-host as much as possible.

It's good to remember we are all human. We all have the same limits as workers.

I feel grateful for my old age and limited future participation in the workforce when I read these stories. Anyone that thinks North American companies will have ethical problems with these technologies just isn't being honest.

BusinessInsider now redirects Tanzanian users to http://pulselive.co.tz which doesnt resolve. This website is such garbage.

I have added a DingTalk line to my checklist for next job interview.

At this point if you are in the EU or the US, you will probably make them look it up more often than not, contributing to this app's growth.

Anyone else getting a 404 on this page now?

Only if it redirects you to your local business insider, that's pretty bad I would say.

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