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Comment by grantdong | Hacker News Reader

In China, its birthplace, '996' always seen as practice of failed management. Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼). Although middle managers know their subordinates are inefficient, they still impose working hour KPI on their team, so they can demonstrate their own value to upper management.

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> Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout (in Chinese we call this 摸鱼).

The CEO of one of my employers was smitten with his new China office because they bragged about operating 996.

To everyone else, it was obvious that they weren’t working more. They were just at the office a lot, or coming and going frequently.

When they’d send a video from the office (product demos) barely anyone was at their seats, contrary to their claims of always working.

Their output was definitely not higher than anyone else.

However, they always responded quickly on Slack, day or night, weekend or not. The CEO thought this was the most amazing thing and indicated that they were always working.

It's sad how a lot of things in life now are all about optics.

And it's shocking that it works for leadership/management so well

To executives, responding to communication is equal to working because communication is all that they do. Same reason that so much time is wasted on meetings: for the people who organize meetings they are what work is, rather than wasted time.

Life is always about optics. Medieval kings wore a piece of gold over their heads for optics.

I guess more people are just starting to realize this because many powerful people are actually dropping some of the well-accepted optics (particularly in tech, where people felt they were treated better than the average employee for a long time)

Nothing new under the sun:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/210z3FRgTPU

Carry a clipboard around too.

Maybe a paper notebook is the new clipboard these day though, some moleskin hipster thingy, nice fountain pen with a nib, I dunno.

Anyone else have suggestions on how to shine on management in 2025?

Chinese work culture is very different from American culture that makes 996 not as bad as what Americans imagine. For example, it's common for people in China to take long naps in the afternoon. It's common to take 1 hour long lunches and dinners where you socialize with your colleagues. These days most people hit the gym at the office as well. So that's an easy 4-5 hours just written off.

So, while it's 12 hours at the office, it's not 12 hours working at your desk. It's probably more like 8-9 hours by American standards where you have a quick lunch, don't take an afternoon siesta etc.

The mythology of the ultra-hard-working Chinese is just that. Americans work pretty damn hard too but the optics are different. Americans also consider the hours at work as wasted time, with people who are irrelevant to their "real" life (the L in WLB), whereas the Chinese consider the socialization and the relationships of work to be pretty core to their life experience.

Also, the Chinese don't raise their own kids. The grandparents raise the kids while the parents focus on earning money for the family. The parents in turn are expected to raise their grandkids. Some kids don't even live with their parents until they get a bit older (around 10-12).

The West is still mostly oblivious to the Chinese way of life.

I used to work for Huawei where 996 or worse wasn't uncommon. While middle management definitely pushed for extended working hours, I didn't get the impression that anyone viewed it as failed management. If anything, upper management knew exactly what was happening and was encouraging it.

Hell, you have the likes of Jack Ma glorifying 996, calling it a blessing.

Not a lot of people know, but the 996 in Alibaba included 2 hour long lunch and sleep break, as well as 1 hour for a dinner at 6 pm.

I worked for ByteDance in Singapore. People would show up for work between 10 and 11am, lunch would start around 11:45am or 12, then people would nap until 2pm at their desk. A good, focused engineer could produce the same output as these engineers while only working in the morning

Exactly - I felt like the real work happened only 11-12 and 15-18, and maaaybe some meetings 19-20. Everything else was a fluff.

No time for kids and loved ones or hobbies outside of work.

I never understood why Huawei is doing it. It seems like a "do it when you are young for the resume and then leave" type of things.

Only young people can support this schedule, how a company like that is expecting senior and experienced people to stay?

The Chinese government banned ‘996’ a few years ago.

I also never understood how it differed from the popular “death march” project management style popularized by companies like Epic and Microsoft.

Technically it was never legal without overtime pay, but enforcement varies a lot.

On paper, PRC employment law is pretty strong on employee side compared to USA.

Because for at least half of the 72-hour workweek, most employee will mentally checkout

Management seeing this and doing the calculation: “if they’re gonna be checked out half the time, we’re really only getting 36 hours of the 40 we’ve been promised.”

Introducing:

9117

The latest innovation in Management (unlocked with the power of AI)

you get yourself a PIP for doing 9-11-7 in some Alibaba teams.

they question the “work enthusiasm” of those who leave office by midnight.

That’s sadly the reality of the push to 996. When Google added early breakfast and late dinner, it was the same reasoning: if people stay “in the zone” longer, you end up squeezing out a bit more.

I get the feeling the push to 996 is in part due to the social media epidemic - everyone spends so much time doomscrolling, might as well keep people in the office much longer to account for that extra wasted time too.

Good times

China is not the birthplace of so called '996'. Long before tech scene in China, there are a lot of investment banks doing that in HK especially for junior analysts. Calling 996 a China thing is just orientlalism. Everything bad is Chinese, everything good is western.

At least the recent popularity of the 996 originated in China, and I believe most Chinese people would agree with that. Besides, even if it started in Hong Kong, saying it originated in China is still technically correct.

Investment banks in Hong Kong were almost exclusively western back in the days with very few ethnic Chinese in senior management.

China is the birthplace of the term 996. Of course it's not the birthplace of people being coerced into unhealthy work hours - that's been around for thousands of years.

There is probably little to nothing specifically Chinese about workaholism as a concept, but the word is definitely Chinese(as in language). Dialect continuum for East Asian languages are contained within borders, or in other words, each of the languages expanded and dominated to the full extents of continuum and hit with stagnation at major geographical features before entering the modern era.

Touch fish?

It's an over-simplification of Chinese idiom "浑水摸鱼", which is literally 'catching fish in muddy water'. Origninated from Thirty-Six Stratagems (三十六计). It generally mean "to take advantage of a chaotic situation or a crisis". It is later extended to express slacking off.

Check out mentally and "go fishing"

Fishing with bare hands is possible but notoriously challenging.

It really seems not very different from how it is outside of China. I feel, as with may things, there is a lot of western propaganda about the "communist enemy" that remains.

I mean thinking about it rationally, China is huge. It doesn't make sense to use the '996 practice' to judge the morality of all of China.

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