There is a lot of learned value here, but I am left with a sense that it isn't worth enduring such a broad spectrum of hardships and indignities for the individual reward. The emotional reward; the sense that you are advancing Chinese society, would also be discomforting, in that I have no love for many of their policies.
One can live comfortably elsewhere without accepting constant compromises at a personal and professional level. I would bet also that, as in Japan, one is always foreign, gaijin, alien, at the end of thr day, and this fact will present as a hard cap on potential.
Maybe it's covered elsewhere in another article, but this is a lot to endure.
Bleak write-up. Question: does it work? In a counterfactual where some of these corporate cultural things were alleviated, what would the impact be in the ability for the enterprise to meet it's goals? Points 1. and 2., I could guess they'd have a positive effect size if measuring a company's success is like it's probability of being able to continue to do business in the near future, but 5.??
For most intellectual jobs, the 996 schedule is demonstrably counterproductive.
Study after study has shown that it's basically impossible to squeeze out more than about 30 hours of actual productivity from the general population per week, especially when this is sustained for long periods of time. Western countries are starting experiments with 4-day work weeks precisely because it's more productive, not less.
I've worked with people doing these types of hours (Indian subcontractors) and they were 100% useless 100% of the time because they were too exhausted to do anything other than rote work. Even that rote work was riddled with errors because they were too tired to think about what they're doing or do any quality assurance. They were successful only at the most trivial tasks, tasks so simple that a script would have sufficed. I needed humans, they were meat robots.
In some countries, that's precisely how managers view their employees: As annoying robots that complain too much, or slaves that they need to also pay (as little as possible).
It's only in a few (not all!) western countries that businesses treat intellectual labour such as IT work as creative "value generation" instead of manual labour to be extracted.
This really isn’t so different from work in other places. That said, I think one reason why this person keeps at it is the profound inner sense of accomplishment of being able to thrive in a totally different culture, country, and language. He sounds very different from the few Dutch ppl I’ve come across in my career; they wouldn’t hesitate to tell you point-blank honest statements or preferences. This guy… for him to make it 5 years, and particularly 14 months in China… yeah, it’s downright impressive. The thing is, if he continues to work at the level he’s at, I’m certain he will eventually tire of it and move on too. At any rate, when life Berends on a visa, it’s tenuous. It’s super tough to stay in China beyond 25 years as a foreigner.
It sounds like they work in a genuinely toxic environment, and utterly exhausting. I get that the Chinese have few options, but why would you voluntarily subject yourself to this level of physical and emotional abuse?
This reads more like a call for help. And I can't help thinking that their high turnover sounds like a huge drag on productivity if so much of the team is coming up to speed at any given time.
This is a really excellent write up. I learned a lot from it, both about differences in international business culture and about ways to adjust to those internally.
Great write-up, thanks! Sorry to be blunt but as Dutch you might not be offended :) What's in it for you, what keeps you there? To me it seems very stressful and hostile work environment.
Chinese private companies face a bleak future due to the country's distorted economic structure; state-owned enterprises, which boast the most resources, offer a better work-life balance, while private firms are subject to stringent restrictions.
Tldr: be prepared to suck up overwork, petty office politics, stolen credit, inflexible and unresponsive leadership, adversarial departments, unrealistic objectives, and double talk.
Maybe the East and West aren’t that different after all.
> It can stress you out, but actually, it’s easier if you tell yourself everybody is just playing a game, and they’re all friendly people deep inside. It’s just a game.
> I also don’t like it when it rains on my birthday, but what can you do about it? Just like that, life in China is better if you don’t let these little things get to you.
I hope there’s a follow-up article in a year so we can see if the optimism is still there.
As a parent, the described schedules seem impractical. It would be possible to hold the 8-10pm schedule in my early twenties, and truth be told I did for bursts of time. But this doesn't sound tractable at a mass scale, when do kids get taken care of?
Besides having your grandparents' help as mentioned in a sibling comment, there's an darker side to the this topic: discrimination against women[0], and the people who aren't young and energetic enough[1].
in my company in china i only hired fresh graduates who haven't been working in other companies yet. that way i get people who are more open to learn my way of working because they haven't been broken by this system.
i remember one of my juniors who came in without any practical experience speaking english (he could read and write and passively understand me) who three months later was having a good natured argument with me about some technical question, which is a behavior practically unheard of in china. you just don't argue with your boss.
>"I also worked with fresh graduates in the Netherlands, but many of those were good designers, writers, and videographers from vocational education —"
Absolutely don't agree with your l this or I'm in another world I guess, easily the reasons why everything is English despite being Dutch
Choice in job market is a luxury, not sure if it's only a China thing. But most fresh grads will end up with whichever company who'd hire them in whatever role they offered.
The OP also mentioned the low retention rate, behind that, it means that for young people, they may start in a low pay job, but there will be tremendous amount of chances for new opportunities elsewhere after a few years of work experience. There will be less BS in the interviews, and ~50% of pay raise each time (sounds familiar?). After try and errs, there's a chance you'll find a fair-paying job with reasonable workload and non-toxic workspace, they call it landed (Shàng Àn 上岸), comparing to the endless Sea of Suffering(Kû Hâi 苦海).
The work culture seems bizarrely counter productive. Where is real value being generated? It’s a bit puzzling in some ways. I’m somehow assuming that the dysfunction described in the piece is way downstream from a lot of messed up communist party broken political economy and socialization stuff.
One can live comfortably elsewhere without accepting constant compromises at a personal and professional level. I would bet also that, as in Japan, one is always foreign, gaijin, alien, at the end of thr day, and this fact will present as a hard cap on potential.
Maybe it's covered elsewhere in another article, but this is a lot to endure.