Jack Ma defends overtime work culture as 'huge blessing'

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/04/14/alibaba-founder-defends-overtime-work-culture-as-huge-blessing.html

by emptybits • 7 years ago

18 13 7 years ago

thejakartapost.com

NotPaidToPost• 7 years ago

Do people think that building a country's economy or company from scratch isn't very hard work?

heyoni• 7 years ago

No. No one thinks that. Not ever, not anywhere.

But if you want human beings to give a shit about said country, maybe let them spend some time in it. Also look up “diminishing returns”.

sm64• 7 years ago

996 just sounds like mismanagement to me. Yes it's hard work but Ali Baba is not a seed startup that they can't afford to hire more people and distribute the workload.

helgie• 7 years ago

Exploiting people is exploiting people, no matter how you spin it.

powerapple• 7 years ago

When you provide jobs to others, you are exploiting them, otherwise, where the profit come from.

indemnity• 7 years ago

I’m certainly glad my ancestors put in the hours, but I don’t exactly want to work 14-16 hours a day like they did in the Industrial Revolution.

China has so much excess labour though, compared to the leverage Western workers had back in the day due to lower numbers.

That with Party control leaves it hard to see how anything like unions could form, or someone like a Sam Parnell could emerge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Duncan_Parnell).

steve1977• 7 years ago

Oh it certainly was a huge blessing for him that many other people worked 996.

mcv• 7 years ago

I'm not so sure. Overworked people are less happy and less healthy, and therefore less productive. I wouldn't be surprised if these extreme hours have no tangible benefit for the productivity of the company.

The only way working extreme hours can be sustainable is if the workers are self-driven, in control of their work environment, and believe in what they're building. So that's founders and possibly other early employees. But not a large corporation where most people are probably just a cog in a large machine.

trm42• 7 years ago

It's quite different to work for your own company as much as possible as you (hopefully) gain really something big in return. If you're doing mandatory constant crunch for somebody else without extraordinary recompensation, then it's not a blessing but quite close to slavery.

Of course that kind of slavery can be a blessing in a country like China where the other options may be even worse...

around_here• 7 years ago

Billionaire business owner tells poors to see working almost the entirety of their lives for his, and others like him, benefit.

They should have rushed the stage.

akabaka777• 7 years ago

i live in korea. My professor is very proud of their generation working very hard to "defeat" japan in the tech industry. I think jack ma's statement is lost in translation in this article.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

At least he is openingly admitting his true opinion and allowing a discussion about interests. Nost just turning the screws to enforce this overtime as outcome and hiring some yogi to preach about mindfullness. Still more open society regarding this then most of the west.

benjalimm• 7 years ago

I've actually thought a lot about China's overtime culture. It's really bad that it pulls people away from their families - Children in China are growing up with a stark absence of their parents. On another hand, China wouldn't be where it is today without it. What do y'all think?

Jack Ma defends overtime work culture as 'huge blessing'

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