It's a very common story in tech. Hard to blame people for making choices that will improve their quality of life.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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It's a very common story in tech. Hard to blame people for making choices that will improve their quality of life.
Is there a survey of this? Just curious.
The US is worse for Chinese scientific & engineering talent in many other aspects even if it’s better in work life balance. The way to address the talent competition isn’t necessarily by directly attacking 996, although I do think 996 is excessive.
For example, how about paying people more? How about addressing ageism? How about guaranteeing job security for competent people? How about putting China’s vast service labor force to work helping with child care, house cleaning, cooking, etc. for these specialists? How about providing free housing in quality districts?
Life in the US despite better work life balance isn’t really that great in many other aspects, and that goes especially for Chinese who are blocked from working in sensitive industries and discriminated against for leadership positions. Not to mention the dating struggles and loss of social prestige in white dominated societies. China could do more to work these angles to retain workers rather than just promote people to work less.
For example, how about paying people more? How about addressing ageism? How about guaranteeing job security for competent people? How about putting China’s vast service labor force to work helping with child care, house cleaning, cooking, etc. for these specialists? How about providing free housing in quality districts?
Life in the US despite better work life balance isn’t really that great in many other aspects, and that goes especially for Chinese who are blocked from working in sensitive industries and discriminated against for leadership positions. Not to mention the dating struggles and loss of social prestige in white dominated societies. China could do more to work these angles to retain workers rather than just promote people to work less.
This all goes without saying but is sort of addressed with income. With higher income, these people can afford to hire those domestic helps (very common in China already in the middle class at least wrt to cleaning services done twice a week). Medical related care is where China drops the ball. Fewer people are willing to perform those roles compared to cooking and cleaning domestic help. Often a stigma against it and the cultural tendency of viewing this as work for children/family of elderly. This attitude is changing though as it's simply impossible for 2 to care for 4 let alone for 8 people. Wealth has been a saving grace here.
As for hours. That's the main issue to immediately tackle. Working less is fine if they're working for 60 to 80 hours a week as a norm.
Better ways to measure output is essential. Right now it seems to be based on pretty bog standard KPIs that don't hold any sort of long term view on productivity for the absolute top end of industry. The issue is the US does offer a much more attractive work life balance compared to China and this isn't only about income or working hours. Even the small niceties in where you work there's obvious difference. Long term China needs to get all this improved to at least US level to compete in attracting and retaining the finest. Short term, China needs to find ways of preventing major brain drain as the West will ramp up efforts to deplete China of Chinese talent as much as possible. That one person could translate to major advantage if the creation of an entire industry.
I don’t think there’s a formal survey but there’s loads of people in tech in the US with the same story. Tons of Chinese engineers at a lot of US companies used to work at Chinese companies and when you ask why they left they almost always say work life balance is the biggest reason. Even Chinese companies with offices here have better WLB here than in China like Bytedance.
If you don't work for one of the oligopoly/monopoly software/finance companies you get nothing. Why do you think the US has such trouble hiring even mediocre semiconductor engineers?
Do you work in the technology sector in the US? Midsized companies here pay well and have a much better work life balance than many other countries. It’s not just the oligopoly dominating everything.
Yes, everyone in the industry knows a hundred people just like this. You get paid more to work less, simple as that.
At that level of competence you're not interacting with US lower working class people. You probably have a nice home in a gated community. Another problem i see for China is the generational leakage of talent, its not only Chinese talent that China is losing they are also losing the next generation, the children of those highly talented couples. So not only is work & life balance better in the US, but also elite reproduction is better because if you have money one can easily buy the services for ivy league entry for your kids. Also those kids will have less competition in the US compared to the ocean full of sharks thats China educational system.
But i can still also remember a time when Silicon valley and US tech in general had 996 or even worse 100 hour workweeks and doing 100 hour work week was a badge of honor for engineers. But US tech sector around early 2010s decided to change up this work life balance situation. I can still remember the wave of articles of big tech company x has unlimited off days etc. US big tech saw they were haemorrhaging talent at an unsustainable speed. Chinese government did observe this hence the anti 996 messaging recent couple of years.
Since US big tech did this move you also saw an explosion of open source projects and contribution in the western tech sphere. Tooling like docker, kubernetes things that allowed small to high tech companies to scale their services. A wild explosion of new programming languages(rust, zig, c3, odin etc). Im not sure if the culture change in silicon valley was the cause but i think it does correlate a bit together with github helping facilitate collaboration.
I'll be honest as a tech worker i'm behind a screen from like 8:00 till like 23:30 but i only work from 8:30 till 16:30 outside that range its hobby coding projects or relax gaming time.
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Bro when I was little I swear that when I grow up I gonna sue my mom for Child abuse, She always say I hurt you because I love you, WTF....lol But I understand, there is NO easy way for success, you have to work hard and improve yourself. Now I see my children spoiled and kind of lazy, I'm afraid for their future. It may be a generation thing BUT todays kid are soft and afraid to ventured out, I sometimes let them eat bitterness and become a villain in their eyes BUT it had to be done for their owned sake.
Living in a 3rd world country had its benefits, 1) highly educated and skilled Chinese don't want to migrate here so less competition 2) we are competitive compare to the rest of ASEAN. It may rankled some of my ASEAN friend here BUT its true (I'm talking about the command of English language and from my Hua Qiao community that of Chinese 3) from number 2, its easy for us to assimilate as the demand for our services are strong (I mean who you wanna choose between an Indian or Filipinos, its no contest we won hands down) .
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