A worker’s complaints over Chinese tech companies’ notorious “996” culture — the idea that employees should work from 9am-9pm 6 days a week — has become one of the fastest growing GitHub repositories ever.
Such working practices are common in China’s tech startup sphere, a sector that has seen explosive growth in recent years but now seems to be slowing significantly.
GitHub is technically a site where developers can “host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 31 million developers”, but this issue-based contribution appears to have struck a chord with many in the community.
Entitled “996.ICU“, the post lays out various relevant sections of Chinese employment law. The name comes from the suggestion that,
“If you continue to tolerate the “996” work schedule, you will risk your own health and might need to stay in an Intensive Care Unit someday. ( 6 rhymes with U in Mandarin). Developers’ lives matter.”
The complaint comes amid a series of headlines regarding lay-offs at some of China’s biggest tech success stories. Alibaba and Tencent have been the subjects of some such stories while Chinese ecommerce giant JD.com, one of the companies named in the GitHub post, was forced to deny rumors that they were shedding thousands of staff this week.
kkchaurasia13 on March 30th, 2019 at 11:38 UTC »
Here is Singapore, I am working in software industry with people come after working in China and above behavior is clearly observable. Sitting in office late evening even when no work. Not much participating in team activities. It seem like they are living in their hole where work is the only thing and other than work, some kind a sin.
AlyoshaV on March 30th, 2019 at 10:08 UTC »
Article links to a specific file that got moved, so here's working links.
Repo: https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
English: https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/blob/master/i18n/en_US.md (not versioned because it may be updated)
Xiaomizi on March 30th, 2019 at 09:25 UTC »
They expect you to be always available and if you want separate work and life or show that actually you have life outside work they already look at you in weird way. Some people just stay in the office to be there even if they don't have much to do. And use video chat to talk to their kids instead of going home. I know I worked for a few of these. The culture is set up for short term. What I mean is startups come and go in China as the wind blows. So even company leaders don't know if they survive the next 3 months anyway.