“996 ICU” is unfortunately the dominant strategy in market.
https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/blob/master/README.md
To put it simple, 996.icu was some sort of “movement” that started by Chinese developers from probably the world’s least political website: Github (the largest git/code hosting website). The Github project (link above) aims to fight against the Tech giants in China who implicitly requires all developers to work from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week. While the extra work is well paid for, many gradually get into suboptimal health status under the extended workload. So the exaggerated slogan of “ICU” implies that these employees get so unhealthy that they visit hospital by going straight into ICU room.
The scene will be easy to be explained in a simplified version of game theory. Assuming the only payoff is an advantage in If any of the company cheat by implementing 996 schedules on their employees, the company get more work done faster and thus gains an advantage in the market. But the turning point is that if its competitors adopt the same strategy, then the 996 schedule gives no advantage to any of them. But they cannot quit in holding 996, because that increases competitor’s advantage. So even though it ends up nothing, the dominant strategy for all tech companies is to increase employee’s workload as long as the advantage they gained by paying extra work time is linear-ish.
| A’s competitor: 996 | A’s competitor: 955 | |
| company A: 996 |
(0,0) |
(0,1) |
| company A: 955 |
(1,0) |
(0,0) |
So as long as it is possible, any company will extend its employee’s workload if their only concern is the market advantage. This is where the law steps in, but the labor law is not strictly enforced. Hence the 996.icu project went viral in China.
Experienced developers may find they have been working 996 for a decade or so, but this phenomenon is questioned this year the tech giants have come to slower growth that people suddenly realize they are paid enough even not working 996. So for individuals, since salary becomes less a dominant factor when they value their job, their valuation of salary goes down while their free time is valued more. Hence if there is a “seller’s preferred graph,” then it no longer holds and the new valuations have brought workload and personal time back to attention. I see this public complain as a step closer to a developed country for China, and the idea of “life counts more” has been reshaping the work environment in China slowly yet steadily.
In addition to law, I want to mention an interesting proposal: change the license of some open-source free application so that a company implementing 996 cannot use or have to pay. If this changes a company’s advantage just a little, this will result in something very different:
| A’s competitor: 996 | A’s competitor: 955 | |
| company A: 996 |
(-0.1,-0.1) |
(0,0.9) |
| company A: 955 |
(0.9,0) |
(0,0) |
So here is a question for you: how will this work?
Thanks for reading.