The company I work in now has no problem competing with Chinese companies working 996, despite us working 7.5h days and having way more vacation days. I believe part of that is that working longer hours doesn't necessarily make you more productive, as has been discussed in tech communities for a while now.

The thing is, to be productive with shorter working hours requires a very different culture. The company I work in now has a very flat structure, and people are encouraged to work on side projects that can improve productivity, and there's a focus on continuously improving methodology. The last company I worked for was Chinese-American (based in US, but 99% Chinese working there), and it was the exact opposite. Decisions on what to work on was made top-down and results were mainly achieved through brute force. Although since we worked in a somewhat independent office in Europe we ended up with a hybrid system.

So the question is, will a shift away from 996 lead to a shift in work culture that increases productivity, or will they just work fewer hours with the same culture?

That seems to be the problem for the CCP in general. They want to make improvements, but they don't really get to the root of the problem. They crack down on after-school tutoring for instance, but they don't change the Gaokao system, so tutoring will just go underground.

The whole mentality of 996 goes back to the time when most of the jobs were manufacturing jobs. If you are a garments factory whats the simplest way to increase throughput? Well, make your workers work harder. If you are in a country the size of China and your workers revolt, replacing them is simple enough. This unfortunately does not work for tech companies. Making software engineers work long hours will just piss them of. Also by its nature spending more time on a piece of code doesn't mean you'll be more productive (in fact I've found the best way to deal with a bug is often take a break and come back and reread your code likely you'll spot the mistake far more easily). Also if a software engineer is good enough they may simply choose to work for an American firm which gives them much more free time and are equally competitive. Furthermore, the more turnover there is in a software firm, the less efficient it is as new hires will have to learn the code base from scratch. So now firing an individual and replacing him may not be as easy as before. Hence, I doubt CCP will actually have to enforce the rule, the firms themselves will self enforce the rules.

This seems a bit unlikely to me:

1. Ignores patriotism.

2. The number of good programmers in China is going to overwhelmingly outnumber the opportunities for them to work for a US company.

Now I'm sure there are colleges and universities where this isn't true, and there are lots of Chinese programmers that do it for fun and love it just as much as any 'westerner'. I've actually met some shit hot C and C++ coders in china professionally and these people absolutely knew their stuff. However the base level education system is woefully unfit for purpose and the vast majority of computer science graduates cannot be assumed to have any practical knowledge of the subject.

This was as of about 5 years ago, so maybe things are changing.

In my experience college education has nothing to do with who is really a good programmer. Sure MIT grads are better than average, but that's because they have a reputation to attract the people that are the most interested in it. CS fundamentals definitely make you a better programmer and able to solve harder problems, but it's somewhat orthogonal to the daily grind of keeping a mental model of a large obtuse system in your head while solving hundred arcane micro-hurdles one after another.

There's also a filter here: To immigrate to the US as a dev you need to be able to secure a job as a dev, and the employer must be willing to sponsor you.

That puts the bar way higher.

Israel is probably a knock-on effect of that, since most (jewish) israelis are (or descend from) eastern european migrants.

That's a popular, but unfortunate misconception. Majority of Jewish Israelis are Mizrahim that immigrated from middle eastern countries, running from persecution by Muslims.

There are some great universities in China and there are definitely some who know their stuff but the average mid level university in China? Nope, completely useless.

To be fair, this was in 2009 to 2014. I have left China since.

Isn't it the foundational concept of fizzbuzz that a lot of applicants to programming jobs are "completely unable to do anything"?

The problem is they don't know how to actually compile and run a "Hello World" program, or write and run any kind of program on a physical computer, because they never had to do it as part of their computer science education.

(internal link to https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ )

Real tech interviews have always been about understanding and applying data structures and algorithms, with some emphasis on problem solving with those tools.

A really long time ago, there used to be questions that were more like "do you know some very common C/hacker idioms", like write a one line strlen or reverse a linked list in place. I used to get asked stuff like that in the late 90s.

(There were also the brainteaser style things, like how many golf balls fit in a 747, but those were often for non-programming roles where people were looking for your ability to problem solve in a vacuum with little information. Those were rarely aimed at engineers, but at engineer adjacent non-technical roles.)

It was common knowledge that people who had graduated before 2004-2005 tended to be much better candidate and had received a better education. In the end, it was necessary for the country but any big systemic changes like this cause growing pains. I do not know what the current landscape in China is nowadays, I would assume that this is much less of a problem since time probably helped with those growing pains, on the other hand, as the PRC starts creating tighter and tighter restrictions, the best elements might be more likely to want to study abroad.

The best approach would be apprenticeships; learning the craft while doing the job. But the industry has always been ridiculously opposed to training its own staff - echoing your point that this is seen as something that the education system should do (why?).

I've heard managers say crap like "but if we train them then they'll leave us when they finish the training and go somewhere else - we'll have paid for their training and get no benefit". This is a staff retention problem, not a training problem.

The clever response to that is: but what if we don't train them and they stay?

I'll say this: programming isn't a profession. If I was being particularly unkind, it's more like a collection of wild west gunslingers.

It probably won't be a profession either until we've settled the whole C++ vs Rust vs Lisp vs JavaScript vs $LANGUAGE_DU_JOUR debate, and stopped acting like egotists. "Rockstar programmer" is a problematical phrase. What it tells us is that programming is one big dick-measuring contest.

I trained as a UK chartered accountant, having graduated in mathematics. I had to go through a set of professional exams. I was under a training contract, started as a junior. I couldn't sign audit reports. That was for the partners. My work was reviewed, and as I moved up through the ranks, I reviewed others. When I was a senior, the juniors asked me for advice. When I finished my work, I spoke to a partner, he reviewed my work, and I reworked whatever was necessary.

There was also "calling and casting". After the accounts were typed up, a more junior clerk would have an old copy of the accounts with corrections, and the more senior clerk would have the revised copy. The junior clerk then read aloud what was on the accounts, and the senior checked it against his copy.

See that? Professional. I imagine lawyers, engineers and manifold other professions have similar appropriate procedures.

What do us programmers do? Release our shit onto the world and fix it later via patches. And issue licences that say we take no responsibility for the fitness of our programs.

That's why I call what we do gunslinging.

Maybe one day the queen will create an Institute of Chartered Programmers, but that day is not only far over the horizon, it's not even in the same solar system.

But I'm not sure I'd want to work in that industry. I like that I can just start hacking away at something that I think will work and create value.

> The clever response to that is: but what if we don't train them and they stay?

Not really. I mean, I get the reference and it is smart. But we're talking about why most tech companies don't hire juniors and train them up. Instead they prefer to hire seniors, not provide any training, and lose them after two years because they can't give pay rises over 5%.

And my impression of "professionals" is not nearly as good as yours. I've seen "professional" managers behave like egotistical idiots way more often than devs. My first startup was destroyed by a "professional" accountant behaving wildly inappropriately. The last time I was a CEO I was quietly informed that I should get a new desk because the previous CEO (an accountant) had a habit of humping hookers on it during his lunch breaks.

You sorta can.

https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

I've also met grads that basically had a dedicated software engineering class where they learned: What's a package manager, build system, how to compile C++ code (linking and compilation), makefiles, agile, waterfall and source control and a few quality metrics to look out for.

I'm mentoring a new developer at my firm. He's fresh out of college. His code works on a basic level. The things he's stubbed his toes on:

* Naming conventions. We have probably more rules about this than some, but things like branch and commit names matter because we tie them into our issue tracking process.

* Strictly reading specifications. We had a couple days rework because he used a different suggested name for something, and it ended up propagating into dozens of class names.

* Knowing when and what can be cleaned up. This I can forgive, as it normally waits towards the end of the project and he isn't quite there yet, but when we paired to work on it, there was a lot of leftover baggage.

* Bulletproofing/exhaustive coverage. I suspect there's a lot of university projects where "what if the remote server hands us HTTP 418" is answered by "the test service doesn't".

* Multiplayer and advanced Git. "The main branch is going to update without you, and eventually there's going to be merge conflicts" and you'll need to merge/rebase was a problem for him, as was dealing with a feature branch with multiple task sub-branches (keeping too many of them open at once is a huge risk for weird merge conflicts and hideous histories when they're finally resolved).

The non-tech skills of how commercial software development actually works in an actual organisation are really important, and the only way of learning them is on the job.

So I don't see the big qualitative difference between complaints about bottom-end Chinese college students and complaints about bottom-end American college students, no.

If it's of interest, I looked into gaokao test scores a while ago and the cutoff for being admitted to a Chinese university lies around the 40th percentile. The schools are officially divided into two tiers (obviously, there are finer distinctions you can make), and the cutoff for the higher tier is around the 80th percentile. So a large number of Chinese universities should have almost the entire student body within what you might think of as an IQ range from 96 to 112.

I've been fairly impressed with the Germans that I've worked with, but that may be sample bias.

At a regional Chinese university you are basically looking at those who couldn't go abroad and to the tier one institutions. And same thing for the TAs and teachers there.

That doesn’t really work except for the lowest quality tier, because tired workers make mistakes, and mistakes cost time. Automate more to remove the human factor, and the remaining people need to be more focused, not less. There is a sort of maximum amount of net useful work you can get out of a person, taking into account slacking off and correcting for errors, and for most people that is not working 996.

Or realize you don't need the code at all and there's a way to do it better.

I would do almost nothing in the moring. I did most of my work in the afternoon. In the evening I just pretended to be working.

Forcing a real 7.5h day would not hurt most companies. But it would hurt the ego of middle managers, who want to prove that their teams are trying their best by working long hours.

Somewhere between 20h and 30h and a 4 day working week would be best for performance imo

I genuinely believe a 4-day work week is the way to go. It's Friday and I'm already burnt out at 11am.

If smaller companies can't compete on the huge salaries and options that larger companies provide, they can certainly compete on flexible work schedules. A developer working 4 days a week is pretty much just as useful to me as the engineering manager as a developer who is working 5 days a week. Budget and schedule.

Tech at this point is needed to some degree in lots of products.

We don't have a worldwide labor shortage (!). Productivity going up and work hours not going is a travesty.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/RI...

Further, low labor productivity and bad on the job training pipelines directly result from squashing uppity labor

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/construction-labor-shor...

The fact I've never once heard a complaint about 4 10's from anyone I've ever known to work them says a lot compared to the usual 5 8's which I hear complaints from about everyone (including myself).

n = 19~21 people or so

So I worked normally and then I'd sit on all my work and wait until just after 5:15 to submit it all and then leave immediately. I didn't get in until 9:30 or 10 anyway so there was literally no difference except my work was delayed.

They praised our team for all the extra work. They really had no clue.

What I realized is people just created their own down time during the work day. The attitude was “if you want me available from 9am to 9pm, then I’ll just just a 2hr lunch, a 1hr dinner and a bunch of 30 min coffee breaks”. They end up doing about 6-8 hrs of actual work. And on top of it end up with a really resentful attitude about their work and boss as well.

Far better to find competent, motivated (not rah-rah, but more like “lets just get it done”) people and tell them what you need done and leave it up to them how to do it.

It is truly depressing. I would never go back. I earn 1/20 of my old salary as a solo developer. I can't make ends meet, yet. But I would never go back.

Paul Graham wrote somewhing like, if you fail, you would have to go back to those boring companies. This fact provides a lot of motivation. I can't remember the exact phrase. But yes, that's exactly how I feel.

How's that not work? I suppose you meant write some code not for your work, but reading tech docs is ABSOLUTELY part of your job...

From wikipedia: "In China the number is considered to be lucky and is often displayed in shop windows and neon signs".

Chit chat with your friends online, have a cup of coffee, spend 30 min listening to an audiobook or reading. And hey, what do you know, it's lunch time already!

My previous employer rushed to open offices in China because the CEO was convinced that 996 and China’s lower wages would double our productivity while cutting costs in half. They opened an expensive office and got recruiters to hire well credentialed people.

Despite having twice as many people and supposedly working twice as many hours, they struggled to deliver comparable work. We spent a lot of time fixing the work that came out of the 996 office in China.

Don’t get me wrong: There were some talented people in that office who I enjoyed working with. However, the 996 schtick always felt more like a performance art than actual productivity technique. The CEO was ecstatic that he could ask a question in Slack at any time day or night and within minutes they would all respond with many enthusiastically positive Slack responses. Whenever they talked about accomplishing something, they made sure to specifically mention that they accomplished it late at night or on the weekend. They seemed to send more e-mails on Saturday than any other day.

But they weren’t actually doing as much as you’d expect for as many people as they had and as much as they claimed to be working. Their code was notoriously unpolished and was often submitted in “good enough” form as soon as they got it to compile or work enough for demos. We also had strange problems with a lot of employees who were trying to use company resources to do freelance work for other companies, assuming we wouldn’t care or notice.

Unfortunately, their 996 performance worked on the CEO for a while. He was convinced they were our highest performing, most dedicated office. It took several years of buggy software and imminent product launches that never materialized for management to realize that they weren’t actually getting more work out of that office, contrary to their impressions.

The lesson is that you get what you reward: If you try to build an office or company around rewarding people for the appearance of long hours and weekend work, that’s what you’re going to get. If you build the culture around expectations of solid software shipped reasonably fast, people will start figuring out how to accomplish that within their own time.

The problem as always is: will they deeply want to solve the issue because they understand it, or is it instead now illegal to say that you work 996? :D It's not the same thing: I hope it wont come to that, but sometimes top down systems like ours create the appearance of the result before the result itself.

I have to say that remaining 3.5-4 hours are spent on other tasks like documentation reviews, etc.

For time being we can assume relationship of performance regression is 4/ToT if ToT more than 4. This means that these Chinese workers perform 3.5 less work per hour or even less so. One can try to compensate by hiring more workers, say, 3.5 more workers but then the amount of communication will increase quadratically and there will be more than 12 times increase in communication needed for team(s) to work.

That means that "996" policy results in great underutilization of people's potential. My napkin calculation is that each "996" worker performs less than 1/30 of what he/she can do.

Regardless of culture, it is sad.

With a formal division between "deep thought" work and "easy" work, I'd be inclined to churn out a rough draft of documentation in the second time box but then spend at least as much time as that in the first time box cleaning it up.

I'd say that documentation that is expected to be used is every bit as difficult to create as good code.

You need teams with clear objectives and project plans so employees are able focus on a task without getting side-tracked due to too many responsibilities or bad planning.

This shouldn't mean that agency or creativity is removed, it's simply about providing the right environment for people to work on complex problems.

I'm not screwing caps onto bottles, the number of hours I work has NOTHING to do with how much I get done.

I get 80% of the work done in 20% of the time, the rest is gathering information.

It's different job from software engineering. More time doesn't lead to more stuff.

That's the Taylorist position, but I think Deming would like a word. And in the more sophisticated manufacturing world with shorter more bespoke runs, the problem-solving ability of your employees and their time spent performing non-recurring setup matters as well.

The 40 hour work week actually comes to us from research on the original assembly line. Henry Ford's analysts apparently concluded that 40 hours was optimal for overall productivity. Past that point and the cost due to the greater number of human errors more than canceled out the additional work.

I would wager that this optimal number is different for different people but also for different professions. In professions where fatigue doesn't result in more mistakes or mistakes are cheaper to rectify then the "optimally productive" hours per week might be higher. In professions where fatigue results in even more mistakes and mistakes are more expensive to rectify then the reverse might be true.

And this says nothing of the leverage of the workers themselves -- I suspect software engineers can get away with working fewer hours if they want to due to the fact that they have more leverage than most workers.

Blind men and elaphant? :)

Most software IT/ops is luckily generally much smaller in time scale of most incidents, and much more tolerant of hand-off errors and delays. Ex: For 24/7, you get an instant email acknowledgement of ticket receipt, someone triages it, and if on a boundary, OK for current shift to ignore and leave for the next one. Likewise, for bigger incidents, better for throughput for the same person to pick across shifts to avoid hand-off errors, even if that introduces delays when it spans shifts. But not universally true across orgs, nor for incident types. Ex: For tricky & sensitive incidents that take 8-24 hours, the hospital results show longer shifts might make sense, so I'd want to see experiments before making assumptions!

Three shifts works well for 24/5, each shift running eight hours a day.

This may just be a natural change as China shifts its core export.

Personally, my productivity varies greatly depending on my mental state, days when I am feeling fresh/sharp/motivated I can accomplish more in a few hours than I could over days burnt out, and the resulting code is more resilient and thought out than I anything I could produce burnt out. When I am burn out, my mind is foggy and less able to reason about various branches of the program and I am way less motivated.

IMO like other posters have stated, 996 culture is less about productivity and more keeping up appearances with management. In China/SK/Japan you don't leave until your boss leaves, even if your work is done, so you will see people staying late a work shopping online or playing video games. The more the office becomes your home the less productive of an environment it becomes.

Very long working hours are very often associated with inefficient companies that are built on micromanagement.

The crack down on after-school tutoring is mainly to drive the capital away from it, it is not designed to eliminate every single after-school tutoring. CCP does not want the after-school tutoring to be a lucrative business for unicorn IPOs.

Not sure if this was meant as sarcasm? China imposes their fair share policies that are shortsighted and eventually self-destructive, the same as almost all groups of people larger than 0.

Not clear, could you explain?

The occasional and unpredictable issue. Construction crews took out the internet for half the city (happened to us a few weeks ago, maybe not half the city but it was bad). This broke a lot of communication systems (how can you deploy your work even working remotely when the systems you need aren't reachable?) and other things. Once service was restored, this forced a scramble the next week to get things done that had to be delayed and also hit the expected deadlines for that week (or risk a cascade effect of everything being delayed). One week of OT for a few people, everything was back in order. This is rare, unpredictable, and so not an anti pattern. It's a thing that happens.

Regular OT is the anti pattern. If your team is working long hours every day, regularly coming in on the weekend, if deployment always runs long and the team has to stay all weekend (even if this is an annual thing because you didn't get the memo on CI/CD), you have a problem.

It could be understaffing. It could be just lousy work. Working long hours seems to induce a decline in quality on its own. It could be a cultural problem. It could be abuse of the system (especially if OT is paid at a higher rate). It could just be bad processes. But regardless, if it happens regularly it warrants investigating.

Sometimes I have to do a bit of overtime to fix a time-sensitive issue, and I'm fine with that. The underlying issue, though, might be lack of code review, insufficient testing, fatigue or anything else.

It's good to remember that overtime is a viable solution, but as any solution it has its costs. This can build resentment among employees (making them quit earlier), increase fatigue (this requiring even more overtime to fix issues caused by fatigued employees), build dissatisfaction (resulting in loss of motivation), etc.

In other words, if you're finding yourself plumbing leaks every week, a better solution for the long term might be to replace the whole pipe :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

The days just keep coming. You need downtime, and off days. There's a strong case to be made that we don't get nearly enough, at least in the USA. Trying to mortgage that time because you didn't set appropriate goals, have appropriate staffing, or make good use of your time will only result in burnout. Often times you don't even get the extra work, because productivity goes down, but everyone must pretend to work, so they're not one of the bad ones.

You will pay for these mistakes eventually. You will not be able to retain people. They will leave, end up in the hospital, or have a meltdown and get fired. Or everyone is just miserable, but things go the same speed, or slower.

However, let's don't forget that you cannot form labor union without blessings from the party. Let's also don't forget that in China, company can fire people really easily, they just hide those unfair or even discriminatory reasons under the table, no one will help you because helping people is too costly.

There is a labor union in China of course, The labor union, called ACFTU, or All-China Federation of Trade Unions. I don't remember when was the last time they actually sued someone/company, maybe never.

Personally, I don't think those paper laws and paper institutions are actually there to serve the general public. So I don't even care what they've said, nothing will change for the better.

People do need to work less to consume more.

What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to make irrational and/or unethical decisions. And they will find a way to circumvent the laws. I am also sure that chinese companies will find a way to circumvent the 996 ruling here.

Don't fall for it. It's thinking like this that leads to managers optimising for the wrong metrics. Hours worked is clearly the wrong metric. Companies don't exist to simply employ workers for long hours, and thinking that way leads you down the wrong path right from the start. You need to look at where the value actually comes from, and this is sometimes subtle and not at all obvious.

Here's a challenge. A taxi driver in London earns about 4x what a taxi driver in Beijing does, in objective international value terms. Why? What factors might lead to that difference? If your value system can't answer that question, then it's wrong. They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are doing is worth 4x as much, and there must be a reason.

The point I'm making is that the £1m came from somewhere. Now yes sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy. We're talking about the economy in general and what makes on economy more valuable than another one in economic terms.

A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a while the money laundering starts to add up: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-l...

The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness and predictability, achieved by a comparatively incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't UK crime.

Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are not above the state and can get clobbered when they become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma.

(A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does that say about the regime there?)

That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...

Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like. Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern economy functions.

The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge cases, because they are things you can get enraged about and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really works.

Spare me the Econ 101, Harley Street is a status symbol, the doctors there are not more highly paid because they're objectively safer or more skilled.

I guess we could call Africa's history of conflict, exploitation and colonialism, and usurious loans from the World Bank to leaders who aren't interested in their citizens' welfare, a distortion of the local market.

This goes for loads of stuff. I would wager a $30 meal to be fresher than a $5 meal on average. I'm not saying there aren't any $5 meals that are fresher than some $30 meals, but just that the $30 has a lot lower chance to make me sick.

This is a purchasing power parity argument; moving people around in London is "worth" more because they have more money, and money that is more valuable on the global exchange rate market.

An economy in which the people have multiple times the purchasing power must do something right. And moving people in that economy around is more valuable than moving people elsewhere.

As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it.

Before you all go clutching your pearls: it's beyond impractical to even suggest paying it back nor would I even want to think about that. Not an option. not suggesting it.

But don't pretend it's because you're special. You stole it. Just own it.

Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then.

That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.

If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th century colonialism you then need to explain the development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.

For example, if not for India, Britain would be absolutely destroyed after WW2 and would be far from their current position in the 21st century (assuming allies still somehow win, big if). India was Britain's cash cow and is the reason why it survived the war.

Germany put the lie to imperial supremacy in 1940 when they comprehensively but-kicked France and Britain. They proved that industrialisation is what mattered and by then imperial mercantilism was a distraction. We were only saved by the English channel, and yes thanks to India. The fact we had India undoubtedly saved us, but in a last ditch final card up our sleeve that kept us in the game kind of way. Not in a trump card that meant Germany never had a chance from the start kind of way.

By the 20th century, I think you could say colonialism didn't pay off. But it was also the seed capital for a lot of europe's industrialization. The same thing happened with Japan - their defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war resulted in an indemnity that underwrote the Mejji restoration.

As for Japan, they did do well out of the war, but they were already rapidly industrialising at a much faster pace than their neighbours. That's why the won the war in the first place. The scale of the reparations might optimistically have paid for a few years of industrialisation and investment, but over the 4 decades between then and the next Sino-Japanese war that's basically a marginal difference. The second Sino-Japanese war merged right into WW2 so was too late to have any major effects on overall national development.

Not really. The japanese ships were, iirc, mostly built in britain and germany. Plus, the chinese had many more ships. I've read that corruption and morale were important factors, but I don't think relative levels of industrialization mattered that much. Bear in mind, Japan did not build things like engines domestically until the 20th century.

Further, the indemnity was nearly four times the annual national budget, and paid in pound sterling. That's more than a 'few years'. That's absolutely transformative. Not to mention the capture of chinese naval vessels, territorial concessions, etc.

> Most exports of industrial goods went to other developed countries.

Depends on the era. The basic point I'm making is that early industrialization, i.e. the wool trade, then the cotton trade, were generally export-driven, and export-driven to west africa. The cotton industry was also underwritten by colonialism insofar as it was predicated on slavery.

Pointing to countries that did not have direct roles in colonialism (although a surprising number of countries you wouldn't think of actually did - i.e. demmark in the slave trade) ignores the fact that colonialism basically amounted to a massive and sustained cash infusion into western europe. The spanish conquests of the new world, for example, brought so much gold and silver into europe they crashed the spanish economy, but I think it's obvious that this gold would have quickly escaped national borders and funded colonial and industrial ventures across western europe.

Looking at Britain, most of the imperial revenue flowed to the gentrified classes and into their estates. The industrialisers were mainly middle class domestic manufacturers and it's the growing friction between these two sides of the economy that drove political conflict and reform in Britain.

Most of Europe had no third world empire. As I pointed out, Germany proved conclusively that Empire was irrelevant. Spain and Portugal had huge Empires and just fizzled out because they didn't industrialise. France also failed to capitalise on Empire in ways that mattered long term.

China also has industrialised rapidly over several decades, and their imperial assets in Tibet and Xinjiang played no significant role in this. What matters is policy and economic culture. This is what distinguishes say Israel from it's neighbours. They're similar sizes, similar resources but night and day in terms of development.

I feel like I'm understating them. I'm getting my overview of the amounts from this paper[0], but in principle, even getting paid a part of the costs of a war is a very good deal, because that money usually goes entirely to your own economy (since they are supplying your military), you get essentially free training for your military, you get prestige, and you get the actual war aims (in this case, control over Korea, which is in itself lucrative).

If you consider another colonial war, the second opium war, the chinese government indemnity in this case didn't cover the costs of the expedition (iirc). However, it's still a really great deal, because you get access to the chinese market, which is worth a ton, and the state finances themselves aren't negatively impacted because the indemnity is enough to cover costs.

I think it's probably true that by the time Germany reunified, empires weren't always that worthwhile.

I don't totally disagree with your culture idea. I just think there's nothing worse for a nation's political culture than being colonized, and it's also terrible for the economy, so it's unsurprising that almost every first world nation was either never colonized, or if it was, is currently ruled by a seceeding group of the colonizers themselves (e.g. the USA).

[0]: https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/3069...

Japan achieved this by looking to countries like England as an example and becoming an imperialist and colonizing parts of Southeast Asia - kicking out some of the European countries who held those colonies in the process.

So yea they did the same thing to get wealthy - stealing resources.

Look at Germany, they never had any significant empire, but they still brought rest of Europe including the imperial powers to their knees in 1940. That conflict showed that the imperial mercantilism of the previous centuries just wasn't relevant anymore.

If imperialism was so great, there's no way Germany should have conceivably been able to roll over the imperial superpowers of France and Britain. The only thing that saved the UK was the English Channel. What mattered was industrialisation, along with economic and financial liberalisation. Every country that has done well in the last 100 years, except a few resource states like those in OPEC, has done so this way.

It the value literally came from somewhere else (geographically), funneled through the financial district and spread to the local economy. London is the bay area, but for bankers.

The City of London has been laundering money for centuries. Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about, and the Square Mile doesn't ask too many questions about source of funds. Not too long ago, HSBC was slapped on the wrist for laundering cartel money.

This keeps getting brought up but it's inconsequential at the scale of the total economy. As I pointed out elsewhere already on this thread, total Russian inward flows to this country accounts for about 1% of foreign investment. Now yes absolutely, foreign investment is a significant factor in the UK economy, about 20%. That makes a big difference, but Russian oligarch funds are not a significant part of that, they're just a politically and socially highly visible one that gets talked about a lot.

The reason London is a centre for laundering money is that it's a massive mainstream finance centre. So yes, you're on the right track, but you're obsessing over a small forest footpath and missing the mainstream economic motorway right next to it.

US FDI into the UK is more than 30x that from Russia. That from the EU is even bigger. This is the stuff that moves the needle.

Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour. Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used into doesn't help.

From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback economically. Then you have to play catch-up economically. That's where the social dysfunction, literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in :)

Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the deciding factor.

The case of Britain vs China isn't a particularly interesting one in this dynamic: it's just the dynamic great powers have always had within their group. The older state has more momentum but is sunsetting. Their wealth still comes from the exact same place, they just haven't quite equalized yet.

I see you avoided mention of South Korea or Taiwan. Israel is another example. I'm actually pretty bullish on Iran if they could kick out the clerics, that country has massive potential.

I think it's fair to characterise China as an imperial power, but how much of their current economic power actually comes from controlling say Tibet or Xinjiang? Those are marginal backwaters. They get a bit of forced labour and cheap vegetables. Maybe some minerals, but nothing they couldn't have bought fairly cheaply from Australia.

Do you actually, genuinely think not having their peripheral controlled territories would have prevented China developing? Seriously?

Your bottom line might still be correct however, wealth is a measure of resources and resources are more or less distributed in a zero-sum game. Whenever someone won something, someone else lost something. The importance of the English Empire and their naval dominance isn't something to downplay, and something they indeed should "own", rather than dismiss.

You're actually the first to mention the slave trade in the chain -- the discussion was just about wealth. Latin America is still also poor when compared to the "developed countries" at the top of the economic food chain, and their people weren't exported as slaves.

But the economic and political structures left by colonialism (both internal and international) meant that the people from these countries could never get out of that hole. Ultimately, people in Finland live much better than in Bolivia because there's a lot more money going around to build nice infrastructure, pay for teachers, quality goods, food, and so on, and where this money comes from can be traced all the way to colonialism.

Nokia couldn't have existed in Bolivia, even though the raw materials to make phones can be found there. It lacks absolutely everything else that is required to maintain a company like that: infrastructure, education, political stability. And the reason why this country lacks all of these things, is this "historical injustice". It's not only that the wealth was stolen, but also the capacity to create more wealth was stolen, not just the cobalt, but also the hypothetical industry that could have generated wealth for the people of the country.

It was definitely colonised, lost all it's forests for the navies of the Empire, and yet is actually pretty rich today (although we still have a lot of post-colonial syndrome, to be fair).

Current wealth: English-speaking, ridiculously tax-incentivized corporate portal to Germany’s economic area

As another African, your logic and morality are a disgrace.

Yip, they sure stole a lot of stuff - as of course did the Mongols and the Aztecs who are now dirt poor. In addition, the Ventians and Swiss never colonised anyone and are/were dripping cash.

But your comment is already a lot more nuanced than the OP's lazy clichéd statements.

A hell of a lot of their wealth also came from, amongst other things:

- individual rights - e,g, Magna caerta - no theft involved

- invention of limited liability corporations

- cadastas and private property rights (no theft involved)

- common law based on precedent (no theft involved)

- investment in mechanised warfare (to keep what they made and stole, see Mongols above)

- etc. etc.

Once only has to compare Singapore (colonised by British and Japanese) with Ghana since independence in the 1960s. Singapore has no water, no resources, no power, is surrounded by hostile neighbours, but is absolutely loaded. Ghana is resource rich and dirt poor.

You can decide for yourself who implemented the list above and who did not. You can also guess who is going to keep digging the hole they are in.

But I guess in certain progressive circles, "they stole it" passes for a rigourous analysis. [ And they get the bonus of claiming the moral high ground of being the perpetual victim ].

The OP should read Hernando de Soto instead.

In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the work of imperialism even today.

They can't face the facts and want to hide their ego behind simple cliche statements that don't capture even 1% of the reality of history.

Do the Crown Jewels produce billions of dollars daily that gets handed out to each citizen?

Or was it actually the British creating ships, goods, establishing trading posts, furthering science and creating the newest machinery etc... that created their wealth? (And still creates it to this day)

And since we are on the topic of the South African 'Star of Africa', the astute investor should note that those muppets in South Africa are busy changing their constitution to allow the expropriation of private property from their own citizens (never mind evil foreigners) a) without compensation, and b) just for kicks - without recourse to the courts.

So I ask you: would you be happy if your pension administrator sold up in Switzerland and USA invested your retirement in South African farms and factories?

It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault.

This is how we in Africa roll.

> It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault.

I've noticed certain parallels between segments of South African and American society: people who feel they have been left behind by a wealthy elite that doesn't care about them, and are willing to burn everything to the ground and start anew. Cue a charismatic politician who radically panders to them (despite being part of the elite), the only differences are that South Africa has objectively worse inequality, and has a longer political cycle.

Setting up trading posts and controlling the beginnings of truly international trade over 200-300 years ago... I would think that would set a country up well moving forward, and somebody eventually had to do it. British were one of the first.

If Europe was able to develop off the back of exploiting African resources, how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources? What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire? There are plenty of them.

Nope. Sorry, you can't whitewash the facts so easily, us from the former colonies won't let you!

https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism

> If this is right, then a third of income inequality in the world today can be explained by the varying impact of European colonialism on different societies. A big deal.

> how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources

Who says it hasn't? I invite you to look at graphs at https://gapminder.org/tools. You must avoid the natural binary thinking tendency, there is a whole spectrum between "developing" and "developed". Don't forget that factors like geographical/religious/linguistic etc affect speed of development. Why are black people in the US still not doing well, despite living in the richest country in the world? It is hard to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty.

> What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire

Hmm, sneaky attempt at changing goal posts - I never said colonization was necessary for development!

How did your African country get all this modern tech that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using the internet? You must've stolen it.

Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education --> production --> exchange high quality goods for currency.

Explains how a small island in north Europe with a weak military and flagging economy is on the UN security council.

Unironically, yes this is how capitalism works. If you have resources, you leverage those resources to produce goods and services that increase your total wealth. If I were to walk into a bank and steal a couple million dollars, maybe I could leverage that money into a successful business. Maybe so successful that it produces inner-generational wealth, so that my great-great-grandchildren are on average more wealthy than they would have been otherwise. I may have "earned" this money with my hypothetical business skills, but it doesn't change the fact that I only had the opportunity because I stole the money.

So yeah, many enterprising individuals took land and resources (and plenty of slave labor) from the Americas/Africa/Asia for hundreds of years, and were able to leverage those resources into even more wealth, thus people in London have more money, thus taxi drivers make more money.

The value of the UK economy, since around 1930, has increased in PPP terms by about 90%. So there's a reasonable argument the value in 1930 was partly down to imperialism, although I think industrialisation was a much bigger factor. Still, the 90% of our economic value we accrued since then certainly didn't come from colonialism, so where did it come from?

Look at Japan, yes it had an empire for a few decades before WW2, but that was mainly a result of industrialisation that had already happened, not a cause of it. Look at what's happened in China since it opened up and liberalised it's economy. At least they finally, finally figured this out.

Also taxi driving isn't exactly the most efficient of markets to compare value. London taxi drivers for example have a unique barrier to entry to become a taxi driver via an onerous road memorization test ("The Knowledge"), and that has nothing to do with the general British economy "doing something right."

By the same token you could say that moving money for the mafia is more valuable than preventing violence and disease in poorer societies.

I suspect the root issue here is what we consider to be value, or what activities are valuable and how value is generated. The common critique of capitalism is based (often unknowingly) on the Marxist theory of value which sees the vast majority of economic activities as parasitic of value, particularly financial activities, and if that's the issue here sure I'm quite willing to debate on that.

Value, whether measured in safety, shelter, nourishment, entertainment, ownership, infrastructure, sense of belonging or whatever you wish, is best built when you can trust the people around you and thus focus your efforts on what is valuable rather than trying to prevent being hurt or robbed.

Note that above I didn’t count money as valuable, since it isn’t intrinsically.

As a former Londoner, absolutely yes. London as a city is extremely parasitic, especially when it comes to time and standard of living. It does provide value when you're either so poor or find it so hard to get a job that working there provides you enough value, or you earn such "screw you" money that you can afford to live a comfortable life there. But for anyone outside of those groups, it's best avoided unless you're just visiting for the sights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uM2cdhfAGA

This is the reason that there's so many rich Russians knocking about e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/p83ljc/offshore_adv...

They did well to hold on to it, though.

.. and on all those metrics China came out much worse (the civil war, no marshall plan, proxy war with the US, communism), as well as not having the massive advantage of having been an industrial power long before the war.

This article dates the takeoff to 1978 (Deng), which seems reasonable: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/a...

Perhaps the question should be "at what date in the future do we expect the cost of a taxi in London and one in Beijing to equalize"?

A London taxi driver is not paid more because his work is somehow more valuable than a Beijing taxi driver's, it's just because everything in London is expensive. That's just basic economics. Read an economics book.

How did everything in London get so expensive? Read a history book about the last few centuries.

Seems like you're just some typical western chauvinist with no real argument.

They had sayings like: "doesnt matter if you lie or stand,you will get 3 thousand at the end" (what meant that there were no rewards for those who worked harder).

There could have been some islands of efficiency (perhaps in closed cities where workers could get accused of being spies if they didnt try hard enough) but for generic workers efficiency did not matter.

And I dont even write about inefficiencies of central planned system itself, where rewards did not come from market forces + falsified statistics on top, so nobody even knew the truth.

Even the communists knew that their system is inefficient, which you can see in many places. For example in "aquarium" novel by Suvorov one of the spies talks how they run out of meat and bread, but the system got so inefficient that it run out of people to murder.

USSR didnt work people harder. Political prisoners yes, but the normal people were incredibly ineffective. Even films made during communism laughed at that.

That's rapidly changing as the birthrate is falling and the population is ageing. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/

I expect the “replaceability” that you mention isn’t just “work long and hard or somebody else will”, but also “work long and hard, because you can be easily replaced as soon as you have a breakdown”…

> i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive"

I'm a bit more optimistic. In a culture where productivity is not the be-all and end-all, staying competitive at the cost one's whole life, will not take roots. I think that productivity also has different dimensions, which helps.

We dont all need to all do the same thing, and the biggest fallacy of all is that we re in competition with each other. We trade more or less efficiently but since doors are always half open, heh, just jump if you want.

Can even change with age.

Let us know how simple this works out in practice.

The most insulting thing to me would be to be called lazy. I can see as a society with that many people though this would naturally go too far.

In the West, we are not lazy but delusional as a society. We are the boxing champion that has quit hard training because they think they can't be beat. This is pretty natural after being the champ for so long. We don't need to train, we can just party and still win. That works until the younger talented hungry competitor comes along and you get knocked out. A tale as old as boxing, a tale as old as human history.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/US...

This makes sense. As people get richer, they use some of their wealth to "purchase" more leisure time. There is no reason to think this won't happen in China, just like it has happened in other places.

I think your fear is unfounded.

For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power, and then ultimately try to be worshiped as gods until the masses push back enough, and then become content with simply having absolute earthly power.

Maybe this trend is over, but given the amount of effort into putting out "God Emperor" memes in the US, my guess is that some people are at least willing to still try at it.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large increases in personal freedoms as well.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

The trend is consistent with other datasets:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

In complex codebases (i.e. pretty much anything except "we're managing a Shopify store" (and probably even then)) you're lucky to be able to onboard someone in a few months, forget about days!

I don't think the Chinese model of work until you drop dead is good but maybe something in the middle?

I haven't seen what you experienced nearly as bad, but I think a much larger challenge is dealing with people who are content to repeatedly exercise substantially the same skillsets each year, every year. Even after I take to the trouble to mentor them with identifying what they desire for their career, aligning to their revealed preferences of what user stories they opt to deliver in team scrums, writing up suggested "getting started" lesson plans, pointing out appropriately small, simple improvements in the code base they can apply their new skills towards, and arranging for free access to one of the big technical training sites. You can lead a horse...

We rather will introduce tariffs to fight against price dumping. We have the mechanism for that and politicians are slowly waking up and realizing that China is an enemy that must be fought.

> The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule practiced by some companies in the People's Republic of China. It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per week.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Domestic SME’s (20 - 40 hours per week). Moderate job risk - usually from business failure. Think of your small town dentist. If he is on vacation skiing for 2 weeks, no one will complain but business might hurt a bit. Expect Basic, low levels of competence.

Regional and Central Government (40 hours per week). No job risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. One thing the CCP does well is to hire relatively competent people to higher levels positions of governance and MOTIVATE them to accomplish tasks. You will be surprised how many have a reasonable command of English and a daughter with a degree from Oxford.

Division of Non Chinese MNC (40-50 hours per week). Moderate job risk. MNC jobs are considered high status in china because foreign employers are thought to treat employees relatively well. In general they respect local laws and avoid intrusive personal questions. Not considered top of the pecking order.

Large Domestic Exporters (50-60 hours per week). Little job risk - substantial risk of being reassigned. These are the beating heart of Chinese productivity and generally have high quality management. Usually has a local flavor of Taylorism. Loyalty is extremely important. Expect a confusing bureaucracy like any large organization.

Domestic Tech companies (70 hours per week - 996). The pace of product development and iteration within these companies is INSANE. It is like having a three day hackathon only to discover that the team from Missouri solved the problem last night while you were out getting pizza. Code quality, Engineering Practices, IP development does not matter as long as you can crank something out there first. They pay very well by Chinese standards and expect employees to live on the company facilities. Marriage within the company is encouraged as it is thought to foster loyalty. It is common for People burn out very quickly from these jobs.

MNC: Multi-National Corporation

Most of the 996 companies that I’ve seen tend to be ultra shitty sweatshops delivering less than bare minimum and with less security than what a university CS freshman would implement. There are obviously exceptions to this, but in China culturally speaking, it’s often much more important what things look like than what they actually are. That’s the core essense of 996. As long as you seem to be working hard and long time, everything else is secondary.

I find it ridiculous how random business managers in EU and US say this shit show would be competitive advantage. It’s everything but.

That being said China has several real competitive advantages over western countries, but media rarely speaks about then.

This is not a rhetorical question. Just interested to know.

Do you expect that "designed and engineered in X, made in China" is a sustainable situation when most of those designers and engineers have never set foot in the factory that makes their product, and never will?

For the capital class, IBGYBG by the time the wheels of sustainability of the situation fall off the cart, and in their mind they'll "simply" switch to the new dominant player; I believe they vastly underestimate switching costs and fungibility of their capital in China. For the media, they say what the capital class pays them to say.

My sense is that in tech jobs it just doesn’t scale.

There are professions where it does seems to work. Banking analysts who expect to go back to school in 2 years crush themselves to get Goldman Sachs banking on the resume.

In 2015 the CCP became aware the country was falling off a demographic cliff. It has the example of Japan, whose working-age population has been decreasing since 1997. And it can see the same development in South Korea.