The explanation is that Homo economicus, the economic optimizing agent, is a leaky abstraction on top of a killer ape. In the modern environment, it's easy to forget that our brains did not actually evolve to deal with money, let alone the high-tech infrastructure of a modern corporation. They evolved to dominate other apes on the African savanna.
But evolution does not document its handiwork. Our genes did not give our brains an explanation of game theory and the evolutionary utility function. They gave our brains a propensity to seek power and to feel pleasure when successfully wielding that power to hurt other people. That this behavior was adaptive in the ancestral environment is a historical fact, not represented anywhere in our neurons.
So yes, it's not about productivity, it's not about profit. It is, as Orwell put it, about the end goal of a boot trampling a human face, forever. That is the default fate of humanity unless that fate is actively and continually opposed.
There are myriad ways that humans tend to make bad decisions in the course of modern life. Psychology and evolutionary biology currently provide the best answer to "why".
If you want to understand yourself well enough to be able to avoid having marketers and advertisers make your most important life choices for you, or want to raise your children to think critically about statements they hear even when it means overcoming confirmation bias, or want to think about how to help society escape detrimental Nash equilibria that lead catastrophic global warming, a deep and accurate understanding of human behavior seems to me to be clearly better than simply operating under the wildly simplistic assumption that people always behave rationally in the pursuit of well defined goals.
I think it’s wrong to assume that evolutionary psychology and sociology are mutually exclusive.
Amazing phrase.
All those people on 996 could fuck around for 5 hours a day doing nothing useful, and as long as a small percentage of them bring themselves to do 30 minutes work every now and then, it could still be a net win for the company.
Profit also doesn't scale proportionally to productivity. In some of these big business markets you probably just need to be a bit more productive than your competition to reap huge rewards. Most employers aren't going to throw their workforce under the bus for a 5% gain, but if that's all you need to corner an entire market or roll your next biggest rival, then suddenly it might look like a fine deal.
Kai-Fu Lee discusses this culture in the Founders Fund podcast Anatomy of Next. He suggests that many of the workers will be the only ones in their family who have high paid office jobs. The rest work in factories, farms and other manual labor. Thus, they see an opportunity to be successful and lift their family out of poverty.
For some people this is called breaks.
Yes, you shouldn't do 12 hours full working, you should take sufficient number of breaks in between.
This will fit the 996 system.
In addition, mindlessly repeating experiments isn't a break.
What constitutes a breaks of course different for each person. Maybe some prefer go to gym instead or going for coffee, or simply just strolling around.
Not always true. In the US, you can be required to stay on premises, but it must be paid.
That's actually what Jack Ma asked for in his original WeChat posts. You simply can't ask a passionate employee to work in a fixed schedule, because they prefer working MUCH LONGER than 996.
Richard Liu almost made this explicit when he stated that people who didn't adhere to it were not his "brothers".
The mystery to me is that if my suspicion is correct, then the CEOs and upper management must think that devotion is ultimately (long-term) more important than productivity is to the bottom line... and I have no idea why. I don't buy the explanation that all of this is just "dumb". Something is up with this.