I consider my self a fairly hard working person, in my first job I've seen situations where people came in on a Monday and would go to their homes next Monday. I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years. And then I relocated from Bangalore to Bay Area for a while, and met a few of our Chinese colleagues- Even by my standards the Chinese were in a different productivity league altogether.
One person I knew would have three monitors, would eat at desk all the three meals, not sure when he even took breaks, but he kind of worked all the time, I mean literally. Would watch tickets in one screen, production issues in one, and work in another one. He'd read every ticket, feature request, pull request, and comment every where, knew everything and would just outperform anybody by some factors(Mind you people in our team I knew were kind of legends themselves). It ain't just the hours, they through and through dominated the initiative. You stood no chance.
I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them.
Im in serious awe of the Chinese culture. They also seemed to have very little gender discrimination, and in general little less hyper about things like religion etc. I guess all this things give them a natural edge.
>> I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them.
I've had the opposite experience. Most of the ones I knew were work evasive, and spent substantial time craming for leet code. I think there might be a generation gap at work.
No, as in they worked with me during graduate studies or were on my team and it was extremely frustrating. In particular "playing dumb" to avoid work was particularly offensive as that strategy created more future work but also involved people lying to my face.
Yeah, maybe you were in a bubble. Chinese are awesome, but they are human. Many a deeply racist, and have a number of other problems. Work as life culture is not something to look up to. You probably should re-evaluate your own objectives if you believe working round the clock while neglecting any other form of life is something to look up to.
>>Yeah, maybe you were in a bubble. Chinese are awesome, but they are human. Many a deeply racist, and have a number of other problems.
My interactions have been very positive, and being an Indian I have never experienced any racism from them. There is a language gap for sure, and due to that times, more than a round of clarification is needed to be on the same page, but that was nothing I couldn't work out.
I agree your interactions would have been different.
It is also possible that I interacted with subset of Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area, which generally happens to be a place for people who in general value diversity and happens to be a meritorious place.
>>You probably should re-evaluate your own objectives
I have, I don't believe in linear returns any more and my days of attempting to scale personal growth as a function of hours worked are behind me. You grow up with age and your perspectives change too.
At the same time I have mad respect for immigrants(as a former failed immigrant myself) and other communities that are working day and night for a good life. More power to them.
>I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years
I am much more productive coding than 99% of the people around me. One of my secrets is I sleep well. Probably your definition of coding is different from mine because of your working area. People make stupid mistakes when they are sleepy, including me, and it is way more expensive to fix(finding bugs in a big codebase) than not making then in the first place.
I have met lots of Chinese people working and had the opposite experience. China is so big that outliers that represent one in a thousand are more common but most people are that, average at most, way worse than European trained workers.
The fact that they sleep on their shops and workshops does not make them super human. Quite the opposite, they are human and working more hours make them work less intense.
I don't believe the Story that Chinese can run at Marathon pace all day, because they are similar mental limits for humans as they are physical ones. And Chinese people get burnout like everybody else or worse. Apathy on workers is the normal state.
Based on what you just described?! I'm sure there are many great reasons to be in awe of Chinese culture, but what you just described sounds like an absolute nightmare. How is this stuff a positive thing? How is this person anything more than a work machine? What's the point of their life at that point?
The people you know worked long hours, but were they actually more productive?
Studies on working have consistently shown diminishing returns on longer and longer hours, generally past 30-40, depending on job type, i.e. physical jobs like assembly line work drop of slowly (mistakes rise but only gradually) vs intellectual jobs where mistakes either rise rapidly or people adjust by taking more slack time throughout the shift.
In all studies that I saw (and there is general lack of quality studies in that area - hard to set up realistic A/B experiment and observational data get you only so far) while average productivity dropped after 40h there were outliers (~10%) with no drop in productivity or increase in error rate with 60h/week. There is good chance that in elite job in Asia (and TSMC is definitely elite) almost everyone is in that category - can work very long hours without burning out. People who could not are either pushed out or leave on their own.
How long were those studies going on for? I can do 12-14 hour days for a week, I even once programmed quite challenging code for 36 hours without making anymore mistakes towards the end, but after I do this I'll be very tired for a few days once the rush is over.
I consider my self a fairly hard working person, in my first job I've seen situations where people came in on a Monday and would go to their homes next Monday. I've done a full time start up with a day job, quite literally coding every waking hour of my life(like 2 - 4 hours sleep a day) for years. And then I relocated from Bangalore to Bay Area for a while, and met a few of our Chinese colleagues- Even by my standards the Chinese were in a different productivity league altogether.
One person I knew would have three monitors, would eat at desk all the three meals, not sure when he even took breaks, but he kind of worked all the time, I mean literally. Would watch tickets in one screen, production issues in one, and work in another one. He'd read every ticket, feature request, pull request, and comment every where, knew everything and would just outperform anybody by some factors(Mind you people in our team I knew were kind of legends themselves). It ain't just the hours, they through and through dominated the initiative. You stood no chance.
I knew several Chinese colleagues and friends like these. They are all good people wanting to make a good life by working hard, nothing to blame them. But it was kind of an unwritten rule that if you had two Chinese working in your team, you had no chance beating them.
Im in serious awe of the Chinese culture. They also seemed to have very little gender discrimination, and in general little less hyper about things like religion etc. I guess all this things give them a natural edge.
So yeah, not all long shifts are equal.
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