How to survive in a Chinese company(jaapgrolleman.com) |
How to survive in a Chinese company(jaapgrolleman.com) |
One can live comfortably elsewhere without accepting constant compromises at a personal and professional level. I would bet also that, as in Japan, one is always foreign, gaijin, alien, at the end of thr day, and this fact will present as a hard cap on potential.
Maybe it's covered elsewhere in another article, but this is a lot to endure.
Study after study has shown that it's basically impossible to squeeze out more than about 30 hours of actual productivity from the general population per week, especially when this is sustained for long periods of time. Western countries are starting experiments with 4-day work weeks precisely because it's more productive, not less.
I've worked with people doing these types of hours (Indian subcontractors) and they were 100% useless 100% of the time because they were too exhausted to do anything other than rote work. Even that rote work was riddled with errors because they were too tired to think about what they're doing or do any quality assurance. They were successful only at the most trivial tasks, tasks so simple that a script would have sufficed. I needed humans, they were meat robots.
In some countries, that's precisely how managers view their employees: As annoying robots that complain too much, or slaves that they need to also pay (as little as possible).
It's only in a few (not all!) western countries that businesses treat intellectual labour such as IT work as creative "value generation" instead of manual labour to be extracted.
Maybe the East and West aren’t that different after all.
Otherwise...
> I also don’t like it when it rains on my birthday, but what can you do about it? Just like that, life in China is better if you don’t let these little things get to you.
I hope there’s a follow-up article in a year so we can see if the optimism is still there.
edit: formatting
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[0]: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/05/business/china-three-chil...
[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/26/china/35-curse-unemployme...
i remember one of my juniors who came in without any practical experience speaking english (he could read and write and passively understand me) who three months later was having a good natured argument with me about some technical question, which is a behavior practically unheard of in china. you just don't argue with your boss.
Absolutely don't agree with your l this or I'm in another world I guess, easily the reasons why everything is English despite being Dutch
Yes, it's low-hanging fruit takeaway, but I don't think there's any value in that shallow pass - and damaging to use such brutal simplification.
presumably OP has a reason for enduring said suffering but it’s not really obvious from the post
The OP also mentioned the low retention rate, behind that, it means that for young people, they may start in a low pay job, but there will be tremendous amount of chances for new opportunities elsewhere after a few years of work experience. There will be less BS in the interviews, and ~50% of pay raise each time (sounds familiar?). After try and errs, there's a chance you'll find a fair-paying job with reasonable workload and non-toxic workspace, they call it landed (Shàng Àn 上岸), comparing to the endless Sea of Suffering(Kû Hâi 苦海).
They have the hope for the future.
Which is not judgement per se - gutsy move opting to work in a different context. Just slightly confused
> This all seems harsh and negative but it can be a fantastic ride (even if it’s taxing).