I sense that the tech industry in the west is moving towards a direction guided by leaders like Elon Musk, who has demonstrated to a degree that certain practices will pay off and would not destroy a system. Being in communication with many ICs and leaders from all over the world, including China, I can say that these practices are extremely reminiscent of patterns that can be observed in Chinese big tech, with the goal of maximizing bottomline and reducing costs. Here's why it won't work for the west and why treating your employees well is actually better for making more money:
There is this schedule called 996(9AM to 9PM, 6 days a week) in China that I'm sensing the west is inching towards in an implicit but not too subtle way. There is also a phenomenon happening in China where tech workers over the age of 35 are being laid off and rejected from interviews with big tech; in some cases this even goes as low as 30.
China is able to afford this due to having demographic dividend, the size of fresh labour supply means Chinese big tech companies can continue to hire waves of new grads, have them go through the pipeline of 996, produce, and lay them off once they hit the age where they begin to self-advocate and push back. In order to continue to have access to the demographic dividend of labour supply, China is also utilizing meta strategies like having women return to the family, encouraging births.
In Chinese big tech companies, work is segmented, collaboration is discouraged, competition between teams and orgs is encouraged. Promotions and career paths are not paved with collaboration but rather self-serving as a group or as an individual. Technical work and service ownership is divided piecemeal manner to facilitate IC replaceability. This pattern can also be found in a lot of western enterprises.
The strategy of "get rid of expensive big thinkers, hire implementers at scale, tell them to do small thing, they do thing, move fast go brrr, replace if it doesn't work out" has worked for China so far but it is at cost, and this isn't a cost that the west can afford in the long term. We continue to see the outcomes in terms of security incidents and reliability issues across tech in various shapes and formats. this is the cost.
The west does not have access to the kind of demographic dividend China does, and Elon Musk's school of thought for how-to-run-a-company simply does not work, because there is no mathematical grounds for doing this type of labour replacement. Also, segregating ownership and having ICs only do piecemeal work is how innovation and joy is killed. The same workforce can produce very different work when they are motivated intrinsically vs under the threat of survival. The best software is built with heart, when people care about the business, security/compliance/reliability becomes real goals rather than checklists.
Companies at all sizes will see better business outcomes when their software is built and maintained by happier people, because there are so many nuanced ways you can save cost, improve security posture, improve inheritability, reduce toil -- it depends on whether people are motivated to think about it, experiment, and do it. This will not be achieved by adopting labour practices from parts of the world that have demographic dividend and can take advantage of large labour supply.
One could argue that leveraging global inequality and replacing western employees with employees in countries with lower cost of living is how leaders expect to solve this problem. However -- different constraints produce different engineering practices, and once those practices are brought into an existing system, there will be a period of clash and friction while everyone figures out how to work with an entire new set of implicit social rules, this has cost on the software systems being maintained. Energy that could be devoted to making better software goes elsewhere, and culture shifts with adopted practices. These adopted practices are often products of survival-driven development in highly competitive countries with large labour supplies, and do not optimize for security, reliability, and performance.
Incidents are expensive, can you imagine the amount of salaries spent on recovery and mitigating impact? Prevention is the best method, and solid software systems build by good people with heart are what is defensible and reliable. At this point I'd like to introduce a Daoist concept from Laozi: 清新治本，直道谋身 -- for all systems, the root cause/foundation can be fostered and healed with ethical authenticity, new paths can be built with direct and kind conduct. Humans evolved by collaborating and community building, we are able to achieve the degree of scientific advancement because people work with each other and exchange information -- eliminating the collaborative spirit to foster competition in order to reduce cost on salaries will only produce fallible systems, which will end up costing more upon failure.
Personally, I'm grateful to have worked with many leaders who share similar sentiments. Viewing operator happiness as a part of the health of a complex system is how we achieve success, and because of this mindset I was enabled to do my best work at Heroku. When ICs are motivated intrinsically, they produce their best output. This may be a good opportunity to say that my medical leave has been accidentally extended to June 30th due to a miscommunication with the company that handles medical leaves with Salesforce -- which actually ends up being beneficial because I do have some explorative procedures lined up for next steps around my health. A company that treats its employees well will also get the best work out of them, and the delta between ok-work and best-work can be directly translated into money when it comes to metrics like Mean Time Between Failures. My gratitude goes to Salesforce and Heroku for giving me the time and space to take care of my health and produce these thoughts, and all the leaders that have contributed to them.
Thanks for making it to the end of this read, here’s a cool sunset for you: 天高地阔，流水行云 - sky is high, the earth is wide, water flows and clouds drift, everything has its natural order, we retain inner peace by acknowledging that and doing our best to go with the order of things, such is the way.
