Going To an Office and Pretending To Work: A Business That's Booming in China (elpais.com) 88
A new business model has emerged across China's major cities, El Pais reports, where companies charge unemployed individuals to rent desk space and pretend to work, responding to social pressure around joblessness amid rising youth unemployment rates. These services charge between 30 and 50 yuan ($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch in spaces designed to mimic traditional work environments.
Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.
Some operations assign fictitious tasks and organize supervisory rounds to enhance the illusion, while premium services allow clients to roleplay as managers or stage workplace conflicts for additional fees. The trend has gained significant traction on Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent to Instagram, where advertisements for "pretend-to-work companies" accumulate millions of views. Youth unemployment reached 16.5% among 16-to-24-year-olds in March 2025, according to National Bureau of Statistics data, while overall urban unemployment stood at 5.3% in the first quarter.
People pay for that in China? (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever makes the economic figures look good I guess.
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...you too will get old and get made redundant...
Re:If it makes you feel better (Score:4, Interesting)
Keeping a Job
Often senior employees figure out a secret business process and don't document / tell anyone else in the company about it. This secret business process means that the person must be kept around. The business disruption caused by firing them is too high.
Other times, people just make busy work to look like they are busy. Sometimes it is at an individual level. In other cases, it can happen collectively. Carl Icahn has this crazy story about letting go 12 floors of people when he couldn't figure out what they actually did. [youtu.be]
Young People Finding Work
Young people not being able to find new jobs is about job creation and skills mismatch. Business wise, creating new jobs is very different than trying to keep existing employees productive and motivated. Keeping an existing business running involves minimizing change and minimizing the impact of inevitable change. Expanding and creating new jobs requires finding new profitable opportunities, hiring new people, buying new equipment, and lots of other steps. It is really hard to do successfully, and magic when it happens.
Young people have historically done much of this for themselves, as they are the only people willing to work hard enough to do it. If young people's expenses are so high that they can hardly make ends meet, then they won't work on the "next big new idea". Student debt and high housing prices kills new job creation. it means that the new business leaders have no money left to create the opportunities to create job growth. Nothing kills off job growth as effectively as too much debt. The founding fathers prioritized free public education for good reasons.
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Can we get an AI option for a downvote?
Re:If it makes you feel better (Score:5, Funny)
Argh!!! ... I'm realizing my writing style looks exactly like Google's AI generated answers ...
It doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, if it looks like AI ...
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Your style looks sharp. It's going to be a real problem if we start having to make our own writing less perfect in order to avoid being accused of it being AI generated.
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I've started leaving off the prepositions, pronouns and such from sentences, and my 'pro' writing is starting to look more like casual writing - more terse. "You've got to lean into it." becomes "Lean into it."
Or I'll just resort to what an idiotic feminist college English lit prof used to call "antiquated 19th century writing style": writing long, syntactically complex but linguistically communicative sentences which convey a complex yet nuanced thought, something AI will absently and superfluously munge.
O
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So companies don't compete anymore (Score:3)
This means that increasingly the specialized knowledge you have is not something that keeps you employed.
This is nothing new it goes back to the 1800s and it has a name. Taylorism. MBAs perfected it and it's their number one job. The goa
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That is what they said about computers, that is what they said about printing press, that is what they said about factories and robots.
They say this to keep the working persons income down, they say this to suppress the employee.
I would tell you to mind your history, but a bot is only told what to do. It doesnt think for itself.
Re: If it makes you feel better (Score:2)
"That is what they said about computers, that is what they said about printing press, that is what they said about factories and robots."
And they were right every time.
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Increases in automation are going to help identify the Wallys of the world and fire them.
I used to believe that sort of thing but I don't anymore.
Too many Wallys have patrons who keep them employed even if they actively screw up and cost the company money or create major setbacks. Those managers as patrons have enough clout to both protect themselves and their proteges.
I agree to an extent about your headcount premise, because it's common for an org to implement hiring freezes for a time, and if vacant positions are vacant for long enough then they're deprecated. A useless employee actually o
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Rather silly for the Chinese to pay for the privilege when so many of us in Western countries have already figured out how to do it while getting paid.
Whatever makes the economic figures look good I guess.
There are indications that recent new college graduates in the US are struggling to find jobs, with unemployment rates around 5.8% overall and near 8% for computer science. However, that pales in comparison to the situation in China, where the estimates are that anywhere from 15% to 50% of new college graduates can't find jobs or at least the white-collar jobs that they were expecting after graduating from college.
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My daughter is graduating in psych. Has a poorly paid but good experience for the future job lined up.
Son is still in school. Has a poorly paid but good experience for the future job already.
People gotta start somewhere.
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Yeah, in the USA these work pretenders are called civil servants.
There are plenty of "Wallys" in private enterprise too, as many other posters have noted.
Re: People pay for that in China? (Score:2)
While people in the West have figured that out without getting laid -- the /. business model
Not only is the world stranger than I imagine (Score:2)
But why?
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Two things (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah there's a lot of what folks call tofu dregs which are buildings that are so poorly built they just collapse but there is a hell of a lot of solid built Office buildings with absolutely nothing to do because the only reason they exist is the government needed to keep the economy functional while Xi consolidated his power enough that he could ignore 30% unemployment.
And like the article says it's a huge social problem to be unemployed.
So you have a lot of office space that can be rented out almost free and you have a lot of people that don't want to be hanging around the house. Market meets demand.
This is what happens when late stage capitalism kicks in around massive amounts of technological unemployment. You get a lot of weird shit like this.
The real problem is that kind of unemployment gets you into wars and increasingly people think they can find solutions to nuclear war like the golden dome.
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people think they can find solutions to nuclear war like the golden dome.
The Golden Dome will never exist, and even if it did it would not prevent catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. To name two immediate vulnerabilities: a) since it is aspiring to take out missiles in their boost phase, it can easily be overwhelmed by a bunch of dummy missiles that consist of a first stage only, and b) submarines can bring nuclear devices very close to coastal cities essentially undetected, and they can be delivered underwater. A 5MT device suddenly popping up a mile or two off the coast
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Yeah.. no. You were doing okay but then you veered off into fantasy land. We and the Russians did a lot of nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s. Simply detonating a few bombs under water is not leading to a nuclear winter. Go read this. https://blog.ucs.org/sulgiye-p... [ucs.org]
It's showing how we're more focused on tactical bombs as opposed to maximizing yield.
To put simply, we are not detonating Tsar bombs. We've literally limiting ourselves .Tsar bomb could of been 100 megaton but they stopped at 50. That dwarfs th
Dude the nukes from the 50s (Score:1)
And they have a lot of it. They don't even have to hit anything with those damn things they could set them off in their silos and we would be fucked.
We aren't talking about a few bombs we're talking about hundreds if not thousands of them each of which has many times the capacity of what destroyed Hiroshima.
This is the frustrating thing about old people they cannot understand
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That "duck and cover" was never right about nuclear weapons. But I'm not sure setting them off in their silos would do much damage. I think the dust needs to get up into the stratosphere.
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Over 1500 underground nuclear weapons tests have been conducted- about 3 times the ones that give us all the cool pictures.
Precisely zero nuclear winters triggered.
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detonating a few bombs under water is not leading to a nuclear winter
Reading words is an important skill. Note how I said "popping up"? I am aware of the theoretical attack mode of using an underwater nuke to cause a radioactive tsunami, but that is NOT what I was talking about. I was talking about essentially a Bouncing Betty attack where the warhead gets close to the coast underwater (probably a supercavitating torpedo like Shkvall et al) then pops up to at least groundburst altitude. Lots more area denial that way. A tsunami is kinetic; a groundburst or airburst gives you
It doesn't have to exist (Score:3)
When empire was fail they inevitably undertake military expansion so they can loot other countries to fill the emptying coffers caused by the mismanagement of the incompetent boobs we put in charge.
America will have to do the same. We'll start with Mexico and Canada and South America. But it's never enough because you continuously put incompetent nepo babies in charge of everything and they screw everything up.
So eventually America will invade China and Europe
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I had assume the dome was talking about terminal and mid-course.
Ultimately, whether boost-phase or terminal, the problem remains: The arms race between interception and launching is unwinnable for the interceptors, against a real adversary.
And for a "not real" adversary (some s
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How the fuck is boost phase interception remotely plausible?
Can't argue with ya. There are absolutely no details https://www.twz.com/space/trum... [twz.com] not because this is super secret megaweapon info that can't be revealed in public, but because this is an aspirational project, a headline, a sound bite designed to boost some ego or other. But anyway, boost phase is the stated goal, and there is vague talk about orbital-based interceptors. Mkay. How many rounds does each orbital platform carry? (Don't tell me it can carry enough energy to power a sufficiently frisky lase
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The only way I see a Golden Dome scenario working for siloed nukes is if the interceptor missiles are in orbit and basically just moments away from being able to launch to intercept, where the orbit takes them over the adversarial nation.
Since no nation wants their adversary to have missiles in space ready to rain down upon them at a moment's notice, I fully expect that any serious effort to deploy such a system would result in the most diplomatic and economic pressure possible. I don't see Russia or China
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The Soviets shot down planes full of people for less.
Orbital ABM capabilities is fucking insanity.
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The only way I see a Golden Dome scenario working for siloed nukes is if the interceptor missiles are in orbit and basically just moments away from being able to launch to intercept
And such a system would be pointless because all the nation needs to do is build a few hundred cheap vehicles that simulate the launch, to overwhelm the very limited number of interceptors that could be carried by each orbital platform. You wouldn't even need to build silos for them, because nukes can be launched from TELs just as easily as from fixed silos. Put your dummies on TELs.
The whole idea is ludicrous on multiple levels.
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China is a centrally planned economy . . .
This is what happens when late stage capitalism kicks in around massive amounts of technological unemployment.
I know you're economically illiterate, but do you even think about what you write at even a basic level? How is a planned economy engaging in pointless activities for the sake of making some numbers come out a certain way the fault of capitalism, much less so-called "late stage" capitalism, which China must have somehow reached more quickly than any country that's been capitalist for hundreds of years given they only enacted market reforms in the past few decades.
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Well, IIUC (no guarantee) China *is* a centrally planned economy, just with low resolution. They say things like "We need more steel mills" or "We need better chip factories", and then they plan incentives to cause those to appear. (Sound familiar? It should.)
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late stage capitalism? (Score:2)
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World War 3 is as inevitable as the Sun rising tomorrow morning. The Owners are fully convinced of their separateness from the rest of humanity. This is all a chess game to them and taking millions of pawns is part of the game. Our entire existence is merely tolerated by them. They think we should be grateful for them allowing us to live.
They should be grateful that we are too stupid to figure out who they are; otherwise, their policies would get them all annihilated.
Re: Not only is the world stranger than I imagine (Score:2)
People who are employed find it easier to find work. I think the theory is that employed people are necessarily employable. This is bullshit, as companies hire the wrong people all the time, but the idea is attractive to the intellectually lazy (like most executives, managers, and HR workers.)
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This is bullshit, as companies hire the wrong people all the time
Can confirm. I'd say our real success rate in hiring is around 15%.
It's getting worse and worse as people are becoming skilled at lying about their skills.
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Hiring is like dating, if you're paying an agent to do it for you, it will be inefficient. People lie on CVs and they lie on dating apps.
To find a date, go and do stuff you like, talk to the other people there, get contacts, then ask for a date. (I'll grant that if your hobby is stomping puppies or something, it might be a struggle)
Hiring is the same. Go to events in your field (e.g conferences, industry awards) talk to the other people there, get contacts then inform them that you're hiring. Just like my a
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Go to events in your field (e.g conferences, industry awards) talk to the other people there
Check.
get contacts then inform them that you're hiring.
Check.
Just like my absurd "stomping puppies" example above, if you are in an awful industry, you will probably experience a recruitment pool of awful people.
Software and Network Engineering doesn't seem that awful to me, but its hiring pool is definitely slanted toward bullshit artists with paper.
The 15% or so that end up being keepers are indeed really good. The others are just getting better at fooling you into thinking they're a keeper.
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Software and Network Engineering doesn't seem that awful to me, but its hiring pool is definitely slanted toward bullshit artists with paper.
The 15% or so that end up being keepers are indeed really good. The others are just getting better at fooling you into thinking they're a keeper.
That's a shame... I've been reading articles about IT jobs here on Slashdot for almost a quarter century now, and every time the subject comes up, industry veterans chime in with good advice and anecdotes. I hoped it would be a solved problem by now. Maybe recruiters need a slashdot-related flter question...
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Expectations too high? Don't know.
There are a lot of very underqualified individuals with all of their papers in order. It was once pretty easy to weed them out. It gets harder. Perhaps I'm just really not good at... really trying to fuck someone out of a job with gotcha questions. Just don't know.
And of course, there are times when you simply have to second guess yourself- after all, one of these people may just interview badly (God knows I sure did 20 years ago)
The badness trend ha
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Unlike yours, which doesn't work due to too much lead-eating.
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For Parent, they're clearly the kind of intellectual powerhouse that scrapes the paint chips off the wall and eats them.
For the Chinese folks, it's because China is a world leader in poisoning their children with lead.
fictional tasks thought the chinese were smarter (Score:2)
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Nah, the fictional task stuff is just the sensationalist spin (that everybody here eats up nowadays, apparently).
The core of what is going on is this: "but for the past few months, she has been paying a monthly fee of 400 yuan ($55) for a comfortable space to spend the day; it’s much cheaper than spending hours in a cafe" and "($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch"
It's just a coworking space.
Blame Verizon (Score:2)
https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]
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That is pretty awesome though. It's like the WFH folks that have two jobs and do both just well enough not to get fired. Yes, I'm totally envious that I'm not nearly that clever. Hats off to those people.
Got my first billion dollar(*) company worked out (Score:3)
Venture capitalist vultures please contact Investor Relations at realfakework.com
Note that we will use AI. For something.
(*) Billion market cap, not billion turnover.
Bullshit jobs [Graber] (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I guess China has those too.
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I haven't read that book, but reading the summary of useless jobs I feel like the author may have never worked?
A good administrative assistant is golden, as is a good middle manager.
I'm not convinced there's no value in someone checking and enforcing compliance too.
I think the author just assumes everyone is perfect and there's no value to a little bit of redundancy to making sure things are done right and on time, and therefore sees fluff where there's value.
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
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I'm the Chief Slashdot Animosity Engineer. Known on the street as a "troll".
Finally! (Score:3)
wrong date ? (Score:3)
I double-checked and it's not April 1st.
WTF?
Capitalism is now packaging wage-slavery as a product and SELLING it to us?
I hope the AIs evolve quickly to take over. My hope for humanity is melting faster than the ice caps.
They're charging the unemployed people?! (Score:2)
Shouldn't this be a social program, subsidized by the government??
Re: They're charging the unemployed people?! (Score:2)
If there were actually anything communist about China, yes it would be.
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I'm sure that there are things about China that are communist. There are in every country I know enough about to have an opinion. And there are also things about them that are free-market. I'm generally in favor of "less government control", but not always. Some things should be run for the common good. People just end up disagreeing violently about which. (And about whether they can trust the government to do it.)
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I think the idea was to make reification real by forc
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Kramer (Score:3)
Didn't Kramer originate this business model on Seinfeld?
Old Soviet Saying (Score:4, Informative)
..."We pretend to work, and the Party pretends to pay us."
Why doesn't MS pay them to (Score:1)
...fix all their damned bugs that have existed for decades? It's cheap educated labor. Wake Up Nadella!
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Re: Why doesn't MS pay them to (Score:2)
Sums up U.S. Medical Insurance Industry (Score:2)
($4-7) daily for desks, Wi-Fi, coffee, and lunch (Score:2)
sounds like a good deal,
McDonalds cost $15 for lunch and they look at you funny after the first 2 hours of refills.
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sounds like a good deal, McDonalds cost $15 for lunch and they look at you funny after the first 2 hours of refills.
Yeah, this is an article that relies on a lot of spin to be negative. Not sure if it more "a place to co-work" or truly "a place to pretend to work", and the newpaper writing the article has a very pro-European stance. I'd take it with a (small, this is China after all) grain of salt.
Re: how to pay (Score:2)
Business model of the future (Score:1)