I worked for OnePlus a few years ago, managing its Amazon account.

The culture leaned heavily toward 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. I was there during a particularly tumultuous period, and by that point a lot of the staffing had already been hollowed out.

That said, the OnePlus 11, 12, 13, and 15 are great phones. The 13 and 15 in particular have insane battery life. I have never managed to drain either one to zero in a single day.

As far as I know, OnePlus and Motorola are also the only major companies selling phones with silicon-carbon batteries in the United States. It is ridiculous that Samsung and Apple still have not adopted them.

One of my biggest frustrations at OnePlus was how much of the internal tooling remained in Chinese or used poor English translations. Most of the management was also based in China and often did not seem to understand the US market very well.

Probably the most ridiculous example was an internal invoice or payment-submission portal. It was awful to use, but the terminology was even stranger. A submission apparently needed to be “signed” and then “sealed.”

I never asked anyone what the original Chinese term was, but I assumed it referred to the use of a Chinese name chop or company seal. Name chops are stone stamps bearing a person’s or company’s name that are pressed into ink and applied to documents as a form of authorization.

It was a small thing, but it captured the broader problem pretty well: internal processes designed around Chinese business practices were translated literally and then handed to US employees with very little localization.