In order to catch the company shuttle to Yizhuang in the northeast corner of Beijing, intern Wang Ke wakes up at 6:40 am every morning. If she can’t make it, she has to face a very torturous 1 hour and 10 minutes, at the cost of 2 transfers from the East Third Ring Road to 21 subway stops.
Internet people seem to be getting busier and busier. Just recently, Racer announced the launch of a full-size week (a kind of overtime system, working six days in the big week and five days in the small week); in order to encourage overtime, Byte Jump also said it would give double the salary to employees who work overtime on weekends.
However, the fatigue brought by overtime can sometimes be the last straw that kills the camel.
On the night of January 3, someone on the workplace social App Pulse revealed that a young female employee of Poundland had died suddenly on her way home at 1:30 am. Subsequently, it was said that the grocery department where the deceased was working was in a hardcore struggle mode, i.e. working 7 days a week and 6 days a week in a super size week mode, and the daily working hours should not be less than 10 hours, and the working hours should not be less than 300 hours per month.
What is it that makes Internet people have to run in a way that overdraws the future?
The general tiredness of the Internet under the sky
First of all, we have to make it clear that the vast majority of Internet companies must be very tired. Whether you are in a giant, small start-up companies or service providers of Internet companies, do technology, products or operations, identity is a regular employee, outsourcing or internship.
If not, you should be glad that your job is not saturated enough. Let’s take a few examples below.
To catch the company shuttle to Yizhuang in the northeast corner of Beijing, intern Wang Ke wakes up at 6:40 a.m. every morning. If she can’t make it, she has to face a very torturous 1 hour and 10 minutes, at the cost of 21 subway stops with 2 transfers from the East Third Ring Road.
sleep time is compressed because of the commute, and she has no life left. Taking the shuttle bus on the way to and from the city allows her to get a short break and get some sleep when she gets on the shuttle bus. But it was hard for her to sleep soundly again. In just three days, she experienced two accidents.
One winter night in 2020, she was thinking about eating dumplings when she arrived home, but the shuttle bus broke down on the road. Sitting in the back, she went to sleep and woke up again, and the bus didn’t move for nearly an hour until the next shuttle picked them up. When she changed trains, she and a fellow passenger she had never met looked at each other and smiled bitterly. That night was the winter solstice, and her plans for an extra meal went out the window.
One morning, the car almost to the company, the back of the glass instantly shattered, Wang Ke woke up from sleep, did not know what happened for a while. The car is still driving forward, the broken glass shaking, a colleague next to her quick eyes, a window shelf to prevent the glass from falling down, became the hero in her eyes. At the end of the shift, the rear window glass has been repaired, but looking back, she still feels scared.
Once going home, Wang Ke changed from the shuttle bus to the subway and sat down directly on the floor in the carriage. Her face was probably haggard, and an aunt kept staring at me with a pitying and compassionate gaze for several stops.
She had also thought about renting a closer apartment. A friend who was leaving her job showed her the apartment she was renting: it was a 10-minute taxi ride from the office and a 2-kilometer walk by subway. It was a 3,600 yuan per month Loft, with a good layout and light, but she couldn’t feel the ambiance around her.
There were few people outside at night, and very little food. Here, she paused, even the shrimp shabu-shabu is a cottage version. Now she still rents in a friend’s house, even if there is not much time to enjoy life every day, but she can see the traffic outside the window, she feels closer to life.
Of course, in the building, there are also pieces of life hidden in the building, hi tea, no Indians, KFC can be found, and the gym is also a popular place to hit. Wang Ke once queued for ten minutes for the treadmill, but she never queued for the TCM physiotherapy room, and the remaining quota was always zero.
In the company’s barber store, Wang Ke witnessed a touching scene.
A male employee with severe hair loss sat on a chair and said to the barber boy: bother pushing it so that my hair can look less thin. The barber boy did his job nimbly. The employee looked at his hair in the mirror, excited and satisfied, hugged the barber boy and said: Thank you, brother!
Although the company does not have small and large weeks, but the operations post often have to work on weekends. Recently, she took the time to watch the newly released movie “Journey of the Heart”, and one of the lines in it made her feel very emotional: the moment you want to live, the spark in your heart has been ignited.
She felt that working in an Internet company is not just a busy job, the long commute and overtime make her lose the opportunity to feel life, not to mention the fire in her heart.
She is not the only one who lost the fire in her heart. Zhang Bo originally worked in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, and was recently poached by an Internet company’s commercialization department to Beijing, where he started a life of drifting alone in the north.
On weekends, if he has nothing to do, he will go to the company by himself to work overtime, he said, the weekend overtime is more efficient, working days, a variety of meetings and work docking, so he is tied up. At mealtime, either order a takeaway, or buy a bento in the company’s convenience store, with the rest of the working day afternoon tea to make up for the day.
Inside volume, is not enough to explain the tiredness of the Internet
Zhu Xiaohui is doing a study on urban sociology in Houjian Village. She majored in sociology in college and was interested in Houzhuang Village, a densely populated area of Internet companies.
Houzhuang Village is known as China’s Silicon Valley, but the urban form of the whole area looks like an inverted city. In the traditional sense of a city, a variety of commercial forms would be found in the streets, which are very busy and display a vibrant form.
But public facilities are scarce here, and every local Internet company defaults to paving some public facilities themselves. Even though Houjian Village has wide roads and streets, there is nothing on both sides, and cafes, convenience stores, gyms and bookstores, which should be commercial subjects on the streets, are centrally placed in the buildings of many big Internet companies.
Each infrastructure built of concrete and steel is like a miniature city, and employees can solve most problems without leaving home. The environment tells people that work is life and life cannot be separated from work.
The Internet factory has placed the public space of the city into a closed space, which cuts people’s public life and brings them together within a space that has a closed space. Zhu Xiaohui said that this space will subconsciously shape people’s lives and psychology.
In the “Potential Talent Attraction Report 2020” released by Pulse, the overall job happiness satisfaction of Internet industry workforce is the third lowest in the ranking of various industries. They have to face problems such as 996, workplace PUA, age anxiety, workplace trust, and giant baby management. Many people think they are being involved in an endless competition of internal consumption, they feel very tired, exhausted and emotionally depressed. The self-deprecation of coders and ppt workers is never a simple flirtation or joke, but also an introspection and reflection of people’s own value.
I think this is a huge system driven by the results, each person is a screw, in this huge system, you are constantly pushed, need to constantly complete one KPI after another, complete one task after another. Zhu Xiaohui lamented that this is a choice without a choice.
According to Zhu Xiaohui’s observation, the Internet is not the result of an individual or a company, the Internet itself is updated and iterated very quickly, and this speed even exceeds the vast majority of industries we know. The rapid entry of capital into the Internet industry has accelerated this rate of change iteration. This forward force is loaded to the company, and then loaded by the company to each employee, who is under much more pressure than traditional industry practitioners.
Zhou Xiaolu jumped to work in the new business line of a large Internet company in late 2020. The department is responsible for creating new products, but according to the company’s regulations, the data has not reached the standard, their products can not be independently online, but rely on the main product to continue to incubate, waiting for the data to run through, in order to separately online new products.
This model is used by most Internet companies to incubate new business lines to play. Zhou Xiaolu in the original Internet company can leave work before 8 o’clock every day, in the new company every day only after 10 o’clock at night.
This new business line emphasizes heavy operation, both the operation model and the business model are in the process of exploration, which requires a lot of human, material and time costs to explore, and there is no fixed standard for everything.
She does not show an antipathy attitude towards her exploratory work and life state, with Starbucks or coffee machine when she is sleepy, space capsule and marching bed when she is tired, and gym when she is tired, with shower room in the gym. In some large companies that do not spare luxury decoration, the interior of the office building even has a whole rock climbing wall.
The vast majority of people around you are like this, I think there is nothing strange. Zhou Xiaolu said.
So what do we do?
Silicon Valley is still more about work-life balance than Beijing.
This is a common idea among many practitioners who have spent time in the Internet industry in both China and the United States. Although the work intensity in Silicon Valley is not what some self-publishers say that people will all leave at the end of the day, but in general, the work intensity is still lower than the average level of the same industry in China.
So, is the Silicon Valley model a good future?
A Chinese former employee of eBay once had a cooperation with Jingdong. The project manager at Jingdong said directly, “We don’t need to see your progress, just mention what you need. Looking at the Jingdong building, which was still lit up at 10 p.m., and looking at the people eBay sent to Jingdong, who returned to the hotel at 5 p.m., he felt that the people at Jingdong were telling the truth.
Obviously, it is a great merit to make the work intensity and time off work of domestic Internet people on par with Silicon Valley.
But it would be naive to expect such a shift in the short term. Under the current competitive pressure of the domestic Internet, overtime and exhaustion will be the norm for Internet people for a long time to come.
The self-proclaimed Baidu senior R & D engineer Zhihu users day arch a pawn analysis that the Internet is born with monopoly properties, once the leader in the field of segmentation, you can take exclusive advantage of profits. The second and third can still drink some soup, the latter may lose the bottom. Each team can only desperately speed up the product iteration, faster to occupy the market.
He also believes that the Internet industry is different from the traditional industry of entrepreneurship, the Internet industry, once the core logic is verified, will be through venture capital to burn money to grab customers and account for market share. Under the Matthew effect, the faster the company runs the more financing it gets, the greater the hope that the cycle will repeat itself and become bigger and stronger.
In addition, compared to Silicon Valley has been more mature company system and competitive pattern, the domestic Internet industry is still in the rapid development, constantly changing, the average level of corporate management is far less than the Silicon Valley, compared to the need to refine the management of the day, to do a technical human-intensive enterprise is an easy thing.
As the workplace author Renshin said, when the benefits of improving management level are much smaller than the benefits of business development and product strategy to the external market, 996 becomes a relatively rational choice for enterprises.
In the logic of market allocation of resources, it is a hard to break the iron law. But in the fastest growing Internet industry, it is particularly obvious, and even in many cases with a touch of blood taste. To break its bondage, escape seems to be a most direct and convenient choice. In the end, people are in control of their own efforts.
This is a time to fight with your life, you can choose the days of comfort, but you have to choose the consequences of comfort, people can control their own efforts, we all can.
On January 4, 2020, Li, an employee of Poundland’s marketing cooperation supplier, used his personal cell phone to post such a statement on Poundland’s official account in Zhihu, which does not represent any official Poundland attitude.
Although the official Poundland expressed strong opposition to this, but this Li Mou still speaks the big truth can not do, just go.
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