- on the night of January 3, 2021, joy received WeChat from her friend. In the message, the friend told her that she finally quit from pindongduo and that she did not want to experience the high-load operation of 12-12 “20 days off 1” again. Later, a friend sent another post, saying that a 23-year-old female employee of Pinduoduo died suddenly at 1:30 am on her way home from work. *
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siege
At 10:55, it was once the most spectacular moment of the day at Shanghai’s Jinhongqiao International Center.
People from all directions gathered in the first floor of the building, two tables with punching machines formed a huge team, not far from the intersection, there are people pedaling a shared bike rushed to the building, braking, throwing cars, galloping…
Good parking is not a priority at the moment, and the clock clock system makes every minute count. “A second slower, and there’s an extra person in front of you, and that person might cause you to punch the card at 11:01 — that’s when it’s most devastating.” Joey said.
A year and a half ago, Ms. Joy, a product manager at Pinduoduo, worked in a department that started at 11 a.m., but because pinduoduo also operates a department that starts at 9 a.m., latenness starts at 9 a.m. Clocking in at 11:01 means two hours and a minute late, which deducts two hours’ pay.
At noon in November 2020, Joy returned to the familiar city of Jinhongqiao to meet a friend who had just joined Pinduoduo. As she stepped into the office, the familiar smell of disinfectant entered her nasal cavity and her breathing became rapid. The pressure, measured in minutes and seconds, hit Joey’s nerves again.
Like most young people, Mr Joy was once enamoured of the glamour of big Internet companies. When she was at huazhong university of science and technology, she heard many successful cases from her alumni: WeChat founder zhang xiaolong, PPTV founder yao xin, huawei vice chairman meng wanzhou… Working at an Internet company has become a top choice for graduates, including her, which means an attractive salary, unlimited room for growth and the possibility of changing the world.
Joy graduated from college in the summer of 2018, around the same time that 3-year-old Pinduoduo made its debut on the U.S. stock market, becoming the fastest e-commerce company to ring the bell in the history of the Internet. At the time, Joey felt that receiving the Offer from Spell Out was “the best offer in my power.”
Also for the best offer in mind, Xu Li made full preparations from the beginning of the graduate study. In the eyes of Xu Li, it was the “golden year of the Internet” in 2014. Microblog, JD and Alibaba went public one after another in this year, and food delivery platforms and taxi-hailing apps ignited a money war, vying for user territory.
Xu Li met in an internship the manager that comes from Ali job-hop, his easy self-confidence, eloquence infected Xu Li, use at that time the most popular network expression is described, let a person be “unknown feel hard” namely. Xu Li, born in a non-computer major, spent an average of six hours a day in graduate school to learn The Java language and brush algorithm. He also signed up for an algorithm contest to increase his stakes in Ali. After graduation, his efforts paid off and he became a programmer at Alibaba.
Xue Nansen’s entry into Ali was somewhat haphazard. In 2018, Xue Nansen, who had already joined an Internet company, accompanied her friend to an interview with Alibaba. Finally, her friend was rejected in the third round of the interview, but she stayed behind and entered the company’s live streaming business.
The story of most young people entering Dachang may be more similar to zhao youqing’s experience — a graduate of a prestigious university, with a broad horizon and a reputation as one of the country’s top minds. Zhao youqing graduated from 985 university with a master’s degree from a famous university in the UK. After returning to China, she became a cog in Baidu’s wheel as the label of excellence changed from “famous university” to “Big Factory”.
But then, like Joey, they chose to leave the factory.
In the Q3 Talent Attraction Report 2020 released by BOSS Zhipin, the Internet industry still ranks second in the talent attraction index, with the IT industry closely related to IT first. Meanwhile, the report on Talent Migration and Flow Trend 2020 released by Pulse also pointed out that the Internet industry witnessed a visible outflow of talents in 2019.
A group of people rushed into the bureau, a group of people disappointed to leave, the Internet factory, has become a new generation of young people besieged.
The picture
Pictograph/” We who Can’t Be Beasts “stills
I read my senior year again
For Joey, life at The Internet powerhouse was like “senior year again.”
As a growth in the direction of product manager, Joe’s work content is how to make data seem to be better looking, she department to discuss a project three months long, after the game, in the end, this project is compressed by 3 to 5 days you online immediately, because the Boss wants to see the product online after short-term benefits.
This is related to the growth of Pinduoduo itself. In 2017, THE GMV (annual turnover) of Pinduoduo exceeded 10 billion yuan, completing the performance of Taobao for 5 years and JINGdong for 10 years in two years. By the time Joy left in 2019, Pinduoduo’s GMV had passed the trillion mark. The rising star has been trying to catch up with the old giants.
The great ideals of “changing the industry” and “changing the world” had nothing to do with Joy. The advice she heard most often was, “Just keep your head down and don’t think about anything else, as teachers often said in their senior year,” and it wasn’t up to her to decide what it meant or whether it was worth it.
In the name of speed and efficiency, the name has been erased from Pyeongduo. Like Ali, Pinduoduo also adopts the flower name system, including work card, email, seat plate, work software, food ordering software… All the places marked with names were replaced by flower names. Since then, she has worked in more and more departments, but joy only knows her colleagues by their names. In a year at pongdo, she knew only the real names of three of her colleagues: a WeChat supervisor, and two alumni she knew from college. “Getting to know your colleagues’ real names and real lives seems to have been acquiesced in as something that is not allowed. The system is reminding you that you are only here to work, not to make friends.
The stations are also constantly changing. There were hundreds of people in Joey’s department who divided nearly three-quarters of the 28 floors of the Golden Hongqiao International Center. The desks were so dense, back-to-back, that Joey often felt like he was sitting back in a classroom with 60 or 70 students.
Since pinduoduo moved into Jinhongqiao International Center in 2017, the number of employees has expanded from more than 1,000 to more than 6,000 within two years. However, the infrastructure construction is far from keeping pace with this pace. “Meeting rooms are always being grabbed, and toilets are always being queued up”. To maximize productivity in a limited office space, Joy once saw a new glass conference room built in three days next to his desk, only to have it dismantled in three days a month later as the space expanded.
The picture
Pictograph/” We who Can’t Be Beasts “stills
Every month or two, Joey’s department makes seat adjustments. There are no cycles or signs of adjustment. It is usually a normal afternoon when the department head uploads a new seating chart in the work group and notifies the whole department to change their positions at 7 or 8 PM. When it comes time to adjust, most people on the 28th floor move from one crowded area to another, clutching desktops and office supplies.
In the words of a large factory HR, seat adjustment is for some business groups adjacent to the same project to work more efficiently. As the project changes, the seat has to change. But such frequent shifts make it hard to build deep relationships with colleagues. “In the same way that high school teachers switch seats and don’t let underachievers talk to each other, but let top performers and underachievers sit in pairs,” Joy’s interpretation is, “companies may want their top performers to sit next to their bottom performers and move them along.”
Others have embraced the Pinduoduo logic altogether. Joy remembers the team leader sitting up straight and tapping away at her desk every day, taking less than two days off from work even when she had to fly to Hong Kong to get her HPV vaccine. Some colleagues left Pinduoduo, feel that the new job is not enough “pinduoduo” strength, is planning to come back; And the same department of the 90’s big leaders are consecutive four or five Spring Festival, are stationed in the company.
“There will be an end one day, but the work will never end.” ‘Those days are like a frog in a pot,’ Mr. Joy says. ‘You get stuck at work and you forget your sense of life and your doubts about the rules.’
When she first entered Pinduoduo, Ms. Joy and her colleagues discussed the merits of the clocking system in private, but no one questioned the company explicitly, thinking, ‘I don’t think a newcomer like me should be allowed to ask such questions.’ The biggest “rebellion” she made was that in the month before she left her job, she refused to go to work by being late. In half of the working days of the month, Joy chose to be half an hour late on purpose, so she was deducted more than 2,000 yuan of salary.
Faced with the Pinto system, an employee invented a cheating method at that time. On the day of being late, he asked the colleague who had arrived for work to take a screenshot with his work computer as proof of his arrival. As long as he submitted this screenshot in the subsequent clocking instructions, he could be regarded as a normal attendance and avoid the punishment of being late.
This later to be reported, Pinduoduo in the company’s internal conduct of a card cheating inventory. At that time, Joy asked for annual leave, scheduled a flight home the next morning, received a phone call from the company at midnight, to confirm joy’s attendance date. “Are you this point that day?” “Are you late at all?” “Are you telling the truth?” “If you think twice, we will check and monitor one by one. It makes Joey feel like he’s on the run.
It was three o ‘clock in the morning after the whole raid was over.
Chopping wood
The poet Joseph Brodsky once told a story about a “wood-cutter.” When a young man learns that he will starve all day without working, he swings an axe and chops wood for 12 hours, far more than the average man can muster. People “can overdose to make evil ridiculous,” Brodsky said.
Joey thought he was the one who was chopping wood in the Patchwork system. When she got into a taxi after filling her stomach at a small noodle shop and left the building at 5am before Singles Day, she clearly remembered that the meter had changed from night to day.
In her final days as a trainee, Joy underwent a shift from product manager to customer service, which made the job easier, but the hours were still pinched accurately.
The number of unfinished orders will be displayed in the upper right corner of the customer service work page. Every time Joey finishes a batch of orders, the team leader will issue a new order quantity. The number of unfinished orders keeps decreasing until it is close to zero. Even when Joy gets more efficient and asymptotically zeros the unfinished numbers by 7:30, a new list is pushed forward, as if an accurate algorithm is counting your time off and doesn’t want you to waste a second.
Just like the lumber cutter, Joy kept completing tasks at the request of the big factory. She felt that she had lost her perception of life and wanted to stay in bed on the Sunday when she could rest. She just wanted to go out for exercise, make up, go shopping and play… She gave it all up.
This “excess game” also happened to Xue Nansen. During the epidemic, Ali live broadcasting business ushered in a boom. Xue Nansen worked until 3 or 4 o ‘clock every day and was woken up by a work call at 8 or 9 the next day. It goes on and on, squeezing my time into five or six hours, unable to get enough of a good night’s sleep. Her heart sometimes felt like it was being pulled, and when she was lying on her back she would panic and not be able to sleep. So every night, Xue nansen lay on her stomach, pressing her body against her heart to help her fall asleep.
One day in March 2020, Xue Nansen started work on her first phone call at 7:50 a.m., followed by calls for products, operations, sales and technology. At her busiest, 10 messages were being typed every minute and she needed to go to the bathroom with her laptop.
At 1 or 2 that afternoon, Xue nansen ordered a roast for lunch, but by the time she was free to pick up a takeaway, it was 8 p.m. Sitting at a computer and opening the lid of a dewy takeaway dish, the smell that comes to your face is not the original smell of barbecued meat, but the oily smell of cold meat. To avoid hypoglycemia, Xue chose to eat it.
The cold roast was the only time she hadn’t eaten while working during that time. When the frozen meat with a layer of grease was swallowed and tears fell, Xue Nansen asked herself: “When and why did you live like this?” The meal was also the catalyst for Xue’s departure.
The decisive moment of his resignation came in May this year. At 4am, Xue Nansen finished the form and got up to go downstairs and wash herself. Halfway up the stairs, Xue felt dizzy, missed her step and rolled down the stairs directly. Even though it was only a head injury, Xue nansen felt frightened.
In xue Nansen’s team of less than 10 people, half of them have fallen down during overtime work: one colleague worked overtime to nausea and vomiting, another worked overtime to have no time to eat and got stomach ulcer, and another one in poor health went directly to the operating room after working overtime for a while…
In Ali, where 996 was regarded as a “blessing”, Xue Nansen could often hear the older Generation of Ali people saying “what do young people do not stay up late for?” and “Young people are used to spell”. At 6 a.m. that morning, Xue nansen took a picture of the injury, sent it to her supervisor, and offered to leave. She decided to leave the “job-killing” system.
The picture
▲ Photo/” I, to the point of work “stills
The loss of
After three years of preparation, Xu ended up staying at Ali for only one year.
What really disillusioned the programmer was “the loss of code value”. Before he joined the company, Xu spent a lot of time trying to write elegant and clear code. But after he joined the company, he found that most people only cared about their own profits, not whether the code was well written or whether the product had a future. Thousands of lines of code have been written in the system like a running ledger. Although there is a system to find fault location, it is always a step later than human discovery when it is really used.
More important is the outcome of the operation. A. the ideal “spirit”, “engineer culture” in the company’s internal promotion system, will be back, fault location system is head of the packaged into “the universe must be a system”, was praised by many people, however, such as the performance of the head with the 3.75, after the successful promotion, “the universe must be a system” had become the nobody tube housing project. “There are a lot of sideshow projects like this at Ali.” “If you want to do something that affects hundreds of millions of users across the country, it may just be your wishful thinking,” Xu said.
At Baidu, Zhao, the product manager, is only seen twice by colleagues in the technology department to complete a project. The first time was when the project was approved, the technology would ask her about the estimated benefits of the project. The second time was the OKR Review (Review of Objectives and Key achievements). They approached Zhao Youqing and put it bluntly, they needed to fill in a completed profit value.
Zhao Youqing once stayed up four or five nights, making three plans for a product, in the meeting with the technical discussion, she had just finished the first one, heard someone sneer. For a moment, she couldn’t resist: “Stop laughing. We can discuss opinions instead of expressing them in this way.”
From external courtesy to internal value, the sense of respect in Zhao youqing’s work is gradually disappearing. When she tried to create a “confidentiality” option for minorities in the gender section of a product, her colleague looked at her curiously and asked: “How did you get that idea? Is that necessary?”
The department leader once said in the dinner party: “the girl does the product manager, uses the appearance superiority, goes to the technology front to spread sajiao.” Zhao then directly retorted: “I wish I could solve the problem by a solution that everyone agrees on, not by putting on makeup or flirting.”
Such moments continue to accumulate, but more often than not, Zhao youqing does not stand up to blame the other side, she put the number of bottlenecks in the work attributed to the individual. She lapses into self-doubt: “I don’t feel like shit, I don’t feel like garbage, I can’t do anything, I can’t do anything.”
She also try to as colleagues, care about the data, the report, prepare the promotion PPT, colleagues are trying to put the living to themselves, even if only to participate in the project finishing touches, also wrap yourself as a project manager, she also stay up late preparing for the promotion PPT, but think how can like them packing.
Zhao finally gave up the promotion. “Dachang is like a big dye VAT. Some people make themselves into a piece of colorful cloth, while others may drown in it.” But later, Zhao sank deeper into self-doubt. Former colleagues promoted faster than their own, which let the habit of being a top student Zhao Youqing felt the pressure. She felt like she was sinking. “I don’t feel like I have any more of myself.”
Every morning, Zhao youqing heard the alarm bell, the company elevator open the door will heartbeat faster; Sitting at her desk in front of the computer, she often doesn’t know how to type the first word. Sometimes, when she couldn’t stand it at her desk, she would go to the bathroom and cry for a while. Even when she returned to her rented house at night, she often needed to break down and cry to express her emotions.
However, the depressed mood has been in, the reaction to the physiological, Zhao Youqing overeating, hair loss, fat. She looked at the tree, feel the leaves written on the “anxious”, looking at the car, feel the kind of fast flying feeling is a kind of restlessness… Zhao Youqing had a hunch that he was ill. When she went to the hospital, the doctor said she was moderately depressed. On the day of the doctor’s appointment, she was afraid to use her medical insurance card for fear that the company would find out about her condition.
The picture
▲ Photo/” I, to the point of work “stills
Get out
In the eyes of those who are used to the rule of big factories, leaving is a difficult thing to understand.
On the day Joey left, his boss listed a number of reasons why it was “worth staying at Pj.com.” You have great company, highly educated and intelligent. You’re in a company that has more room to grow than many giants; You’re doing something that’s going to revolutionize whole manufacturing, whole agriculture…
But Joy feels that these reasons, she is not infatuated with, the myth of freedom of wealth, is no longer attractive to her. “If I’m still here, in five years I might move into a higher position, complete some KPI’s, make a good salary and build my own life in Shanghai, but it won’t appeal to me if I have to suffer every day to achieve it.”
After leaving her job, Ms. Joy spent two months in Shanghai, trying to shop and cook like her former self, visiting the Bund with friends and taking in the city’s bustling night scene from the top of a building. In the past, she used to stand in front of the glass window on the 28th floor and watch the night scene. The surrounding buildings were connected to each other, and the viaduct below extended everywhere.
The picture
▲ After her departure, Joy photographed the Golden Hongqiao building, “like a giant monster,” she said. Chart/provided by interviewees
When Zhao youqing went to the hospital for a second check-up, his psychological condition had changed from “depression” to “depression” and “anxiety”. When she told her father, his first reaction was: “You don’t want to take medicine, you just take too much medicine.”
In the eyes of Zhao youqing’s parents, as a Beijing native, she has neither the loneliness of beipiao nor the pressure of money. The job at Baidu is also her choice, so there should be no pressure. Until now, they found that the daughter who had planned her study abroad plan, applied for a scholarship and got a Dream Offer did not find her own value in Dachang.
Zhao youqing learned self-suture, leaving is a big step forward. On the last day, Zhao youqing chose to walk down the stairs to leave the company. When she reached the last floor, she burst into tears. She felt the resignation was like saying goodbye to the past and felt relieved.
Xue Nansen also experienced a brief period of relief. In October 2019, Xue Nansen, who was also in Ali, took an annual vacation to visit the northwest with friends. However, her phone was stolen before the plane took off. During those few days in the northwest, she had the most peaceful time of the year. It wasn’t until she wanted to go home that she bought a new phone and returned to Ali’s system.
“No one has decreed that young people must work to their death.” In May 2020, Xue Nansen left Ali’s system with this belief in mind. Unlike Joy and Zhao, the boss understands her choice. “I’m older,” he says. “I’m not as young as you, and I have options.
Hangzhou has not warmed up in May. People wearing masks come and go in the company, and the elevator is painted with a grid for passengers, which can only hold two or three people at a time. Xue Nansen kept the scene in mind and set off on the journey back to Yantai.
sequelae
In June 2020, the story of guo Yu, a 28-year-old retired programmer from Bytedance, appeared in people’s eyes. Early last year, having achieved early financial freedom, Guo decided to make a change and announced his “retirement” from Bytedance to open a spa hotel in Japan.
Unlike Guo, who retired at the age of 28, more young people leave Dachang before entering the stage of realizing wealth freedom, but like Guo, they have had a long period of searching for what they really want to do.
After leaving dachang, Xue Nansen chose to start a business, she opened a self-help study room, the work from that always held the notebook and constantly sounded the sound of nails mobile phone to the real world, she learned to assemble their own desk and chair bookcase, wire connection, operation of small programs… Sometimes she had to stay up until the wee hours of the morning and get up at 6 a.m. to work, but in the buzz of the electric drill and the dust, she felt relaxed because this time, she was staying up late for herself.
Still, there are traces of Ali in Xue Nansen’s life today. She never watches taobao live, even if the things sold in the studio are cheaper. She has to put her phone on silent, or the sound of an unexpected message will make her nervous like a ticking time bomb. There will be a pause of three or four seconds before she answers the phone. She needs to do a mental construction of “talking”, even if it is an important client. Xue Nansen called these “dachang sequelae”.
Zhao youqing’s legacy is that every time she clicks on the interface of baidu App, she subconsciously looks at the functional entrance she helped create. She hopes that one day in the future, she can open Baidu only for simple search.
Zhao didn’t leave the Internet altogether. She became a product manager for an education company. The basic skills and methodologies that Baidu had taught her played a role in her new job. “It’s like breaking up with a romantic partner. You leave and you find out that he has something to recommend him.” She does not deny the possibility of returning to Dachang in five or ten years. “If I had the chance, I would have learned to adjust myself, and I wouldn’t have resisted going back to Dachang.”
Xu li does not regret his choice to leave Ali. In his mind, work should give way to life. He does not understand the choice of a colleague to be separated from his family for the sake of his career, nor can he accept the behavior of working overtime on New Year’s Eve to share his circle of friends.
One Spring Festival, Xu Li was left on duty to approve the work orders of technicians. He stayed up all night, mechanically clicking the paperwork, but the next day he was asked to go back to work. “It seems like a normal thing to them, but I feel like I can’t play with them anymore… If work isn’t for living, then what’s worth it?”
After leaving Ali, Xu joined a startup company. In the new company, everyone’s code needs to be evaluated by different people. Every function must be carefully written unit tests and integration tests. The affirmation of engineers does not need packaging, but can be reflected directly. After working for a year, he was promoted to be the Tech Leader of the team. As he worked on hiring, he occasionally remembered the aura of Dachang. Startups are far less attractive to talent than big companies. Candidates who meet expectations either offer exceptionally high salaries or end up with offers but don’t get hired…
Joy, who also works in a startup company, can’t help but wonder if he can escape from the big factory and choose a more comfortable life. After many years, will the struggling young people in the big factory be many times better than himself? She still finds herself occasionally trapped in a system of external evaluation. In order to forget about this system, Recently, Joy would take a guitar lesson during her lunch break at work, observe the growth and changes of fruit at the door of the apartment building after work, share the new songs she plays and sings in her circle of friends, and listen to the concert late at night, trying to find more internal driving force and sense of things.
The picture
▲ After leaving Dachang, Joy casually took photos of the fruit in the community. Chart/provided by interviewees
On the night of January 3, 2021, joy received WeChat from her friend. In the message, the friend told her that she had finally quit pindongduo and that she was not willing to go through the high-load operation of 12-12 “20 days off 1” again. Later, a friend sent another post, saying that a 23-year-old female employee of Pinduoduo died suddenly at 1:30 am on her way home from work.
(At the request of interviewees, the characters in this article are all pseudonyms.)
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