Poundland employee Tan Moulin fell from the 27th floor of his home, wearing pajamas and pajama pants and a pair of woolen slippers at the time of his death, while his parents were at home burning lunch for him. He graduated in 2020 and had just turned up at Poundland.
We can’t tell exactly why Xiao Tan suddenly left his job and went home, choosing to commit suicide, nor can we fully restore the full picture of his life, but as one of the fresh graduates who were screened through the layers and eventually joined the Internet powerhouse, Xiao Tan had been deeply embedded in the e-commerce giant Poundland, along with other young people who joined the company.
When innovation, freedom, and respect are gradually stripped away, and employees are trapped in clocking in, performance, and surveillance, how do we define such a job, except for a high salary?
Interviews: Jia Shu, Yingdi Li, Fenfeng Wu, Wenyuan Cai
Writer: Wu Fenfeng, Li Yidi, Liu Min
Editor: Min Liu
New Media Editor: Neil
New Media Executive: xixi
“”Tan Moulin””
At 12:30 p.m., neighbors heard a loud bang and a skinny boy fell in the yard. He fell from the 27th floor, wearing his home pajamas and pajama pants, with a pair of woolen slippers on his feet.
It was January 9, 2021, and people soon heard that the boy, surnamed Tan, had suddenly returned home from Shanghai to Changsha on the first day, staying only one night, and was supposed to take a flight back to Shanghai that afternoon. When he committed suicide, his parents were in the kitchen burning lunch.
The news spread in the evening that “another employee of Poundland died,” the second death of a young employee within a week at the Internet giant Poundland. 2020 The 22-year-old female employee, Zhang Moufei, died suddenly at 1 a.m. on her way home from work, and the discussion of “Poundland’s crushing of employees” is not over yet. Although the cause is unknown, the sudden death of this boy has triggered a new shock, he is also a new employee, the same young, died when only 23 years old.
Li Ding was brushing up on the news at dinner that day. “Changsha”, “joined on July 8, 2020 job”, “technology development engineer”, the dinner table The information about the boys was read by colleagues, and Li Ding gradually felt that the whole person was not good, “Tan Moulin” – the name was read out, a huge shock. -The name was read out, and a great fear instantly seized him.
WeChat, qq, phone, Li Ding immediately used all the ways to contact roommate Tan, no response.
Perhaps not yet off work, Li Ding reassured himself, college graduation these six months, Tan back to the message more and more slowly, sometimes after half a day to reply that he was too busy. He knows Xiao Tan off work every day at 11:00, “after work and then call him. “
9:00, 10:00 …… see the news of the university roommates have popped up, we all guarded the phone waiting for Xiao Tan late night after work.
At 11 o’clock at night, Xiao Tan’s phone call has not yet come. Some people swiped to the news comments and found that the deceased was “a computer science graduate of Sichuan University”.
The boys’ fluke shattered: “It’s true. “
They know the classmate Xiao Tan, the summer of 2019 in Poundland internship, the summer of 2020 university graduation smoothly into the job, his time in Poundland’s Shanghai Changning District headquarters, before and after nearly a year.
Xiao Tan has always been very planning, his internship, job search will be half a year in advance to prepare, when he joined Poundland, he thought the future are good: two or three years later, find a more leisurely work, to the hometown of Changsha or other second-tier cities to jump ship, “actually did not intend to do a long time. “
But in the company notice Tan, looks so handy: Tan just before the New Year’s Day to turn. January 8, he asked for leave from the supervisor at 8:00 in the morning, which is not a day off, he did not say what the reason, directly on the plane back home to Changsha. His father went to the airport to pick him up, and that night he booked a ticket to return to Shanghai the next day. His classmates couldn’t understand his busy schedule, nor could they understand why his life, which was clearly planned, was terminated early at the age of 23.
“Rushing to the big factory”
The job of Poundland is also a target plan for many young people of the same age. This App was launched in 2015 and listed in the United States in 2018, nearly two years has swept away the previous “dirt”, “down”, “down” and “down”. “sink”, “startups ” impression and turned into a hot star Internet giant, with annual active users already exceeding 700 million, approaching Taobao.
A Xiaotan alumnus told us that when graduating, people’s job search direction was mainly FMCG, real estate and Internet, and the Internet was considered the most capable of bringing growth. Earlier, in 2016, 985 school graduates like Sichuan University entered Tencent and Ali are very easy, but since then the situation has changed greatly, and when this alumnus graduated in 2017, it has been difficult to get an offer from BAT, “the school enrollment of these companies are from very Very, very, very powerful schools, very, very high quality”.
The “big factory” is a new pennant race, where the top students find a new goal to sprint for after the midterm, entrance exams and graduate school.
Mr. Fashion” contacted several young employees of Poundland, job search reasons are similar: the feeling of Internet equality, good atmosphere, knowledge-based academic talent accounted for a high proportion of the halo is very obvious. From the beginning of the interview, it felt like meeting all the same kind of people. Like having to compete for admission to a good school, “suddenly there is a company that can break Ali’s monopoly and is growing very quickly, so it wants to go. ” “At that time, the user growth of Poundland was very fast, and I wanted to see why this was. “
Xiao Tan in which, probably not the most dazzling. The company’s students say he is “literally an average student” – not very aggressive when it comes to handing in materials, and not delayed to the end. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services. Not a bully, but his grades are okay.
This boy is very thin, 1 meter 72 meters tall, weighing less than 50 kilograms. When he was studying, he liked to stay in the dormitory, and after a few refusals, his classmates tacitly agreed not to drag him to group activities. He loves to be quiet, often eats take-out, and when he first started school, he liked to play Starcraft for a long time by himself.
He was also a good student on another level. He had been interested in computers and programming since high school, and was significantly more active in specialized classes like “computer networking”. The computer science majors have long been sure that Tan is the one who can do this job.
Employment pressure started in his junior year, and Xiao Tan quickly switched to study. He stopped playing and got a new computer. The first plan was to go to graduate school, and he soon realized he didn’t want to study anymore. The second plan was to find a job, and time became even tighter, so he went straight to his counselor and asked to enter the java association to work on a project.
“He suddenly switched to the java language, not very good, very desperate, a month or two to do a lot of work. “Li Ding recalled that Xiao Tan did not like to participate in any school organizations, into the association this step is completely prepared for finding an internship. As long as the goal is determined, Tan is certainly not a big problem, whether in the Association, or later to Poundland internship, Tan always “special can carry”.
In the summer of his third year, in July 2019, Tan got an internship offer from Poundland’s Shanghai headquarters, which is equivalent to getting a half-way ticket to the ship in advance. The recruitment threshold of large factories is getting higher and higher these years, and the technical positions where engineers are located have high requirements for algorithms, project experience, and specific education. In the case of comprehensive positions like product and operation, students from prestigious schools are fighting with each other, and the original configuration of “undergraduate 985 and overseas master” can always be easily selected. In the year 2020, many people were brushed off at the resume level.
The company has been assigned to the wallet group of Poundland, doing back-end research and development. Li Ding’s understanding is to write the code for the card-tying function in the payment department. He remembered that Tan said, when he first went there is no work to do, every day to turn the company’s knowledge base to learn, “the website background may have monitoring, will limit the number of an employee to turn the knowledge base, he turned more, it was found by the monitoring, and then divided to work. “
Every day during lunch break, Tan will run downstairs to find a location to look through various professional blogs to learn. He liked the internship, more hard work, but can still afford it, Poundland’s R & D post transfer probability is high, he does not need to be anxious about the job search.
It’s a heartwarming position, a 2021 soon-to-be college student Zhang Grain told Mr. Fashion that she thinks Poundland has high value, “opening up the sinking market for the first time, allowing rural users to have consumption habits and helping neglected groups. The account of Xiaotan herself, who is suspected to be a Zhihu, also liked a reply in support of Poundland in May 2019, called “Guess who I am The user, who was also an intern at Poundland in 2019, was adamantly anti-black for the company: “I think a person who goes to a company must be identified with that company. At least do not do evil, otherwise work for money, life has no meaning. “
Zhang grain grain feel that the choice is free, the Internet said 300 ~ 380 hours of work intensity is great, but which big factory work is not tired? Their own young, may bear the intensity of such work, if the body really can not carry, “then go, it does not have to die. “
Another heartbeat is income. The offer from the big factory is completely irresistible, “the offer from Poundland is too much. “
“In the end, respect also disappeared.”
We were not able to recover Xiao Tan’s life after joining the company, and he gradually lost contact with his classmates. Company life is like a huge black hole, running fast, intense, and secretive, young people’s lives are completely sucked in.
Time is the first to disappear.
Zhou Qian, 24, who joined the company in 2018, is in the same technical R&D position as Xiao Tan and has experienced the same top supervisor. He introduced the director of the Duo Wallet Group, whose name is “Kera”, who pioneered the technical department’s Two shifts” shift system: morning shift, 7:00 am – 11:00 pm work; evening shift, 7:00 pm – 7:00 am the next day, the next day afternoon 3:00 pm the next day, you must punch in and go to work.
This big shift comes once every half month, and even as a young freshman, Zhou Qian felt that he could not survive. During the night shift, sitting on a chair at home, Qian Zhou would fall asleep in fatigue, but at this time, a software system used to monitor platform problems was still running in a sophisticated way. Whenever a problem is monitored, the system will automatically warn, and this warning will come every half hour or hour.
Early warning in three levels, the first level, first call the staff on duty, three rings after, if the employee did not answer, the system automatically escalated.
At the second level, call the supervisor, and if there is still no response, the system escalates again.
At the third level, the call will be made directly to the boss Huang Zheng.
The luckiest time, Zhou Qian slept for three hours in a row on the night of the duty. He was always afraid of being woken up by the phone at night, “even when I’m not on duty, I can’t control it anymore”. Sometimes a wild cat barking near his home would also wake him up late at night.
Duo wallet group is “double monthly rest”, that is, a month off two days, working 13 days before resting 1 day. In the double ten, double 11, double 12 several e-commerce festival, basically three months will not have time off. Zhou Qian experienced a continuous shift of ten days, the last two days sitting in front of the computer, the brain has been completely unable to turn, can only sluggishly do some mechanical things.
Autonomy is the second to disappear.
Guo, who joined the company in 2019, originally took a management trainee offer, and she was assigned to the customer service group as soon as she joined. At the end of the three-month rotation, the company suddenly told her that the previous departmental offer was temporarily invalidated and she had to re-interview the leaders of each department.
The management trainees went to interview one by one, and if the department leaders were filled in advance, the people behind them had to go to other departments, even if it was not their earliest goal to apply for Poundland. Some people ended up being left in the customer service department, and some people left directly as a result. The whole process of management training students do not have any choice, only the right to be notified.
Xiao N, who joined in 2020, is 25 years old and has worked in several Internet companies before. Compared to the freedom and openness of the previous ones, Jindo gave her an impression of “information isolation”. Three weeks after she joined the company, N got access to the company’s internal data, while before that she had been doing simple things that interns could operate.
At the same time, N found that she had no access to the “whole thing”, and what she was given was the middle part of many small processes. This fragmented and repetitive work content was accelerating the substitutability of people, and “basically everyone is a tool for the supervisor”.
Then the sense of intimacy disappeared.
“preventing employees like thieves”, Zhou Qian can appreciate that the company’s style has changed significantly. when he joined in 2018, all of Poundland’s technical documents were open to internal, and employee A could In the document, employee A can see the technical problems solved by employee B. But after the annual meeting in 2019, the information between departments began to be isolated, and employees only had the permission to view their own department’s documents. To facilitate communication, employees sometimes share information through screenshots, but if they are found, they need to receive “education” from the leadership, and gradually, screenshots are also prohibited.
At the company level, intimate communication between employees is also forbidden, new WeChat groups are broken up, and employees can only communicate with each other on the company’s internal communication software “Konck”.
Finally, respect disappears.
Internet companies generally prohibit employees from talking about performance, but in Poundland, just like secondary school exams, the monthly performance appraisal will be publicly sent in the employees’ emails.
The performance of grassroots employees is all up to the second level supervisor. Xiao N realized that this practice directly stimulated the employees’ mentality of wanting to “win”, and the more immature people were, the easier it was to get involved.
Zhou Qian had also been brainwashed by this score: the leader denied his ability to work while telling him that there was still a chance to work hard, and for a while Zhou Qian worked hard and his performance score was immediately raised. But after a long time, he gradually became suspicious of this kind of scoring: some people would make a small mistake and the performance score would become very low, while others seemed to be indifferent to how they made mistakes. The high and low scores were completely opaque and depended on the preferences of the supervisor alone.
Freshmen are often the ones who take the blame in the group. Zhou Qian said that although the company does not put freshmen in charge of the project alone, many groups will let freshmen carry the lowest performance. He knew a freshman who had carried the minimum performance for three months in a row, and even so, the supervisor kept “prodding”: your output is not as good as others. But other employees have been working for more than three years, so how can we compare them? “Zhou Qian said. And in Poundland, as long as there are two months of bottom of the performance, it means no more possibility of salary increase in six months.
As for the disappearance of holidays, is a self-explanatory matter.
In the first year of employment, several young people have no annual leave. The sacked Pindo employee “Wang Taixu” introduced that Pindo also had mandatory holiday deductions, more than three days of vacation will be asked to return to work early.
Zhou Qian found that the weekend overtime pay is not doubled, exactly the same as the working day. From a single weekly break to a double monthly break, a colleague took leave twice a month and was told by the leader that “your working hours do not meet the requirements”; and another colleague who was the most tired The other most tired colleague worked from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. every day.
You have nothing but work, no friends, not even parents,” Zhou Qian said. Working overtime to the end, some female colleagues’ menstruation is also gone.
At the beginning of the outbreak in 2020, the city of Shanghai stipulated that work would resume on February 10, and the group of young Poundland employees, Xiao Liu, the leaders called one by one to inform everyone to return to work on January 31, the seventh day of the New Year. Xiao Liu was determined to resist returning to work, but many colleagues in the group responded very positively. “Finally I reluctantly dragged a few days, but still came back. No way, everyone made a statement so that I can not refuse. “
When recognizing this environment, freshers will find themselves in a dilemma. According to Zhou Qian, in the Internet industry, a default rule is that if a fresh graduate wants to jump ship, the best first job for two years, which is the hiring side for employees “down-to-earth “consideration. Otherwise, unless the ability is exceptional, the school special merit, otherwise even the interview opportunity can not fight. In a state of “no place to go”, fresh graduates can only stay.
Last August, Tan chatted with Li Ding: “We have a summer festival on the pdd side, you can see a lot of Japanese ladies. “At this time he joined just 1 month, Li Ding felt that he was in a good mood.
In October last year, Li Ding asked: “Do you have to go on 13 days in a row? The top can not stand? “Tan replied:” so the demand is not done, not to say, the demand ddl to arrive and a lot of not done. “
Last November 24, 10:30 am, Li Ding asked: “pdd into 227? Only in the company to eat dinner” he heard rumors, pdd overtime hours changed to 2 pm to 2 am.
2 p.m., Tan just replied: “227 is what the hell”
The conversation ended without a head, after Li Ding did not take the initiative to contact Xiaotan, “think he is busy.
“They left Poundland.”
Whenever you want to talk privately with colleagues, 30-year-old Li often do a look, signaling the two to walk downstairs to the smoking area to talk.
After the IPO in 2019, everyone felt the tightening of Poundland’s management, Li Chang found that the previous “chattering” atmosphere gradually disappeared, she gradually She gradually learned not to talk to her colleagues at the workstation. Despite her years of experience, she was still surprised by the degree of control the company had over its employees.
At the 2019 annual meeting, COO Abu spent 20 minutes talking about “the importance of punching in”, saying that some executives were late and playing tricks to avoid punching in, which was a form of deception. This is a deception of the company. Li often found it unbelievable how such a small thing could rise to such a level of harm to the company.
Before 11 o’clock and after 20 o’clock is Poundland punching time, boot records, browser records, chat records, etc. can also be used as evidence of going to work. An employee posting records: “It is rumored that there are employees for the next employee to open the behavior, the senior management is furious, decided to make up the card in the future are required to HR check the monitoring to enforce, no longer recognized all proof. “And when the camera and card punch are broken, more absurd things happened, a division employees on the pulse to spit, the company at this point in turn asked employees to provide proof of work, he relied on the phone to swipe the subway in and out of the station time to prove innocence, but a colleague driving, because one day parked the car However, a colleague who drove a car was recorded as absent from work by the company because he parked his car on the roadside one day and did not pay the bill.
“The company is very distrustful of employees, and everything is thought in a bad direction. Employees complain.
People are not machines, and many employees start passive resistance in high pressure.
The company opposed to employee socialization, kept dissolving the WeChat group among colleagues, and even some administrative would pretend to be freshmen to add the group, and then blow their own identity to threaten the group owner to dissolve. Large office groups, singles dating groups, ball sports groups were disbanded one by one, and group owners were threatened too many times to build them again. When employees communicate privately, they either get out of their work stations or don’t use the company WiFi to communicate and don’t leave any records on WeChat. Everyone went back to the former Internet communication method of phone calls, or even chatting with the configuration of cell phone traffic + nails.
Lazy touch is also a kind of resistance. Liu started out in the busiest department of Poundland, six days a week, all in the night at 11 or 12 o’clock after work. Slowly, she learned to “dawdle all kinds of skills”. Every day downstairs to buy coffee is her most relaxed time, coffee shops have APP, you can order in advance, to the scene directly away, but Xiao Liu every time to the scene and then order, select the flavor, payment, dawdle off a few minutes, “every day, waiting for the coffee time is my most relaxed and pleasant time “.
Zhou Qian was running to the mall to go to the toilet, a squat is half an hour. If not lazy, he simply can not stand the intensity of such work. He went to Starbucks to buy coffee to be lazy, and ran into the leader “Kra” head-on a few times, and went to the gym at 10:30 p.m., and ended up bumping into “Kra” – the leader is also slacking off, but Zhou Qian does not have the power to give performance deductions to his superiors, so he can only choose more and more remote places for his slacking off .
Xiao Liu’s resistance stretched to not doing meaningless overtime every day and going home at 9 or 10 o’clock every day, at the cost of continued performance beaten to the lowest score. But the resistance did not allow her to escape the business of grocery shopping that had been apportioned to her. At the same time, the leadership demanded that she must list her working hours as part of the KPI as well, and one’s work results should be reflected by the hours, which made her completely unacceptable and decided to leave.
Li Chang also decided not to stay, one day in 2019, she submitted her resignation application in the morning, and HR came to her efficiently in the afternoon to do the exit procedures, sitting across from her, staring at her to delete all her colleagues in the WeChat address book. Li often from three o’clock in the afternoon until five o’clock, while secretly in another group live deletion process, a friend in the group sent this absurd story to a circle of friends. But as a “qualified Poundland employee”, her first reaction was to have the friend quickly delete the tweet.
Two years later, looking back, Li often think that these things are ridiculous: outsiders look at the pulse on the trolling of employees, too unbelievable. He checked your phone, let him check? “But that’s how it is in Poundland. “
She had worked in another large Internet company for a few years. The leader wanted to transfer a colleague, the colleague did not want to, the leader invited him to dinner, drinks, and he explained the reason for the transfer. Li often think this is normal, but in Poundland, everyone is forced to transfer positions, and even ask you to go to another city the next day. What about the rented house? No one cares.
She reflected that she may have been alienated some when she was in Poundland, “There is no one in this company to question, refute, you are assimilated, people really is assimilated. “Li Chang said about 1984,” a highly centralized system, refusing to disclose information, in such places people are very repressed, just like that novel. “
But Li Chang understands very well that as a relatively mature middle-aged person herself, these things will not have a devastating effect on her. But if a college student, just graduated, the first job into such a work atmosphere, “he will be very difficult.”
“A farewell at 23”
On December 10, 2020, Jindo launched the “Duo Duo Wallet” function, which is the APP’s own payment service. The news introduced that this business will be a breakthrough to help the Internet giant layout the “traffic + financial” model business.
This is a business that Tan has been involved in since her internship, and as an official recommended payment tool for Poundland, it is likely that people will see the “DuoDuo Wallet” figure as the title party in this year’s Spring Festival Gala.
In the process of testing and launching the new product, there is no way to know what Tan has done and what he has changed. A month later on January 9, 2021, the evening of the day Tan jumped, the official Poundland in that public notice, in the form of a score, mentioned Tan’s work: “The company system shows that Tan’s work.
“The company system shows that Tan Moulin performance average score of about 80 points (100-point system). “
After Tan’s news was reported, criticism about Poundland continued to ferment, and the former intern he had liked on Zhihu, “Guess who I am”, also had a surprising The former intern “Guess Who”, whom he had liked on Zhihu, also made a surprising turn. In the article, “The rumor is that a Poundland employee was forced to resign voluntarily and kicked out of the company by the management for posting a photo of a colleague being carried to an ambulance online? What is the authenticity of the incident? In the post, “Guess who I am” no longer helps the company to fight against blackness. The company anti-black, he angrily replied.
“The truth is correct, I am the friend in question. “
The company’s public relations is shameless, bought the pulse and b station, Zhihu may be the last side of the net. “
“Originally was also a former employee of Poundland, leaving the company witnessed the ugly face of the company. “
But all this hubbub has nothing to do with Xiaotan anymore. Friend Li Ding is still difficult to accept the sudden departure of Xiao Tan. At school, Tan usually lie down with the lights out at 11 o’clock at night and wake up very early in the morning. His body is thin, he has developed a regular routine, eat fruit, pay attention to the habit of health. After getting the offer, Tan increased the intensity of the exercise, he began to run at night, bought a bar, also bought push-ups equipment, eat protein powder, want to build muscle.
After getting the offer, the two talked about buying a house, Tan “think Shanghai is difficult to buy a house, envious of dad in Changsha is easy to buy”. Li Ding does not know what happened to his best friend after graduation, the boy is not a person who is good at spilling his troubles to the outside world. His WeChat does not have a circle of friends, and QQ space is only in high school, the latest one is already 2016.
Xiao Tan likes Japanese comics, learning Japanese for a semester, Li Ding saw Xiao Tan reading Japanese novels on the computer for a while. The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you’re looking for.
In ancient Japanese, the word “higashi-un” refers to the dawn before the transition from darkness to light, and the sky is colored with cedar.
The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to its customers. He packed a lot of express, the destination is Shanghai. The day he left, Li Ding sent him out of the dormitory compound, and there was another roommate present. Li Ding hugged Tan for a while, and still felt that he was very thin.
They said goodbye to the 23-year-old Tan forever.
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