Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Wang Lin
Cover source | Visual China
What is the scene of an Internet company with more than 100,000 employees? Presumably employees can fill 10 football pitches in a row and eat 150 tons of food a day.
In the past, Internet companies were wary of overextending. Alibaba, known for its hiring efforts, froze expansion in 2015 to maintain 30,000 people. His founder, Jack Ma, once said that If Ali is 102 years old, it should not exceed 50,000 employees. Tencent founder Ma Huateng sent a letter to all employees in 2012 to remind them to overcome the disease of large enterprises and reshape the spirit of small companies, when Tencent had only 20,000 people.
But now, things have changed. A new batch of Internet companies have broken this rule, and they are crazy to recruit people - ByteDance has more than 100,000 people last year, and Meituan will soon have 100,000 people.
Soon, Ali Tencent began to follow suit. The two companies exceeded 100,000 people in 2019 and 2021 respectively. At least 5 years ago, internet companies with online business-based business exceeded 100,000 people, which is an unimaginable scale. Because the BMW Group, which has been established for nearly a hundred years, is only this scale.
This makes people have to sigh that the Internet is beginning to look like a labor-intensive industry.
In the years of personnel surge, there have been no new national-level products in the Internet industry, and no breakthrough technologies. At the same time, the expansion of personnel leads to organizational bloating, in some enterprises, the top managers are busy, the middle managers "conspire" and "fight for power and profit", while the grass-roots employees are discouraged and people are overwhelmed. On social platforms, Internet practitioners' dissatisfaction with the company is becoming more and more obvious.
Now, the consequences of overextending are gradually emerging.
The most rapid factories began to lay off employees
ByteDance is finally no longer continuing to carry out its expansion strategy.
It kicked off the largest layoffs to date. The education business line has laid off more than 5,000 people, and employees such as commercialization, ohayoo games, and real estate business "Happiness Li" have been laid off. Just 10 days ago, ByteDance just announced the overall abolition of the Talent Development Center team.
ByteDance is considered to be one of the most promising mobile Internet giants at present, and its office workplace in Beijing is spread throughout Haidian, and its product matrix is amazingly rich. Its most well-known product, Douyin/Tiktok, has spread all over the world, and even Facebook is afraid of three points. People gave it a name that represented its strength and status, "Cosmic Bar".
It was once considered omnipotent and penetrated into the main business of almost all Internet giants, and the media ridiculed its unlimited expansion with "ByteDance's friends are only Millet".
This year, the universal ByteDance can not be attacked, games, local life, cloud business, etc. have not improved much. At the same time, as the only source of income, the daily active growth of its profit center Douyin has peaked.
This has led to the once mythical company also starting to lay off employees.
ByteDance, which pays attention to efficiency, is also unambiguous in the matter of layoffs. On the evening of November 30, the employees of "Happiness Lane", who had received the notice of layoffs, were asked to come to the company early the next morning to negotiate compensation. Most of these employees were dismissed on business reshuffle, where they were allowed to transfer internally, but that required more than three rounds of interviews internally.
Before the emergence of Douyin, Kuaishou was the only hegemon in the field of short videos. There is almost no advertising, and its users are over 100 million.
Douyin and Kuaishou are known as one of the few national-level products in the field of mobile Internet. These two national short video companies have invariably reported the news of layoffs.
Unlike the social platform that "only employees with performance C are optimized", Tech Planet learned from a number of Kuaishou employees that the layoffs not only involved employees with performance C, but also many employees with performance B and fresh graduates/club enrollments who were still in the probationary period. They are scattered across various departments, such as data platforms, commercialization, e-commerce, and so on.
These laid-off employees are now facing an embarrassing situation. In the last month of the fourth quarter, most of the Internet companies' HCs were locked, and they didn't have much to choose from. A Kuaishou employee mentioned that he now goes out for an interview, and most HR will ask, was he laid off?
Since 2018, layoffs are almost a routine operation of Internet manufacturers, and almost every year at the end of the year, the message of layoffs will be sent out, and the slogan of "Internet winter" will be shouted almost every year.
But this year's situation is even more dire — regulatory pressure has fallen on almost every head Internet company, the advertising business, one of the three most valuable sources of revenue for Internet companies, has not risen, and weak consumption and no amazing products have made growth seem extremely valuable.
But layoffs don't fundamentally improve the situation for any company — Douyin's daily life doesn't grow, and Byte doesn't make blockbuster games. Kuaishou will not surpass byte, and its advertising revenue will not usher in explosive growth.
In 2016, when ByteDance had less than 10,000 people, Zhang Yiming admitted that almost no industry-leading companies controlled labor costs to achieve leadership. But labor costs are always the most controllable and immediate.
This move sends a signal to everyone that as long as it does not conform to the company's strategic direction and cannot create enough value for the company, anyone is at risk of being laid off in the context of de-fattening and thinning.
Consequences of the talent overmatch strategy
"Vigorous miracles", ByteDance once believed in the theory of exchanging big investment for big growth, and they used to recruit people madly.
In March 2020, ByteDance had nearly 60,000 people worldwide, and by the end of the year, there were 100,000 people. They have a huge HR team. According to "Late Post", as of the beginning of November, ByteDance's human resources team had more than 4,000 people, including interns, of which HR accounted for the largest proportion of recruitment, about 3,000 people; there were also thousands of people responsible for employer branding, talent development, organizational development and compensation performance.
An HR who once worked at ByteDance told Tech Planet that the number of interns in ByteDance's HR team is almost twice that of regular employees. Most of the work of these interns is to assist in interviews, such as calling candidates, helping to register, and so on.
An HRBP of a top manufacturer told Tech Planet that an Internet company of about 40,000 people has an HR team of about 500 people. Based on 100,000 people, ByteDance's HR team is the most reasonable at 1,250 people. According to the regular employees, ByteDance does meet this data, but coupled with the huge team of interns, it seems that its HR team is extremely large. You know, Alibaba, which is known for its emphasis on recruitment, has only 700 HR at the size of 100,000 people.
The large HR team provides a good complement to the development of Byte.
"It's a pretty 'scary' bunch of people. They always recruit relevant personnel according to particularly high requirements and standards, commonly known as over-matching. The interview process and method are so refined that I can't wait to develop a system to see if this person has an incomparably strong potential. An HR who has worked at ByteDance admits.
The starting point of ByteDance's implementation of the talent overmatch strategy is not a problem, because human resource management needs to be configured and planned, and the company's business is developing, so human resource management also needs to be forward-looking.
"For example, I currently need ten product managers, the basic requirements are 1-2 years of work experience, bachelor degree or above. Meeting these few conditions is actually enough. However, I must have a master's degree or above, more than 3-5 years of work experience, explosive products, 1-3 years of management experience (product director, etc.). Hr explained above.
In the short term, this will increase the company's operating costs. But in the long run, the benefits do outweigh the disadvantages. "In the early days, ByteDance's business development was amazingly fast, and when new projects needed to be carried out, through internal recruitment, potential planning, succession planning and other training models, the right project leaders could be quickly selected from these high-standard talent pools. These people are already fully familiar with the company's operating model and office style, and can be almost seamless. "A byte of work hr representation.
But this is a good overmatch. The bad thing is that talent is wasted tremendously. The most typical is that there are many returnees in byte content review positions. An overseas master who once got an offer for the post said that he received an offer from Beijing at that time, with a basic salary of 2400, plus staying up late to work overtime was only more than 6000.
"We don't really like to take orders because their talent pool is so large that you can understand that it covers almost the best part of the market, so we don't get referral fees." An Internet headhunter said.
Do you really need 100,000 people?
At first, the outside world did not recognize this over-allocation strategy, because it greatly increased the operating costs of large factories, and because of the large number of employees, it was very easy to breed large company diseases.
In 2012, Tencent's market capitalization had reached $70 billion, and the entire company numbered only 20,000 people. At that time, Ma Huateng sent a letter to all employees, reminding him to overcome the disease of large enterprises and reshape the spirit of small companies. Before his death, Jobs called Apple the largest startup on the planet, with the world's largest market capitalization, less than 50,000 employees, and a market capitalization of more than $300 billion.
Most of the companies that have grown up in the mobile Internet era believe in "great miracles", and they are accustomed to using the tactics of the sea of people. But today, the market value of Kuaishou, which has a population of nearly 20,000 people, is only $46 billion, the METUan with a market value of nearly $200 billion is about to reach 100,000 people, and the latest valuation of more than $400 billion in bytes has more than 100,000 people.
This kind of talent over-allocation strategy has also begun to be emulated by the big factories that were once wary of overextending.
According to Tech Planet statistics, from 2019 onwards, Tencent's personnel scale has almost doubled. From 2016 to 2019, the company steadily expanded at a rate of 10,000 new people per year, and in 2019-2021, its new number exceeded 20,000. Alibaba is no exception, with the number of employees growing at a rate of 20,000 per year in 2018-2020 (excluding the high-tech retail consolidation).
It is also at this point in time that the Internet has no longer appeared any phenomenon-level products, and there are almost no new sustainable business models, and large manufacturers have begun to invade each other's territory and fight in the stock market.
Big companies may be hoping to attract enough people to collide with enough ideas, or when they have enough amazing ideas, there are the right people to execute.
But for now, neither of these ideas has become a reality, but has exacerbated the "inner volume".
An employee of a large factory confessed to Tech Planet that there is a group of people who want to grab everything, want to do everything, all kinds of positive, leaders especially like but colleagues are very annoying. If one person does not leave work, the second person will not dare to leave, and then there will be a third and a fourth, and eventually it will silently spread to the entire department, and everyone will passively "roll inside" because of this person.
A product manager with more than 5 years of work experience in a large factory, in zhihu shared his feelings, in this business model that relies on traffic, the stock is fighting, the product is dismantled to pieces, before the 3 people can do, divided into 3 departments, from management to the front line, more than a dozen people grab a bowl of porridge, internal friction, conflict can be seen.
The inner volume is a significant negative effect after the implementation of the talent over-allocation strategy before the emergence of new national-level applications, followed by layoffs. This inevitably affects the corporate image, but it is the evil consequence that the big manufacturers must swallow, and the laid-off employees can only get N+1 compensation, and when the company's strategy is adjusted, they do not have any means to resist.
A Kuaishou employee once told Tech Planet that he doubted that Kuaishou could achieve 300 million DAUs when the number of personnel was only a few thousand, and now the number of employees has increased by 2-3 times, but the growth of DUA has hardly changed, and it is not known what the recruited people are doing.
In December last year, at the face-to-face communication meeting of ByteDance's CEO, Zhang Yiming recalled that when the name was still today's headlines, Android and iOS were each developed by two, but more than 20 applications were made. "I don't know why so many people are on a lot of projects right now, and I want to spend more time learning about it."
This may be the confusion of everyone. Apple now has just 140,000 people and a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion. At the end of 2018, Facebook had 36,000 employees, and its market value exceeded $800 billion that year.
In contrast, ByteDance, which has more than 100,000 people, is valued at more than $400 billion, while the profitable Tencent has exceeded 100,000 people, but its market value is only about one-fifth of Apple's.
In fact, with the development of the company, the growth of personnel scale is an inevitable trend, and the big factory will naturally have more and more people. However, companies should offer employees more opportunities to create value, rather than manufacturing inner rolls under the 996's high-pressure work system.
Internet giants may really need more people, but companies should also be wary of overextending. Because when expansion is out of control, companies can be in a dangerous situation.
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