At Beijing Xierqi Subway Station, a large number of young people take a bus here every day and set off for their respective jobs. Photo/Visual China
Behind the "35-year-old crisis"
Reporter/Yang Zhijie Wen/Lei Xiaolin
Internet giants, which have always been known for their "inner volume", are starting a correction movement.
On November 9, 2021, Tencent launched the Employee Care Upgrade Program, where employees who have been employed for 15 years can choose "early retirement" and enjoy retirement benefits. Among them, the long-term service thank you payment is a fixed salary of 6 months, and the retirement honorary payment is one of the "service period" and "50% unbanned stock options". Some people optimistically interpret that this is the first time that Internet companies have faced and solved the "mid-life crisis" of hitting workers. But the policy has also been questioned — at Internet companies where the average age of employees is around 30, "probably 90 percent of people know in their hearts that they will definitely not stay until retirement."
In the past 10 years, Internet companies are undoubtedly the most willing to spend money for talents as a whole, and a large number of outstanding college graduates and overseas students have broken through several rounds of interviews and squeezed their heads to pour into large factories. However, in the past one or two years, the "996 Blessing Report", the deformed overtime work caused sudden death, the 35-year-old anxiety has frequently triggered employee backlash and social controversy, and the "employment model" of Internet manufacturers has shown an extreme bias.
In the view of the deputy dean of the School of Labor Economics of the Capital University of Economics and Business who studies internet labor relations, the problems in the human resource management mechanism of the Internet industry are caused by a variety of complex factors, and the current welfare treatment is not the root cause. The big factory anti-"inner roll" still has a long way to go.
From "Voluntary Overtime" to "996 Blessing"
The overtime culture has always run through the development of the Internet industry for more than 20 years. Shen Xiaofei, a veteran Internet headhunter, told China News Weekly that internet companies did not have a "996" system in the early days, but at that time everyone volunteered to work overtime, "The early Internet was in a stage of rapid development, and employees could do a lot of things, such as doing a new technology or realizing a new idea, and the company rarely restricted it."
Liang Meng, associate professor at the College of Humanities and Development of China Agricultural University, has long been concerned about Internet technology and labor. In 2012, Liang Meng, who was still studying for a doctorate, worked part-time in the product department of a well-known Internet company in China (hereinafter referred to as Company Z), completing 4 months of participant observation and interviews. Company Z is a typical representative of mainstream Internet companies at home and abroad, advocating the engineer culture of "technology changing the world". During her part-time job, Liang Meng can strongly feel the company's admiration for engineer culture every day. There is a flexible working system here, and programmers are the most "mysterious" group of people in the company, and there are no fixed working hours. Programmers also have more privileges, such as playing games during working hours and having generous team building funds. Engineers also have a high degree of decision-making power in product design, and even the resources that product managers need to fight for.
In Liang Meng's view, the most distinctive point in the management and control mode of the first generation of elite Internet companies on the PC side is that programmers have the right to decide the working hours and working hours, and out of a sense of responsibility and a sense of achievement, the phenomenon of voluntary overtime is common.
At this stage, although the vicious incidents caused by deformed overtime have appeared, the high-intensity overtime of technology companies has not improved, and even become the daily routine of many Internet companies. In Liang Meng's view, the overtime work of the Internet has been a common phenomenon since its inception, but it has only led to large-scale complaints about overtime in the development stage of the mobile Internet.
In order to compete for traffic entrance, the competition between Various Internet companies is fierce, and the platform economy is rising. From BAT to Meituan, ByteDance, etc., they have expanded their business at this stage and evolved into a large factory with a scale of tens of thousands or even more than 100,000 people, and various mobile Internet companies have also set their visions more practical. In Liang Meng's view, compared with the dream of changing the world, some corporate cultures in the mobile Internet era are closer to the culture of market competition, and the previous Z company is also changing, which means that the free and equal "engineer culture" is diluted, and the autonomy that is proud of is gradually lost.
In the first decade of the development of the Internet, enterprises mostly adopted the waterfall development method, "the process includes requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing and release, etc., which is a classic development method for elite Internet companies such as BAT to start." Liang Meng explained that in this mode, the employee workflow is fixed, the previous process is completed, the next one can start, "the product development process is generally 3 months to 6 months, and with a relatively complete product architecture as the goal of final release and delivery." However, in the mobile Internet era, the agile development of more efficient collaboration has become popular among Internet enterprises and has become the mainstream development method of BAT, ByteDance, Didi and other enterprises. This is a software development capability that responds to rapidly changing requirements, and instead of strictly following a workflow, agile development is performed side by side, emphasizing the rapid delivery of small functions to the application, and then continuous improvement and enhancement over the project cycle.
This method has obvious advantages, the work process and progress are clear, and it is easy to monitor the technology development process, but it also changes the pace of work. A product manager described to Liang Meng how the work pressure soared, "In the past, I wrote the business MRD (requirements document) at one time, and the rest was the technical design, development, and testing. But with Agile, I'm constantly tearing down story (user stories) to them, and I'm constantly trying to verify the consistency of the features he's developed before. Liang Meng concludes that this model requires closer cooperation, communication and mutual supervision at the horizontal level, so that the autonomy of the labor process is gradually reduced compared to the previous agile development.
The figures involved are trapped in a web, and the flexible working system is useless. Liang Meng believes that "this problem is superficially related to law and labor remuneration, but in essence, it is due to the change in the type of management control caused by technology, resulting in the loss of autonomy and decision-making space in the labor process, resulting in a contradiction between the cultural capital of workers (that is, the culture of engineers) and the corporate culture and management mechanism."
"From the perspective of labor employment, 2020 is a peak point for the oppression of Internet labor and employment." Scope told China News Weekly that under the needs of business-driven, Internet companies want to gain greater market share, promoting the strict management of internal labor employment.
With the gradual loss of the demographic dividend and the saturation of traffic, the competition in the Internet industry for the same track has become more and more fierce. After the new crown epidemic, the group purchase of various Internet companies rushing to the beach is the epitome of white-hot competition. Since June 2020, Didi, Meituan, Pinduoduo, Alibaba, ByteDance, etc. have successively made efforts to buy community groups, and Didi CEO Cheng Wei has said that "there is no upper limit for investment, and we will go all out to take the first". At that time, thousands of Pinduoduo employees opened the market in third- and fourth-tier cities, and some employees anonymously mentioned on a workplace App, "From November to now, 50 days, there has been no rest day, 11 o'clock in the morning to work, the average off-work time is 3 to 4 am." At 1:30 a.m. on December 29, 2020, Zhang Moufei, a 23-year-old employee of Pinduoduo Grocery Shopping, suddenly fainted on the way to work, and died of ineffective rescue, becoming a victim of internet deformed overtime.
Scope believes that the employment system of many Internet companies is extremely contrary to the law, and it is an industry-wide behavior, and the "overtime culture" has been strengthened by generations. Alibaba founder Ma Yun's concept is the most representative, he has publicly stated that China BAT such a company can "996" is a kind of "blessing", the company's implementation of "996", means faster development speed, for employees, "without paying beyond others efforts and time, you can not achieve the desired success." "Enterprises have the motivation to extend overtime and form such a culture, for employees, the economic income of overtime is higher, and there is no trade union checks and balances within the enterprise." The scope pointed out that whether it is managers or society, the understanding of it is lagging behind, "coupled with the imperfect legal environment of the market, the Internet overtime has become a dangerous situation where no one is willing to enforce the legal rules."
In August 2021, the Supreme People's Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security clearly pointed out through cases that "996" seriously violated the provisions of the law on extending the upper limit of working hours, and the relevant company rules and regulations should be found to be invalid. At the same time, the major factories have also begun to tighten the overtime intensity in the system, Kuaishou, Meituan Preferred, ByteDance have cancelled the big and small weeks, Tencent Photonic Studio announced that it will leave the office before 21:00 on weekdays outside Wednesday, leave work at 18:00 on Wednesdays, and apply for overtime on Saturdays and Sundays.
However, a domestic first-line mobile Internet company HRBP (human resources business partner) pointed out that the essence of the problem is that the working hours are shortened, but if the work content and assessment mechanism remain unchanged, the problem of overtime will not cure the symptoms.
On February 23, 2018, the eighth day of the Chinese New Year, Shenzhen Tencent Building distributed open door red envelopes, and many employees lined up downstairs to wait for collection. Photo/Visual China
When "human resources" becomes "labor costs"
Overtime labor is a result of high wage incentives, ByteDance has been in the company's internal investigation, only 1/3 of the employees support the cancellation of the "big and small week", most people are unwilling, some employees have calculated, because of the cancellation of overtime will lose nearly 100,000 yuan of income per year.
Regardless of Chinese and foreign Internet enterprises, human resource costs are one of the important components of the total cost of Internet enterprises. As of March 2021, Alibaba has more than 250,000 full-time employees, Tencent and ByteDance have more than 100,000 employees, and the scale of Meituan may reach the order of 100,000. For example, Tencent's financial report shows that in the third quarter of 2021, revenue was 142.368 billion yuan and net profit was 39.5 billion yuan. As of September 30, 2021, Tencent had 107348 employees, and the total cost of remuneration for the three months ended September 30, 2021 was RMB25.963 billion. In the same period of 2020, the total number of employees was only 77,592, and the total cost of remuneration was 17.703 billion yuan, rising rapidly. Kuaishou's third quarter 2021 financial report clearly mentioned that the company's loss in the first three quarters was as high as 21.9 billion yuan, due to the rapid rise in sales costs and various expenses, of which the increase in the number of employees led to an increase in compensation expenses was an important reason.
Liu Xin, a professor at the School of Public Administration of Chinese Min University, told China News Weekly that the labor cost of Internet companies accounts for a large proportion, but companies want to expand, so they pay special attention to how to control labor costs and how many benefits are created per capita.
Controlling labor costs plays a decisive role in controlling total costs, and is also the core content of cost control of Internet enterprises. A series of software and hardware such as the organizational structure, business processes, development models, reward and punishment mechanisms, and personnel elimination of Internet companies will be adjusted around this goal, which has become the consensus of the industry.
Hr Careful (pseudonym), who is responsible for school recruitment in a domestic large-line factory, once worked in a real estate enterprise, before joining the Internet factory, he thought that the Internet company was an open and flat enterprise, but after coming, he felt that it was more like a labor-intensive work like an electronics factory, and the work of each front-line employee was finely distributed, it was difficult to know the whole picture, as long as it was carefully implemented. He told China News Weekly, "From the company's point of view, it is necessary, the purpose of the company is to make money, the purpose of management is to reduce costs, faster efficiency, divide it into finer, like the assembly line of an electronics factory, when a certain link goes wrong, it can be quickly replaced." And in my old company, everyone may have to do some slightly larger projects, and once someone leaves, it is difficult to immediately find the same person to replace."
The 996 and big weeks are obviously the most direct and maximize the use of human resources. The welfare of Internet companies, like sugar coating wrapped in overtime culture, plays a certain role in inducing. For example, ByteDance has implemented a "big and small week" system for many years, employees have double salaries during overtime, and after overtime until 22:00, employees can use the enterprise Didi; employees who live within 30 minutes of walking from the office location have rent subsidies of 1000 to 1500 yuan. Zhang Yiming of ByteDance has said that the subsidy has nothing to do with overtime. But to some extent, this is just like the British sociologist Browell proposed "manufacturing consent", the enterprise formulates a series of production rules and the design of micro-labor processes, so that workers identify with production, while ignoring the truth of employment relations and the essence of management control.
This approach also maximizes "human effectiveness". A labor cost calculation chart circulating on the Internet shows that if an engineer has a monthly basic salary of 20,000 yuan and a year-end bonus of 4 months, then, the implementation of the "996" work system, the total cost paid by the company is 511,700 yuan (basic salary, overtime pay, year-end bonus and social security provident fund, etc.). If the "996" is not implemented, another engineer is recruited, and the nine-to-six work system is implemented, the company will have to pay a total labor cost of 846,400 yuan.
Wang Chao, a professor at the National Development Research Institute of Peking University, believes that the prevalence of overtime culture in Internet companies is actually a continuation of the model of making full use of the demographic dividend for traditional industries. Innovation in the Internet industry has not innovated in terms of labor. Labor cost savings in the Internet industry are not really achieved through systematic innovation, but more of a cost transfer, and labor itself has become an inevitable option for cost transfer.
When the operation encounters challenges, the "human resources" accumulated during the period of rapid expansion immediately become "labor costs". Enterprises will choose to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and "living" is the most important. A person who worked in a major Internet factory told China News Weekly that before he left at the end of 2020, the company tilted a lot of resources to develop e-commerce live broadcasting, recruiting a large number of people, but Alibaba and Douyin have taken the lead, and the department has not made much profit as a catch-up. "In order to find new growth points, the company will try new business, but in general, there is no longevity, and the patience given is 1 to 2 years, and it will be cut off at once without effect, which is very common in the company." Layoffs also take into account labor costs. iQiyi recently broke out a large-scale layoff, there is a media summary, the layoff list is mostly probationary employees, which is a way for the company to lay off employees at a relatively small cost - layoff compensation is the least.
But in 2021 at the same time as the wave of layoffs, the Internet factories have also greatly increased the proportion of school recruitment, Tencent for the 2022 school recruitment open 5,000 positions, is the largest ever, Jingdong, Ali, Meituan plans to introduce tens of thousands of fresh graduates, some talents' salaries are even higher than previous students. An HR who is in charge of school recruitment in a first-line factory told China News Weekly that from the perspective of labor costs, school enrollment is "really cheap" compared to social recruitment. For example, he said that when a company recruits an employee, the company has to pay at least 400,000 to 500,000 yuan of annual salary, plus five insurances and one gold, which is about 30% to 40%, which is a high cost. However, as long as the company spends an annual salary of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan, it can recruit very good school enrollment. Internet companies recruit thousands of fresh graduates every year to do training plans together, which are evenly distributed to everyone, and the training cost is very low.
Liu Xin believes that in general, recruiting new people also involves paying more social security and management costs. For enterprises, the problems that can be solved by overtime, enterprises will try not to recruit more people.
Overtime is a common phenomenon in some Internet manufacturers. Figure/IC
The employment roll behind the 35-year-old crisis
According to the "Average Age of Employees of Large Internet Enterprises" survey released by the Pulse Data Research Institute in 2021, the average age of the 20 domestic enterprises that were counted was between 27 and 33 years old. Among them, the new generation of Internet companies represented by TMD (ByteDance, Meituan, Didi), the average age of companies under 30 years old (including 30 years old) accounts for almost half, and the average age of ByteDance and Pinduoduo employees is relatively low, with an average age of only 27 years old. In BAT, the average age of Alibaba employees is 31 years old, Baidu's average age is 30 years old, and Tencent's employees are 29 years old.
Well-known foreign technology companies also prefer young people. In 2017, market research firm Statista reported that the average age of employees at top tech companies was between 27 and 39 years old. Five companies such as AOL, Facebook, linkedIn, Salesforce and Google are 30 years old and younger, most companies such as Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, and Nvidia have employees between the ages of 31 and 35, and a few 3 companies such as IBM and HP have employees over the age of 38.
The "35-year-old crisis" has existed for a long time in Internet companies, and Internet practitioners over the age of 35 who have not yet become executives are more likely to be optimized and more difficult to find the job they want. A person who does corporate culture in the head of the big factory told China News Weekly that the culture of many Internet companies has a slogan called "embracing change", and this sentence is reflected in the work of HR, which is more like recruiting young people, in contrast, senior people are not so adaptable and ability to change their thinking.
"In the face of change, young people are more willing to take some aggressive postures, and old employees are more likely to adopt some conservative postures." Feng Lijuan, chief human resources expert at 51job, told China News Weekly.
Compared with most employees over the age of 35 who have started a family, young people are paid less, have strong learning ability, are energetic, and are more willing to work overtime or even "996". In addition, most of the company's business development position threshold is not high, for the company, the demand for new people and the elderly is the same, but the salary is high, the company will naturally choose a new person with higher cost performance.
Even if promoted to management, employees over the age of 35 are at risk of being laid off at any time. A person who once worked at BAT mentioned that the company has some middle-level people, working for 10 years, with an annual salary of millions, but it may not be equal to the returns they bring to the company, "just stepping on the shoulders of giants to accompany the company to grow." Some middle-aged people in the workplace between the ages of 35 and 50 began to be considered to have "occupied" management positions for many years, and their business was not refined and they were good at office politics, and they would be "optimized" by large factories one after another.
Another reality is that "to some extent, when you enter an Internet company in your 20s, work in such a high-intensity position until you are over 30 years old, experience 996, and there may be various hidden dangers in your body." The scope mentions that in terms of the labor cost of the enterprise, if the middle and elderly employee structure is maintained, the follow-up will also face such as employee absence due to illness, higher medical insurance and the probability of work injury.
In recent years, some Internet factories have increased the scale of school enrollment and increased salaries, and some companies have even offered annual salaries of 350,000 yuan or even more than 400,000 yuan, upside down with old employees. In Liu Xin's view, the company's annual large-scale school recruitment to some extent, which is also aimed at the middle and senior managers of the enterprise with high salaries and low productivity, "replacing the elderly with new people".
The innovation of Internet companies relies on young talents, but in the view of Zhu Guowei, a professor at the School of Business Administration of Hunan University, there are also certain drawbacks in this way of employing people. He mentioned in an interview with Xinhua News Agency that "China's long-term demographic dividend has made enterprises accustomed to the 'pinching' way of employing people and overtime work intensity, but the '35-year-old workplace boom-bust line' actually reflects the misunderstanding of the concept of unit employment, that is, paying attention to the 'cheap and easy to use' labor force, while ignoring the manpower support and resource experience reserves required behind industrial transformation and upgrading." Such employment orientation, it is easy to fall into the vicious circle of "inner volume" of industry and employment. ”
The unspoken rule of most enterprises is not to recruit job seekers over the age of 35, which is not only due to the need for a younger corporate team, but also stems from a kind of implicit discrimination against 35+ employees. The 35+ employees who are re-entering the job market may be seen as "inferior" by some employers: they can't stay in their original units.
In November 2020, a 45-year-old software developer left a message on the "I say a word to the prime minister" column on the Chinese government website, reporting that he had encountered discrimination against the age of employment, which caused concern. He is proficient in various technical systems of Java, obtained the PMP project management certificate, the system architect certificate, and felt that he had entered the best moment of his career, but because he took care of his son's study, he resigned for half a year and then looked for a job, but it was difficult to even get the opportunity to interview. "Now that the state encourages delayed retirement, I think that experienced professional and technical personnel over the age of 40 are in the golden age of their career development, and they cannot be limited by age when looking for a job."
A labor relations scholar, who did not want to be named, told China News Weekly that age discrimination is not clearly listed in the Employment Promotion Law, and legislation needs to be improved in the future, such as increasing the punishment for age discrimination in employment. But he mentioned that age discrimination does not only exist in the Internet industry, some traditional industries in the recruitment, 35 years old is generally the upper limit of the entry age (front-line positions), such as civil servants. "Under the demonstration effect of the public sector, it is difficult to promote the prohibition of age discrimination in private enterprises."
The above-mentioned labor relations scholars, who did not want to be named, believe that the Internet industry applicants are large in scale and attractive in salary, and will continue to manage and recruit along the original path for some time to come. However, in the long run, with the change of demographic structure, the social harm of this employment model of enterprises will gradually appear, and it needs to really attract the attention of legislation and law enforcement.