Source: Visual China
Author 丨 Cheng Xiaoyi
Edit | Kang Xiao
Produced | Shenzhen Network Tencent News Xiaoman Studio
The sudden death of a 28-year-old young employee has put ByteDance on the cusp of public opinion again.
On the afternoon of February 22, a 28-year-old expectant mother who was two months pregnant spoke out on the Internet, saying that her 28-year-old husband died suddenly at ByteDance on the evening of the 21st.
The mother-to-be told her collapse and helplessness in the community owner group, in her opinion, her husband failed to get the first treatment when there was an accident in the company gym, believing that the company delayed the best rescue time. On the evening of the 21st, her husband was judged by the doctors to have "all the brains died, no spontaneous breathing, no spontaneous heartbeat, all organ failure, and inability to return to heaven." ”
On the morning of February 23, ByteDance issued an announcement on the intranet to refute the rumors, saying that the employee, Wu, was "still in rescue". In the afternoon, ByteDance posted again, saying that Wu died after 41 hours of rescue. As of press time, there is no news to clarify the root cause of Wu's accident.
"Deep Web" learned that Wu is an image algorithm engineer in byteDance's video architecture department, and a submission record of Wu in the Bytegit code management system shows that since January 29 this year, Wu has been submitting code at three or four o'clock in the morning for many times. On February 9, it was submitted from 3 a.m. to 12 noon.
A ByteDance employee told The Deep Web that the system uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and that the display time is added by 8 hours to Beijing time. "So in fact, the working hours are normal hours, not overtime in the early morning."
This incident triggered widespread empathy among employees of internet factories. A ByteDance engineer lamented that although he didn't know Wu, "but things hurt his kind, seeing his wife still have to consider money, children and other practical issues when her heart is broken, I have a feeling of looking in the mirror." ”
Although there is no official determination of the cause of death, public opinion generally believes that the reason for his death was improper fitness after overwork.
In the 10 years since its establishment, ByteDance has gone from an unknown "latecomer" to a giant with a valuation of 100 billion US dollars. Founder Zhang Yiming has also gone from a serial entrepreneurial loser to one of the most talked about young entrepreneurs in China's Internet industry. Countless young people are attracted by the high salaries given by ByteDance, the promised open culture, and the development prospects, and some people continue to leave due to high-intensity work and the rapid expansion of the organization. Although since July last year, Byte has gradually introduced a series of policies to "reduce the burden" for employees, such as canceling the size week, anxiety is still the background of Byte employees.
"Can't stop working overtime"
ByteDance's fast-paced and overtime culture is well known, and many Beijing ByteDance employees told the Deep Web that leaving work at 9 p.m. is considered "normal work". Although since July last year, Byte has introduced a series of employee "burden reduction" policies such as "canceling the size week", the anxiety of Byte employees has not been alleviated, but has become very popular after ByteDance decided to "defert and increase weight" in 2021.
An employee of a company who has a project docking with ByteDance told The Deep Web that although Byte later canceled the size week, the work can be docked anytime and anywhere online, and "the work rhythm of Byte is basically 007."
Byte employees do not have absolute holidays and weekends, as long as there are mobile phones and computers and networks, they can work anytime and anywhere, and the feedback time will never exceed two hours.
The employee said that once the project is launched, it is possible to meet at what time in the evening, and even a few times in the early morning there are still conference calls. "In order to report step by step, a plan may have to go through several layers, corresponding to several versions, they often change it and find that the boss wants the original version, which is very common."
In fact, not only Byte, this employee can experience the anxiety and inner volume from Byte and other Internet manufacturers, and all processes and rhythms are constantly accelerating.
A former byte employee also told the "Deep Web" that due to the internal volume of the department, he was exhausted, so that he asked for psychological counseling twice a week.
Since the second quarter of last year, ByteDance education, commercialization, games, war investment and other teams have been laid off one after another, and the war investment department has even suffered a "disaster".
A ByteDance employee told the "Deep Web" that he was always worried that he would be laid off, "the work has been too much to do, and he is still doing work", but he is afraid that there will be no work to do one day.
Two employees of the relevant departments of Byte Sports told The DeepNet that they have been very busy since joining the company last year, basically working overtime on Saturdays and often overtime on Sundays.
A byte employee told the "Deep Web" that compared with the Beijing headquarters, the Shanghai headquarters did not have a very "inner volume", basically 10 to 8, and occasionally worked overtime until 10 pm. Some Byte employees who transferred from Shanghai to Beijing can also appreciate the difference between the two headquarters.
From the perspective of the industry, the number and talent density of Internet companies in Beijing are larger than in Shanghai, and the competition is relatively more intense. In addition, influenced by the city's culture, he believes that Shanghai is more pursuing life experience. In another dimension, this difference is related to the distribution of the company's business. For example, byte's most heavily relied on commercialization departments are mainly concentrated in Beijing, while the local life team that has previously tried to innovate business was launched in Shanghai.
Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, has been a loyal supporter of the "high investment for high growth" view before, and he once believed that the big and small weeks (single rest every other week) would definitely bring gains to the company at this stage.
However, the mobile Internet demographic dividend is gradually disappearing, and Internet companies must begin to get used to "slow growth".
In March 2021, Zhang Yiming delivered a speech at the anniversary celebration as CEO of ByteDance for the last time. Looking back at the content of the speech, it is more like a reflection on his expansion actions that have not been successful in the past year. For example, after having the resources, it is not easy to increase leverage and increase investment in the wrong direction.
In the past year, ByteDance has made few breakthroughs in many areas such as local life, games, medium- and long-term video, education, etc., and the bigger crisis is that the growth of the old business as a revenue pillar is also slowing down. A person close to Douyin told the DeepNet that the average daily active number of Douyin has reached 700 million, compared with 600 million announced in June 2020, the growth is not obvious.
"There is generally a misconception that more labor creates more value." Yang Heqing, vice president of the China Institute of Labor and former dean of the School of Labor Economics of the Capital University of Economics and Business, has led a team to study the problem of domestic "overwork" since 2007, and he said in an interview with the interface in 2019 that "there is a critical point in the relationship between labor input and value growth", and after exceeding the critical point, the more serious the degree of overwork, the greater the economic loss.
As far as the country is concerned, the phenomenon of overwork of some workers has not appeared in recent years, Yang Heqing said that overwork existed long before the reform and opening up, but the topics concerned by each era are different. In the past, the level of social and economic development was low, and social attention was focused on solving problems related to food and clothing, and overwork did not attract people's attention.
The awakening of individual consciousness is closely related to socio-economic development, and when socio-economic development reaches a certain level, people's demand for occupational health also becomes higher. In the past decade, the domestic attention to the phenomenon of overwork has increased to a great extent.
Globally, overwork is a common phenomenon at certain stages in various countries. Working hours in countries around the world did decline before the 1980s, but then this trend suddenly stopped and shifted to a gradual increase. The Americans and the British are also working tirelessly, dwarfing even the Japanese.
In his book "The Age of Overwork," Koji Morioka tried to explain why: In the 1980s, competition between countries such as the United States and Japan intensified, and mergers and acquisitions and restructurings between companies were frequent. Since this period, people's employment pressure has become increasing, and the bosses of American companies have begun to shout: "There are too many employees, the welfare package is too generous, and they are all spoiled." ”
As a result, companies have carried out reforms in their business methods with the goal of "streamlining", and have begun to lay off redundant personnel, reduce scale, and reduce labor costs. Entrepreneurs have left behind the post-World War II employer approach to warm-hearted business, as Gilles Berger has done. In his 2003 book, Suffocating Offices, Forced Working Americans, A. Fraser described the fact that Office buildings in the United States have become "sweatshops" for white-collar workers, whose working conditions are no less harsh than the real sweatshops established by multinational corporations in developing countries.
In 1978, ceos of major U.S. companies were paid about 30 times the average salary of their employees, and 17 years later, in 1995, they were paid more than 115 times the average salary of their employees. Even so, because American employees at the time generally threw half of their wealth into the stock market, Fraser described it as willing to endure layoffs and wage cuts as long as the stock price continued to rise.
When there is an overwork problem in high-paying positions in high-paying industries, people will be shocked much more than grass-roots jobs. According to the general principles of economics, low-income workers generally work longer hours than high-income workers in the same country at the same time. Therefore, people often have a certain psychological preparation for the overwork phenomenon of relatively grass-roots positions such as couriers, takeaway delivery workers, customer service, and 24-hour store attendants.
However, throughout the historical data of the United States and Japan in the 1990s, high-income people worked longer hours than low-income people.
"Lack of fitness knowledge"
In order to combat the decline in physical health brought about by hard work, fitness has become the only magic weapon for contemporary people to alleviate work pressure and health anxiety.
In order to cater to the "special work and rest time" of office workers, gyms in first-tier cities have begun to launch 24-hour gyms in recent years, which is quite popular. According to fitness statistics released by Leke in July last year, in the Beijing area, the fitness population from 22 pm to 8 am the next day accounted for 12.8%, and in the country, the proportion of fitness members during this period was only close to 10%.
Back to the incident mentioned at the beginning, according to ByteDance's announcement, on the evening of the 21st, Wu felt uncomfortable before exercising in the company gym for nearly an hour. This is not an isolated case, in December 2020, a 47-year-old employee of SenseTime died suddenly in the gym after an hour and a half of fitness.
A senior fitness coach in Beijing told "Deep Net" that the physical exhaustion state is very unsuitable for fitness, not only can not achieve the effect, but also many times will be damaged to the body.
The above-mentioned fitness coach said that many employees of large factories will find personal trainers in the gym in their spare time, and the first lesson is often to establish a correct concept of fitness, "warm up in advance, end stretching, and stay up late the next day can not work out." The knowledge of some employees of large factories about these basic knowledge is basically equal to 0. ”
Free gyms, as part of the care of employees in large factories, have almost become the standard for Internet companies. However, fitness industry practitioners told the "Deep Web" that many large factories provide fitness equipment, but few professionals teach how to use it, "In addition to these Internet factories, some community fitness devices also have health risks, but the fitness personnel in the community will not always be tired like the employees of the big factory." ”
A master of clinical medicine from Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine said in response to related questions that many patients mistakenly believe that sitting for eight or even more than ten hours during the day without moving, and practicing in the gym for an hour after work can solve the muscle tension and fatigue accumulated during the day. "Many people have finished practicing and it is counterproductive, so they come to see a doctor."
If you want to do muscle building training and improve muscle tolerance, you have to exercise when your muscles are in good condition. If you want to exercise to improve the heart and lungs and endocrine function, you need to practice when the body and mind are not tired. "For an office worker who has a busy day, back pain, physical and mental exhaustion, and less anger and laziness, the most important thing to do at this time is to rest."
(Sun Yu, Liu Si, etc. also contributed to this article)
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