Source: Times Finance Author: Xu Xiaoqian Yuchen
Source: Pixabay
"The world is vast, and there is a lot to do."
At the No. 1 gate of Hangzhou Ali Park, an employee comforted a friend who "graduated early" next to him.
On the afternoon of May 24, Ali Park, which was at the center of the public opinion storm, was a little different from usual, and a parting was being staged. Just the day before, Alibaba's business department was exposed to start organizational position and personnel optimization, and the overall proportion was about 7%
At 5 p.m., there is still an hour left before the end of the day. A thin man walked out of the park gate with a suitcase, his white hair making him look slightly vicissitudes. Carrying a black computer bag, scattered books and a packet of cucumber-flavored Le Shi chips were slightly crammed into another accompanying pocket.
Ali employees who left the park in a hurry Source: Photo by Times Finance
Then one after another people walked out of the park with large bags and small bags, their expressions were cold, their steps were hurried, looking at the incoming ride-hailing cars, and no one looked back to look at the battlefield where they had struggled. Until dusk, luxury cars drove out of the park's barrier poles, whistling away with shining brand plates.
As a technology talent factory, Alibaba carries the aspirations of most employees for a great future, but under the blade of organizational change and cost reduction and efficiency increase, some people's dreams have suddenly been interrupted.
The above-mentioned Ali Park was officially opened last year, a north-south road that separates the headquarters building from the ecosphere enterprise office building. At the same time, an east-west pedestrian bridge connects the two areas. It is said that this symbolizes the unimpeded transmission and sharing of data throughout the park.
Alibaba's response to rumors of layoffs has long been overdue, and on the evening of May 25, Alibaba Group announced that a total of 15,000 new recruits will be needed for the six major business groups in 2023, including more than 3,000 school recruits.
However, the tense and uneasy atmosphere has spread throughout the Internet circle. "Many companies have lowered their recruitment budgets after hearing the rumors, and some have closed recruitment positions," a Hangzhou headhunter shared on social media.
The layoffs have landed, and high P is the hardest hit area
When the layoffs were not yet stormy, Yanan, who had been with Ali for a year, had smelled the red flags, and "the list of layoffs was decided a week ago."
This is a stormy layoff that comes and goes quickly, leaving only 1 month at most for the target of the layoff, and most people will choose to retreat on the same day and take the decent compensation of N+3. "Often eat two loose meals a day, there is no need to be particularly entangled, most people accept it calmly." An Alibaba employee said to Times Finance.
A group of employees who left the Cloud Valley Park Source: Photo by Times Finance
According to a number of Ali employees, the focus of this layoff is the high-P group, and most of the low-level "small shrimp" are implicated.
"The nearly 100 fresh graduates recruited last year are not within the scope of layoffs, but the big guys in the project team with P8-P10 have left one after another, and the corresponding layoff ratios in various departments are different, and the layoff target of our group should be 10%." Yanan told Times Finance that she vaguely felt that this was a precursor to the change of the middle-level team of her business unit.
The employees of the outsourcing team are accustomed to the frequent parting moments of large factories, and an Ali computer room maintenance employee revealed to Times Finance that the operation and maintenance personnel of the computer room change a batch of people almost every three months.
Li Xiao, an employee of the Taotian Group in Xixi Park, received no less than 20 greetings from friends and family in one week, and she could only respond to the concern of her circle of acquaintances with "not as powerful as the outside world".
Although Li Xiao's department remained calm, most employees were like frightened birds, worried that the gears of layoffs would soon turn to themselves, so that in intensive meetings and tasks, she was in a state of disengagement, and the central topic of private discussion became what was the way out after the layoffs.
"Even if you avoid this layoff, it is difficult to ensure that you will be safe next time, and the business that performs well must complete the layoff target, and other business employees with poor earnings should not be able to escape." Li Xiao told Times Finance that since last year, her department has experienced two major shocks, and gradually, she has to accept the fact that "layoffs are normalized".
Since 2022, cost reduction and efficiency improvement have become the keynote of Alibaba's business development, and financial report data shows that Alibaba's personnel will shrink by nearly 20,000 in 2022. According to the latest data, the number of personnel in the first quarter of 2023 decreased again by 4,524.
With the major restructuring of the organizational structure, the risk of uncertainty faced by employees has greatly increased.
Li Ming, who has recently been optimized, has been doing psychological construction for nearly three months, and his business group is in a relatively awkward position, and it is difficult to clearly divide into a specific business department, he frankly told Times Finance: "Employees in the ambiguous area of business are the biggest victims of this structural adjustment." ”
The employees of the large factory lost their jobs, which affected the pond fish
In 2017, Taobao employee Wang Ping retreated as the mobile Internet was booming.
He experienced the golden age of the development of the e-commerce industry, and in his memory, Alibaba's headquarters campus was always a thriving face, and every day he woke up, a series of exciting numbers urged employees to constantly work overtime: rising GMV, strong growth in the number of new customers and rapidly expanding employees.
"It seems like every day without interruption, unlimited ideas waiting to be discovered, and even two employees crowding into a workstation during staff expansion." Wang Ping can't forget the warm atmosphere of the park when it is on the rise, whenever the Double 11 promotion comes, the entire Xixi Park is decorated with brilliant spotlights, and the record-breaking transaction volume is always accompanied by the ups and downs of gongs and drums and surging cheers, what he didn't expect was that the once lively picture was also frozen in history.
In 2021, the total transaction rating of Tmall Double 11 was 540.3 billion yuan, an increase of 8.45% over the same period in 2020, and the growth rate slowed down. By the following year, Alibaba stopped publishing GMV and focused instead on the quality of its operations. According to public information, as of 2022, Alibaba's Chinese market has exceeded 1 billion consumers, approaching the ceiling of user growth.
In 2013, the war of ride-hailing had not yet been ignited, and taxis were a common means of transportation for employees to commute to work, and after 8 p.m., an endless stream of traffic poured to the gate of Xixi Park.
According to Yang Fan's recollection, before the rise of the Internet, no one speculated on houses, but on taxis, when a taxi could be fried for 1 million yuan, "We were conservatively estimated to earn 800 yuan a day even in two shifts, and more than 20,000 yuan a month." ”
In July 2021, a number of large factories, including Kuaishou, ByteDance, and Meituan, announced the cancellation of large and small weeks, followed by housing subsidies, afternoon tea, taxi subsidies and other benefits.
The rapid development of the surrounding ride-hailing market "put on the brakes" after Ali abolished taxi subsidies on a large scale. According to a number of employees, it has been more than a year since Alibaba canceled the taxi subsidy, and only provides a limit of 800 yuan per month, which has caused some employees who leave work early to turn to public transportation.
The decline in the budget of the big factory directly hit Yang Fan's income, and at 9 p.m. ushered in the last batch of off-work peaks, and after another hour, the order volume near the park was like stepping on the brakes. "Two or three years ago, there were still a lot of orders to pick up at two or three o'clock in the morning, and now by 10 o'clock there are almost no orders."
Yang Fan has witnessed the ebb and flow of Alibaba's employees, which he defines as a "tree hole" for frustrated employees. "In November last year, a couple who worked at Ali were both laid off after buying a house for half a year... Recently, the DAMO Academy has not been peaceful, and the autonomous driving business team as a whole has been laid off..." Yang Fan gushed about his experience.
About a 5-minute walk from Xixi Park is a large residential area: Fuding Homestead, where most of the young Ali employees live. However, this is only their temporary foothold. According to the security guard at the gate of Fuding Home, in 2023, the tenant turnover rate here reached its peak, "Last year there were many people living here, and this year there are significantly fewer residents, and much less." ”
Supporting facilities around Alixixi Park Source: Photo by Times Finance
With incomes rising, winning a house in the Future Science and Technology City is often the goal of Alibaba's employees. Sunshine City Future Yue MAX, Zhongnan Yue Mansion, and Dongyuan Yin Future near Xixi Park constitute the "three brothers" of the Future Science and Technology City. In the few years that Ali has lost weight, the surrounding housing prices have experienced a lot of shocks.
Shell house search shows that Sunshine City Future Yue MAX is currently selling a total of 118 houses, with mainstream listing prices ranging from 55,000 yuan / square meter to 65,000 yuan / square meter, and at its peak, the average listing price of the community as a whole exceeded 70,000 yuan / square meter.
Reborn or stalled, an Internet giant at a fork in the road
After reducing costs and increasing efficiency throughout 2022, Ali used the most direct method - organizational slimming.
Since the beginning of this year, Alibaba has undergone the biggest organizational change in history. On March 28, Daniel Zhang issued an open letter: Alibaba will launch the "1+6+N" organizational change. In addition, Ali's once proud middle platform will be completely lightened and thinned, according to "late" reports, Ali Zhongtai was completely split in mid-May, and the team once exceeded 10,000 people at its peak.
Wu Fan, a departing employee, has seen the drawbacks caused by huge organizations, and a problem needs to go through countless internal mutual pulls and consumption. "Individual high-level managers just want to guard one acre and three points of land and do business that will not go wrong."
In the past decade, Internet giants, including Alibaba, have provoked large and small changes, from online car hailing, 100-group wars, mobile payment to sinking markets and community group buying, and major manufacturers have transformed users' life scenes everywhere and continuously expanded their business boundaries.
At the same time, the rapid expansion of the tissue crept in. From 2018 to 2020, Alibaba's annual number of employees grew at a rate of 20,000; ByteDance, which believes in miracles, has exceeded 100,000 employees in just 8 years; From 2016 to 2019, Tencent expanded steadily at a rate of 10,000 new people per year.
"I have the impression that as long as the number one person in the company mentions investing regardless of the cost, at least two teams in the business will follow up, and hundreds of people will participate." Wu Fan said.
There is no doubt that the end result of the two big moves is the contraction of personnel. "Many business segments have plans to go public, and it is inevitable to adjust the personnel organization, not because the operation has encountered difficulties." A mid-level employee who left DAMO Academy speculated that after experiencing rapid personnel expansion, lightweight operations would become the norm for Alibaba's future development.
When domestic Internet companies launched large-scale layoffs, major technology giants in the United States also blew a storm of layoffs. After Musk acquired Twitter, he launched a series of drastic initiatives, cutting the number of employees from 7,500 to only 1,500; Recently, Meta completed the second round of layoffs of 10,000 people, with a cumulative reduction of about 21,000 employees; In November, Amazon set a long-term goal of laying off 27,000 people within three months.
Internet managers seem to have tasted the sweetness of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and recently, Musk predicted at the London summit that Twitter could achieve a turnaround as early as June. After a quarter-reduction in headcount, Meta achieved a 3% increase in revenue in the first quarter of 2023, with advertising growth returning to $28.101 billion.
The days of big factories will continue for a while, and the attitude towards the wind outlet has become much more cautious, and after the concept of the meta-universe has been cold, the arrival of the era of large models has not disrupted the war, and some of the leading manufacturers have not even officially made a move. In addition, they almost all chose to let the group CFO come to the forefront, Ali's Daniel Zhang, TikTok's Zhou Shouzi, JD.com's Xu Ran... Earlier, the number one on Weibo was also replaced by Wang Gaofei, who came from a financial background.
"Ten years ago, Internet managers were still people who really relied on business to fight, and it can only be said that all Internet giants have reached a turning point where they need to refine their operations."
(The interviewees in this article are pseudonyms.) ）