Behind the "35 year old crisis" The Internet giant, which has always been known as "inner roll", is starting a rectification movement. On November 9, 2021, Tencent launched the employee care upgrading plan. Employees who have been employed for 15 years can choose to "retire early" and enjoy retirement benefits. Among them, the long-term service payment is 6-month fixed salary, and the retirement honor payment is either "service life payment" or "50% of the unlicensed stock options". Some people are optimistic that this is the first time that Internet enterprises face and solve the "middle-aged crisis" of migrant workers. But the policy has also been questioned - in Internet companies where the average age of employees is about 30, "maybe 90% of people know that they will not stay until retirement". Over the past 10 years, Internet companies are undoubtedly the most willing to spend money for talents on the whole. A large number of excellent college graduates and overseas students have broken through several rounds of interviews and tried to rush into large factories. However, in recent one or two years, "996 blessing news", abnormal overtime caused sudden death, 35 year old anxiety frequently caused employee rebound and social disputes, and the "employment model" of large Internet factories showed an extreme bias. According to the scope of vice president of the school of labor economics of Capital University of economics and trade, which 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 is not the root cause. There is still a long way to go for big factories to fight against "internal roll". From "voluntary overtime" to "996 blessing" Overtime culture has been running through the development of the Internet industry for more than 20 years. Shen Xiaofei is a senior Internet headhunter. He told China Newsweek that in the early days, Internet companies did not have the "996" system, but at that time everyone volunteered to work overtime. "In the early days, the Internet was in the stage of rapid development, and employees could do a lot of things, such as making a new technology or realizing a new idea, but the company had few restrictions.". Liang Meng, associate professor of Humanities and Development College of China Agricultural University, has long paid attention to Internet technology and labor. In 2012, Liang Meng, who is still studying for a doctor, worked part-time in the product department of a well-known domestic Internet company (hereinafter referred to as Z Company) and completed four months of participant observation and interview. Z company is a typical representative of mainstream Internet companies at home and abroad, advocating the engineer culture of "technology changes the world". During her part-time job, Liang Meng can strongly feel the company's admiration for engineer culture every day. The flexible working system is implemented here. Programmers are the most "mysterious" group of people in the company, and there is no fixed working time. Programmers also have more privileges, such as playing games during working hours and rich team building funds. Engineers also have high decision-making power in product design, and even the resources that product managers need to strive for. In Liang Meng's view, the most distinctive feature of the management and control mode of the first generation of PC elite Internet companies is that programmers have the right to decide the working hours and working hours. Out of a sense of responsibility and achievement, voluntary overtime is common. At this stage, although the malignant events caused by abnormal overtime have appeared, the high-intensity overtime of technology companies has not improved, and even become the daily work of many Internet companies. In Liang Meng's view, overtime work on the Internet has been a common phenomenon since its establishment, but it only triggered a large-scale complaint against overtime at the development stage of mobile Internet. In order to compete for traffic entrance, Internet companies compete fiercely, and platform economy rises. From bat to meituan and byte beat, they all expanded their business at this stage and evolved into a large factory with a scale of tens of thousands or even more than 100000 people. Various mobile Internet companies also set their vision 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 market competitive culture. The previous Z company is also changing, which means that the free and equal "engineer culture" has been diluted and the proud autonomy has been gradually lost. In the first decade of the development of the Internet, enterprises mostly adopted the waterfall development method. "The process includes demand analysis, design, implementation, testing and release. It is a classic development method by which elite Internet companies such as bat started." Liang Meng explained that under this mode, the employee's workflow is fixed. The last process can be completed before the next one can be started. "The product development process generally takes 3 to 6 months, and the goal of final release and delivery is a relatively perfect product architecture". However, in the mobile Internet era, more efficient and collaborative agile development has become popular in Internet enterprises and has become the mainstream development mode of bat, byte beating, didi and other enterprises. This is a software development capability to respond to rapidly changing needs. Compared with waterfall development, agile development does not strictly follow the workflow, but is implemented side by side, emphasizing the rapid delivery of small functions to applications, and then continuous improvement and strengthening in the project cycle. This method has obvious advantages, clear work process and progress, and is easy to monitor the technology development process, but it also changes the work rhythm. 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 technology for design, development and testing. But if I was agile, I would constantly dismantle the store (user story) to them, and I would constantly verify the consistency of the functions he developed before." Liang Meng concluded that this model needs closer cooperation, communication and mutual supervision at the horizontal level, so that the autonomy space for the labor process is gradually reduced compared with that before agile development. The figures involved are trapped in a net, and the flexible work system is in vain. Liang Meng believes that "on the surface, this problem is related to the law and labor remuneration, but in essence, it is due to the change of management control type caused by technology, which leads to the loss of workers' autonomy and decision-making space in the labor process, resulting in the contradiction between workers' cultural capital (i.e. engineer Culture) and corporate culture and management mechanism". "From the perspective of labor and employment, 2020 is a peak point of Internet labor and employment squeeze." The scope tells China Newsweek that under the needs of business driving, Internet companies want to obtain greater market share and promote the strict management of internal labor employment. With the gradual loss of demographic dividend and traffic saturation, the competition in the Internet industry for the same track has become more and more fierce. After COVID-19, the Internet companies' beheading of community group purchase is the epitome of white hot competition. Since June 2020, Didi, meituan, pinduoduo, Alibaba and byte beat have successively launched community group buying. Didi CEO Cheng Wei said that "there is no upper limit on investment and try our best to win the first". At that time, thousands of pinduoduo employees opened the market in the third and fourth tier cities. An employee mentioned anonymously on a workplace app that "it has been 50 days since November. They haven't had a day off. They go to work at 11 a.m. and the average off-duty time is 3 ~ 4 a.m.". At 1:30 a.m. on December 29, 2020, Zhang moufei, 23, an employee of pinduoduo shopping, suddenly fainted on the way to work, died of ineffective rescue, and became the victim of abnormal overtime on the Internet. According to the scope, the employment system of many Internet companies is extremely contrary to the laws and regulations, and it is an industry wide behavior. The "overtime culture" has been strengthened from generation to generation. Alibaba founder Ma Yun's concept is the most representative. He once said publicly that the "996" of Chinese bat companies is a "blessing". The company's implementation of "996" means a faster development speed. For employees, "you can't achieve the desired success without surpassing others' efforts and time". "Enterprises have the motivation to extend working hours and form such a culture. For employees, the economic income of overtime is higher, and there is no trade union check and balance within the enterprise". The scope points out that both managers and society lag behind in their understanding of it, "coupled with the imperfect market legalization environment, Internet overtime has become a dangerous situation in which no one is willing to implement legal rules". In August 2021, the Supreme People's court and the Ministry of human resources and social security clearly pointed out through a case 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 deemed invalid. Meanwhile, the major factories also began to work overtime on the system. The Kwai Chi, the US group preferred and the byte beating beat up the size week. Tencent photon studio announced that it had to leave the office before 21 o'clock Wednesday, and work on Wednesday at 18. However, a domestic front-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 be temporary rather than permanent. On February 23, 2018, on the eighth day of the lunar new year, Shenzhen Tencent building issued red envelopes for opening the door, and many employees lined up downstairs to receive them. Figure / visual China When "human resources" becomes "human cost" Overtime work is a result of high salary incentive. According to a survey conducted within the company, only one third of employees support the cancellation of "big and small weeks", and most people are unwilling. Some employees have calculated that the cancellation of overtime will lose nearly 100000 yuan of income every year. Regardless of Chinese and foreign Internet enterprises, human resource cost is one of the important components of the total cost of Internet enterprises. As of March 2021, Alibaba has more than 250000 full-time employees, and Tencent and Baidu have more than 100000 employees. The scale of meituan may reach 100000. However, the labor cost of the Internet is too high. For example, Tencent reported a revenue of 142.368 billion yuan and a net profit of 39.5 billion yuan in the third quarter of 2021. As of September 30, 2021, Tencent had 107348 employees, and the total remuneration cost for the three months ended September 30, 2021 was 25.963 billion yuan. In the same period of 2020, the total number of employees is only 77592, and the total remuneration cost is 17.703 billion yuan, rising rapidly. Kwai's 2021 three quarter earnings report clearly mentioned that the company's losses in the first three quarters reached up to 21 billion 900 million yuan, which resulted from the rapid increase in sales costs and expenses. Increasing the number of employees led to the rise in compensation expenses. Liu Xin, a professor at the school of public administration of Renmin University of China, told China Newsweek that Internet companies account for a large proportion of human costs, but all companies want to expand. Therefore, they pay special attention to how to control human costs and how much benefits are created per capita. Controlling labor cost plays a decisive role in controlling the total cost, and it is also the core content of cost control of Internet enterprises. The organizational structure, business process, development mode, reward and punishment mechanism, personnel elimination and a series of software and hardware of Internet companies will be adjusted around this goal, which has become the consensus in the industry. HR Zhou Mi (a pseudonym), who is in charge of school recruitment in a large front-line factory in China, once worked in a real estate enterprise. Before joining the Internet factory, he thought that the Internet company was an open and flat enterprise. However, after coming here, he felt that it was more like a labor-intensive work like an electronics factory. The work of each front-line employee was carefully distributed, so it was difficult to know the whole picture, Just carry it out carefully. He told China Newsweek, "it is necessary from the perspective of the company. The purpose of the company is to make money. The purpose of management is to reduce costs, achieve efficiency faster and divide it more carefully. Like an electronic factory assembly line, when something goes wrong in a certain link, it can be quickly