Although the annual salary of 500,000 yuan may seem glamorous, behind the high salary lies huge work pressure, complex interpersonal relationships and endless mental internal friction. Through the real stories of many employees of large factories, this article reveals the contradiction between high salaries and ideals, and why they choose to leave large factories and pursue a freer and purer life.
When Alibaba’s employee’s resignation letter caused an uproar on the Internet, Ah Shuo was blowing the sea breeze on the cruise ship.
“We don’t talk about bringing change to society, we talk about wages, stocks, and houses”, “P8, P9, and P10 are empty talk when they are promoted to a high level”, “customers first, not as good as bosses first”…… The strong flavor of the big factory in the letter instantly pulled him back into painful memories.
Although he is not an Alibaba employee, Ah Shuo has tasted the taste of “the big factory work card is not easy to wear” and can understand the mood of the letter writer – even if he crosses the threshold of 30 years old, he knows that the naked bloggers have returned to the workplace collectively, and he still quit his glamorous job with an annual salary of 500,000 yuan.
“Life should not only have KPIs and OKRs, but also create your own possibilities.” This sounds hypocritical, but it is the truth after Ah Shuo tried it himself.
There are not a few people like Ah Shuo who know that the environment is full of challenges, but still give up their high salaries and flee from large factories.
According to a survey, the willingness of employees of domestic Internet companies to leave in 2024Q4 is as high as 37%, which is equivalent to 1 in 3 large manufacturers not wanting to do it, and the notes on “leaving large factories” in a book have exceeded 2.3 million.
The high salary, title, and aura of the big factory are still shining, but the people of the big factory miss those simple, pure, and free breathing days.
01 Involved in a large factory, but trapped in “ineffective work”
Li Ran, a top 3 finance major, was catching up with the wave of Internet cost reduction and efficiency increase during school recruitment, and bad news such as “graduation” and “sending talents to the society” were in the news one after another, announcing the end of the dividends of the times.
But she still rolled up her grades and internships, and plunged into the arms of a big factory.
How can product managers do a good job in B-end digitalization?
All walks of life have taken advantage of the ride-hail of digital transformation and achieved the rapid development of the industry. Since B-end products are products that provide services for enterprises, how should enterprises ride the digital ride?
View details >
“A skinny camel is bigger than a horse.” Li Ran said frankly that compared with brokerage investment banks with sharp headcount reductions and halves in salary, large factories still leave a place with high salaries for financial students. And new businesses such as cloud computing and AI have also begun to emerge, “Where new technologies break out, people should go.” ”
However, it is a long process to turn the rudder of a big ship, and what greets Li Ran may also be the dilemma of “new business cannot prove itself and the stock competition of the old bank”.
At another cross-departmental meeting, colleagues from the business department talked eloquently in front of the PPT, and Li Ran from the strategy department sat in the corner of the edge, living like a small transparent.
She wanted to express her opinion several times, but her colleagues ignored it, did not even leave her a chance to speak, and the report that had been screaming on the computer for many days was once again reduced to irrelevant “background material”.
Before joining the company, Li Ran thought that the strategic position of a large factory was to discover business opportunities from massive data, with the transcendent status of “brain” and think tank, and later found that the real unlocking method was “PPT production machine”.
After more of these scenes, Li Ran gradually slapped the taste: “The business department doesn’t want to take us to meetings, they are more concerned about actual output than the ethereal strategy.” ”
Ye Sheng, who jumped from a medium-sized factory to a large factory, couldn’t help but complain to the leader that the more he worked, the more “degraded” he became – he could do some system optimization projects anyway, but now he was doing the work of “adding, deleting, modifying, and checking” the code that was difficult for interns.
The leader suppressed his restlessness, analyzed the meaning of the business from “expanding the territory” to “intensive farming”, and made a promise to “manage a line separately after doing a good job”, and Ye Sheng ignited a glimmer of hope for the future.
But before the realization of the pie, his days were still static, the task at hand was not finished, and the product manager rushed over, the demand was “both necessary and wanted”, and DDL “as soon as possible is best tomorrow”, resulting in him being either doing a project or on the way to the next project.
If these changes can really come in handy, Ye Sheng also admitted, “But many new features are tasteless for users.” ”
No one called for a stop, and products and R&D could only continue to pile up one function after another, “Everyone is like a hamster on a roller, running in a set of workflows, but they don’t know why.” ”
Lin He, who likes to mention the “greetings” of merchants every day and continues to harass others in the face of abuse, also feels suffocated.
She recruited a short video company to help small and medium-sized businesses on the platform operate tens of thousands of stores. “But we are just novices who graduated from undergraduates, and we don’t know as much as others.” She is often questioned about this.
But the platform can’t manage so much, user growth is gradually peaking, and digging out the stock cake can maintain growth and moat. Therefore, whether it is a 985 or 211 graduate or a returnee master’s degree, you have to work as a “telephone specialist”.
Every time he gets off work, Lin He’s spirit will be tense, afraid that he will be named: a color table will pop up in the work group, which will write everyone’s call duration, connection rate and other indicators, and those who do not meet the standard will be made up by @overtime.
She rarely escaped, “More than 300 merchants, 70% have to chat for 3 rounds, 60% have to talk for 10 rounds, and they can’t express their feelings.” Lin He looked at the list in his hand and only felt that it was difficult to get off work.
Jiang Jiang had long expected the “dirty work” of the big factory, and even worked with relish, but she couldn’t hold on.
02 It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s important to stand in line
Knowing that Jiang Jiang had a 50% salary cut to enter a large factory, people around her suspected that she had been given ecstasy soup, but she made up her mind: “Work is to study with pay.” ”
Jiang Jiang, who is preparing to start a business in the future, regards large factories as a testing ground for stealing teachers and experience: if the business process is unreasonable, the logic will be reorganized; The performance plan is contrary to the project goal, and the initiative is to propose a new plan…… With his own strength, he established a departmental SOP.
But after doing more work, Jiang Jiang gradually became unhappy – she was tired and carried the whole audience, but the daily life of some colleagues was sitting at the workstation playing games and fishing.
Unlike the overwhelming optimization on the Internet, many colleagues around Jiang Jiang still receive high salaries and live a leisurely fairy life. “It turns out that there are still people working, but after the Guangjin plan, the workers were laid off, and the rest were idle.” She could not understand this decision.
Ah Shuo, who has 9 years of work experience, is not surprised by this, in his eyes, it is far better to do work than to please the leader.
When he first entered the factory, he, like many young people, was full of ambition and wanted to show his strength, but the leader emphasized the most to him was: “You have to know who you are.” ”
He didn’t understand the meaning at first, until he went to attend an inter-departmental meeting and saw a large-scale performance show: the PPT of colleagues on stage was fancy, the data model was copied from somewhere, and the mouth was full of Internet slang such as “closed-loop ecology” and “empowering business grasp”.
If it weren’t for the confrontation with him, knowing that the other party only had a level of 90 points, Ah Shuo would have thought that he had met a great god who could make a 120-point effect.
This is not an isolated case, the colleagues who spoke next all became actresses, four or five departments pulled together and aligned a project, and they were stunned for 2 hours without results, and there was a tendency to open “overtime”.
Ah Shuo was numb, he realized that under the factional struggle, “no one really cares about how good things can be, only how much benefit they can win.” ”
And everyone is riveted and strives to be seen and remembered by the big leaders, otherwise “a department will be considered worthless if it does not make a splash for a long time, and when it is optimized, the whole department will be in danger.” ”
In order to protect himself, Ah Shuo was gradually assimilated and forced to get involved in intrigues. Liu Mi, who works in a major e-commerce company, even found that after several rounds of blood exchange and reshuffle, the old scalpers around him disappeared, leaving most of them as “chattering players”.
These people seem to be working overtime on their computers, but in fact they open a chat dialog box, and they are in a good relationship with their bosses and colleagues, “always talking more than doing.”
With the attitude that people don’t offend me and I don’t offend people, Liu Mi originally wanted to live in harmony with the “chattering players”, but as everyone knows, when the moths appear, the “house” has long been in danger.
That vacation was a respite from her working overtime for several months, but a conference call instantly pulled her back to reality from the sun, sand, and seascape. What’s even more annoying is that she has obviously talked about the content discussed at the meeting countless times, but she still broke it for 2 hours over and over again.
In the past two years, similar situations have happened countless times: “The same meeting has to be held countless times to get results, and the same problem has to be told to the other party many times to understand.” ”
There are too many people fishing, and Liu Mi has become the only person with experience and practical work, and in order to coax her to work, the reputation of “those who can work harder” fell from the sky. She gritted her teeth and endured it at first, but later found that forbearance would only be exchanged for the other party to get an inch for a while, and she “seemed to be unable to finish what she was doing no matter how overtime she worked.” ”
Liu Mi didn’t want to continue for a moment, and her life should not be trapped in a big factory.
03 Escape from the big factory and achieve “money and spiritual freedom”
“How much is freedom worth? Go and see how many people can’t find a job now! As his mother’s serious voice fell, Li Ran’s tears also fell.
In order to resign from the big factory, she quarreled with her family for two days. In her hometown town, Li Ran is a top student in Qingbei who has only produced one in more than ten years, and her neighbors in the village know that she is competitive in the college entrance examination, and in the secular cognition, she should match a glamorous and decent good job.
And now the general environment is not good, and many top students can’t find a good job with lanterns, but she resigns willfully, so it is naturally difficult to get support from her family.
But Li Ran couldn’t forget the fear of the moment when he went to the toilet and looked up, the company’s inspirational slogan was pasted on the wall.
“The toilet is a place for migrant workers to heal themselves and release stress.” She said in horror, even this promised land has been occupied by “blessings”, let alone other places?
Li Ran will open the “dinner table complaining conference” with the department’s partners at noon, such as the company is strict about attendance again, there is no time to write a good report, east one hammer west, one hammer, etc., at first everyone will echo her, and then gradually become her one-man show, and the partners are immersed in cooking and unmoved.
“Everyone got used to it and slowly accepted it, anyway, the company gave the money.” Realizing that the people around him had been swallowed up by the culture of the big factory, Li Ran, who refused to integrate, felt unprecedented loneliness.
Li Ran at least received mental damage fees, and Lin He, whose income was not so high, found that the money he earned in the big factory was almost not enough to cover the cost of medical treatment.
In Lin He’s office, throat tablets are almost essential for everyone, and they are angry on the phone all year round, and everyone even makes gray jokes with each other: “If you are angry with me again, I will have two more nodules.” ”
This seems humorous, but in fact it is full of helplessness, “In order to survive in the big factory, everyone has more or less a little physical problem.” Lin He sighed, the Internet workplace accounts she followed, the last few headlines, were all depressed again, and even the sudden death of an employee could not be on the news, and “exchanging life for money” became a common thing.
Lin He had just graduated, and his body had not yet been destroyed, thinking that he could bear it, but in the second month of joining the company, he felt two oversized nodules on his neck. She was startled, hurriedly took leave to go to the hospital for examination, and lay in bed at night and pinched her fingers, and the deducted salary and medical expenses were deducted for two days.
She woke up, “The salary of a large factory is high, and the hourly wage is actually not high, and it is not enough to buy medicine.” “I submitted my resignation within two days.
Now, Lin He has cut her salary by 30% and entered a new consumer company, which is not as equal and free as the big factory, and it depends on the leader’s face to act, no matter what outrageous and absurd decision the leader makes, she has to implement it.
“But these small scenes don’t put much pressure on me coming out of the big factory.” Lin He has long been in the turbulent Internet world, and he has practiced calmness. And the data ability and logical thinking exercised by the big factory also made her like a fish in water in her new job, “To be honest, even the difficulty of the internship is not comparable.” ”
The money is less, but Lin He feels that life is back, and she even has time to start a side hustle, become a resigned blogger from a large factory, and can earn more than a dozen cups of milk tea money every month.
“You will never get spiritual freedom in a big factory.” Ah Shuo believes that people have three freedoms, time, money and spiritual freedom, and if a career can bring the first two, then the latter will definitely be realized. And the big factories could hardly give him any freedom.
Therefore, after perceiving that the general environment has improved and does not need the protection of large factories, he decisively quit his job and started a business, and is currently “restarting his life” on the travel track.
The big factory is just a place for Ah Shuo to earn start-up capital, he joked, “It is impossible to work part-time.” ”
(The characters in the article are all pseudonyms, and I would like to thank the bloggers “Traveler Anan”, “Ciraffle Cauliflower’s Diary”, and “BeforeSunrise” for their support of this article.) ）
