‘Hardworking bitches’ given cold shoulder by Microsoft employees in China office
Former employees of Chinese internet firms are engaged in a culture war with their colleagues at Microsoft China about work-life balance.
In one of Microsoft’s China offices, two different work cultures are colliding.
On one side of the debate are a team of longtime employees working for the American software giant’s China branch, who believe that a healthy work-life balance is critical to their well-being and is deeply entrenched in the company’s brand. On the other side are a group of newly employed engineers who used to work for homegrown tech giants like Alibaba and Huawei. For them, an unhealthy obsession with long hours clocked in the office is not only a prerequisite for success, but also an essential part of their identity as Chinese tech workers.
The conflict began drawing attention last week when a screenshot (in Chinese) of a group chat involving some Microsoft engineers in Suzhou surfaced on Chinese social media. In the screenshot, a person says that he just finished a “random inspection” of his colleagues’ statuses on the company’s internal communication platform, and discovered that some of them were still active online outside of regular work hours. “Please immediately stop your behavior as hardworking bitches [奋斗逼 fèndòu bī] at Alibaba,” the person wrote in a message that mentioned a few coworkers who “failed” his inspection.
Two other members of the chat responded to the announcement, with one writing: “What the heck? This is so dope.”
Soon after the screenshot was posted, an anonymous person, who claimed to be familiar with the matter, provided some context for the conversation. According to him (in Chinese), the “inspection” featured in the chat is an unofficial project created by some Microsoft engineers in the firm’s Suzhou office. The initiative is designed to detect which of their coworkers work insane hours and issue warnings to them.
“Microsoft recently hired a group of hardworking bitches who previously worked for Chinese companies. There’s a competition among them to embrace extreme workaholism, which is characterized by staying up late for work and talking to one another in group chats in the middle of the night. They are sick,” the person wrote (in Chinese) in a post online. He added that the goal of the project was to push back against the overzealous work culture promoted by ex-employees of Alibaba and Huawei who had already “broke the firm’s rules” and “built a toxic atmosphere.”
The project has received an outpouring of support on the Chinese internet in the past few days, with many hoping to have a similar mechanism adopted in their workplaces to weed out workaholics. “There were times when I was peer pressured to have an unhealthy working life because of those obnoxious coworkers. What annoys me the most is that some of them don’t actually work hard. They slack off during the day just to save work for the night. They fool bosses into thinking that they work so hard that they don’t even have free time,” a Douban user commented (in Chinese).
It has also struck a special chord with those in China’s digital industries, where work ethic is a perennial topic that has prompted rounds of debates and movements. While China’s labor law stipulates that workers should not work more than eight hours a day, or 44 hours a week, a fetishization of unending work hours is common among Chinese tech employees, who collectively created the infamous “996” culture — working 12 hours a day (9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and six days a week — that has permeated the industry for years. The extreme devotion to work in no small part stemmed from internet moguls who publicly endorsed such culture. Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma (马云 Mǎ Yún), for example, once called extended work hours “a huge blessing” that workers should be grateful for.
In recent years, the 996 work schedule has been met with mounting backlash from Chinese tech workers. Last year, an online community of Chinese programmers launched a movement on GitHub, the Microsoft-owned service for sharing code, to vent their frustrations over the toxic work culture and compile a blacklist of Chinese internet companies where the hours are especially long. For the first time in China’s history of internet boom, the campaign resulted in an industry-wide conversation about work-life balance.
