“Da Chang”, a Chinese word meaning “big factory”, usually refers to China’s most well-known tech giants, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Pinduoduo, NetEase, etc.

You might not be familiar with these companies, but you must have heard about Tik Tok, Taobao, and WeChat, the applications used by billions of people worldwide. These internet giants have profoundly reshaped the Chinese people’s everyday lives, from online shopping to entertainment, from daily communication to mobile payment.

In past decades, the dramatically increasing net worth of these China’s internet companies has made them the most highly-valued companies in the world.

These internet giants provide a large number of jobs and internship opportunities in China. According to Tencent’s annual employment report, in 2021, over 8000 Tencent internship jobs were provided, increasing 228% more jobs than last year.

The Downside of Working in Da Chang

However, not everyone found the work they look forward to from their “Da Chang” experience.

“The working experience in Huawei was a nightmare. The working hours there are always extended. You only need to do exactly what the boss told you,” said Ray, who once was a full-time programmer in Huawei Xi’an, but left one and half years ago.

In Ray’s mind, these thoughtless and tedious works at Huawei can never develop one’s industry skills and knowledge. Instead, people in “Da Chang” tend to assimilate to this heavily routined living style after years of working and lose their innovation and passion.

When asked about her thoughts on her previous work experience in Huawei, Ray said: “Do not expect anything from your company, then everything will be a surprise.”

All work and no play?

According to Article 36 in the Labour Law of mainland China, workers shall work for no more than 8 hours a day and no more than 44 hours a week on average.

Yet, China’s tech industry is known for excessively long working hours, usually referring to the “996” work culture, in which the “Da Chang” are bulldozing their employees to work 6 days a week, and 12 hours a day from 9 am to 9 pm.

In March 2019, some programmers behind a Github user “996icu” embarked on a campaign named “996.ICU” and aired their grievances about working conditions through a code-sharing Github site.

As per Reuters, the campaign collected data shared by over 4,000 employees of companies such as Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba and showed that many of them work approximately 12 hours per day. 996ICU, the campaign's webpage was soon blocked on multiple platforms, including the Tencent-owned messaging tools QQ and WeChat, Baidu, and the UC Browser.

Later in April, Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma Yun responded to the public criticism about “996” on a Weibo post, saying that the “996” schedule is a “huge blessing”, adding that any employees of Alibaba should be prepared to work 12 hours a day if they want to succeed.

“The real 996 is not simply overtime work,” said Ma in another meeting with the employees, and claimed that those who work shorter hours “won’t taste the happiness and rewards of hard work.”

Richard Liu Qiangdong, the founder of Alibaba’s rival JD.com, was also reported to criticize employees who did not work hard enough as “slackers”. He once said in an article on WeChat that his company did not force employees to work in the “996” schedule, but encouraged every worker in JD.com to strive for excellence in work.

Liu also claimed that he could work according to the schedule of “8116+8”, which means working from 8 am to 11 pm on weekdays and Saturdays and working 8 hours on Sundays.

Two years later, another campaign called “Worker Lives Matter”, later rebranded to “Working Time,” renewed a debate on grueling '996' corporate culture in tech companies. More than 5,000 employees from the technology industry posted their detailed work schedule, such as the name of their company, their position, and working hours, on an open-access spreadsheet. They share the positive and negative experiences at work, protesting against excessive work hours.

However, the notorious “996 working culture” does not deter the undergraduates from fighting for a seat in the tech giants.

When Joy Su entered the last round of interviews to get into Tencent, she was asked by the Human Resources officer if she could work overtime occasionally.

"If the department demands the workers to work overtime excessively, the company will state in the job requirements like 'willing to work overtime' or phrased as 'has a certain level of stress tolerance','" said Su based on her own observation.

Joy Su, said she was not required to stay overtime when she worked for Tencent, but there was an ‘invisible’ extra work for everyone at the weekend. “There is a working report we have to submit every week, but we can only write the report on weekends, because the data we need to use in the report is sent to us at the end of every Friday,” said Joy, “For the three months in Tencent, I didn’t really enjoy my weekends. I worked every Saturday on the report.”

Young people desire Da Chang, as Da Chang desires them

Gina Chen, a second-year postgraduate student from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University, said she has been preparing for the coming internship interviews in big techs for one month. Last year, she failed to find a satisfying summer internship in an internet giant, but she still hopes to try again. “The tech giant means a larger pool of talents and more professional opportunities,” Gina said.

More than half of the total employees are interns in a specific group running content verification for Wesee in Tencent Tianjin.

According to Selena, many internet companies need younger employees who can understand the thoughts and needs of the younger generations, who have constituted the vast majority of the user groups.

“Take Tencent’s short video product Wesee as an example, in the last few years they had met several problems during the competition with Bytedance’s TikTok. Tencent will need more employees from the younger generation to find out what interests the users nowadays,” said Selena.

Work-life balance is not of the utmost priority for undergraduates nowadays when looking for their first job, as revealed in the 2020 Chinese University Graduate Employability Report. But both Sophia Sheng and Joy Su said they would not consider working for internet giants companies in the future unless there is no other better choice.

“The internet company jobs were all about user growth. People work day and night in these companies, just to make that number larger,” said Joy Su, “I feel like that in this process, no problems will be solved, and nothing valuable will be created.”

Sophia Sheng said interest would be the top priority of her future job. “I want to wake up every day doing the work that I’m truly interested in.” Said Sophia Sheng.

Unlike the mainland tech companies glorifying the “996” work culture, their counterparts overseas are moving forward to a flexible working arrangement while workers maintain, or even improve their productivity in the workplace.

One-third of the tech workers in the United States admitted in a Blind’s survey that they only work 3 to 4 hours when working remotely during the Covid-19 outbreak. A professional at Amazon shared with the job-seeking platform: “Last year, I went through a period of 12 to 14 hours days, 65 to 70 hours weeks. Now I only work 44 to 48 hours a week. I’m more focused, more productive, and happier.”

China’s authorities have also issued a warning to the tech companies that punishing work culture is illegal in late August this year. The state’s top court and labour ministry published a joint statement detailing ten court decisions related to labour disputes, many involving workers being forced to work overtime.

That signaled the tech giants to step on the brakes. In November, Tencent was reported to shorten the working schedule from “996” to “965” — working from 9 am to 6 pm, and 5 days a week.