This article is reproduced from 20 companies, author Dong Zhifei
"At Byte, don't think of yourself as a human being, break yourself up, just use it as a good tool."
After working for two and a half years, Tina resigned from ByteDance in 2020. At that time, her next job had not yet been determined, but she could not continue to overdraw physically and mentally.
Tina has done at least five or six projects, including overseas products, Douyin, education... The first year of employment is still exciting. After frequently changing projects, she was bored. "It is equivalent to copying and pasting your skills directly in different businesses."
Business adjustments are almost normal in byte beating. Accompanied by the replacement of the middle level. In the two and a half years since Tina was employed, she has experienced more than 5 different leaders. No leader took her for more than half a year. Tina said: "I write performances every six months, and they don't know what to write."
"I think everything here is short-term orientation."
A former department director who left ByteDance had a deeper view, "To some extent, this huge App factory promotes its business through iterating the middle layer. This is related to its organizational structure."
01. Flat structure, tired middle layer
Many people who left Byte talked about this company, and the most impressive thing is its flat management.
ByteDance has 10 ranks, which seems to be no different from Ali's 11 levels (professional level, and M level) and Tencent's 13 levels. But a former byte employee said that in fact, byte ranks can be simplified into four levels, and those below level 3 are almost the same, and they are executives.
Level 3 (3-1 and 3-2) is the middle-level leader and group leader level, while level 4 and above are high-level (the R&D department is one level higher than other departments), and the top 5-2 is Zhang Yiming. Zhang Yiming will also communicate directly with his level 3 colleagues. In Tencent and Ali, similar things rarely happen.
This is the source of pressure in the middle layer of bytes. "Because the spread is flat, the person in the middle is the most tired." Xiao Fei said, "both business and management."
Xiao Fei's experience in Byte is from 2017 to 2019, "I feel that the past three years are longer than six years." He is the head of a small operations department at Byte.
In his opinion, byte's work pressure is unclear in one or two sentences. Xiao Fei believes that unlike the outside world, the performance pressure of Byte is not so heavy, "at least not as heavy as Ali."
It comes from byte's famous flat management, which makes daily work different from general organization. "Each department is very small, so a lot of work is done by each department together, that is, we may initiate a task that requires the coordination of various departments, and often receive collaborative tasks. Then I will split it and assign it to specific tasks. Classmates." Xiao Fei said.
Therefore, as a middle level, the starting point of daily work is to receive a collaborative task, then split the task, and then assign it to your subordinates. "Specifically, it means meeting during the day and working at night."
Xiao Fei felt as if he was on a huge production line. Work packages came over one by one. He disassembled them into parts one by one, put them on the conveyor belt, and let the employees behind them complete the processing, then combine them and enter the next department.
Compared with the previous traditional enterprises, busyness is doubled, and high speed and efficiency also bring work satisfaction. In particular, the swarm-style self-organization work method is a fresh and epoch-leading feeling that he has never experienced before, and it makes him more excited than dopamine. Many employees who leave BYTE will mention that there is an exciting and stimulating honeymoon period for those who have just joined the company.
The pressure is also increasing day by day. The first is the long working hours. "There is a regular meeting every week, usually until midnight. At other times, you can get home after nine o'clock in the evening."
"In fact, the most abused in Byte is the middle level." Xiao Fei was a little jealous of the company's young people. "The basic employees at the bottom are well taken care of."
The flat structure also makes it difficult to perform a 360-degree EIA at the middle level, because all colleagues who have worked with you can write reviews. "Subordinates can easily express their dissatisfaction, and they are anonymous." Xiao Fei believes that the culture of Toutiao is very unfriendly to middle-level leaders.
Tang Ze, who used to do research and development at Byte, also said that middle-level employees at level 3 or so are very tired. "The team leader is the hardest." There are more than a dozen programmers under the team leader (this position should correspond to Ali P8, and the team managed by P8 is generally within 20 people). He told Quan Now that the team leader not only has to work overtime with his subordinates, but also manages to ensure the completion of performance. "And the money must be much less than the director."
02, pragmatic view of employment
In some reports, Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, was portrayed as a "robot" that can always maintain emotional stability. The former employees interviewed by Quan Now believe that to some extent, he is indeed such a person. Even when he found that employees were discussing the game "Original God" intensely in the group, his first reaction was still more restrained. "Does the classmates/departments who have been chatting in the group from early in the morning until now at work busy today? Is this common?"
Zhang Yiming believes in hard work. The first job "regardless of what I should do and what is not." Promoted from the grassroots level to the department head in two years. He also has high demands on the "struggle" of his middle and high level. But once the entrepreneurial stage has passed, especially when the number of middle-level people exceeds 150 (the upper limit of the number of people in stable social relations), it is difficult for the boss to ensure the fair distribution of benefits and personally urge everyone to move forward at full speed.
Zhang Yiming did not evade this problem. He said in the 2020 full letter: "We have seen a lot of management problems, and the most direct feedback is that the statistical results of employee engagement and satisfaction have declined."
As a manager with a technical background, Zhang Yiming believes in pragmatism. In order to maximize the interests of the team and the company, personal emotions, ego, and satisfaction should be put back. The supremacy of efficiency is reflected in the matter of employing people. Middle and senior executives who cannot run or whose experience can no longer be used by the company will soon be left out or emptied.
In the past, for example, Zhao Tian, deputy editor-in-chief of Sina.com, from Zhang Yiming personally poaching corners and “high-profile joining” in 2015, as one of the heads of today’s headlines, he frequently gave speeches on the platform. By 2019, he gradually “disappeared” in public, but not for 4 years. The time is up.
Xiao Xia, who was interviewed by Quan Now, came to Zhao Tian's team at that time.
"Before Zhao Tian arrived, the byte executives actually didn't have anyone who understood the content." Xiaoxia told Quan Now. Zhao Tian was in charge of the operation of today's headline content at the time, reporting directly to Zhang Yiming. In short, she is the hero who helped Toutiao break the copyright dilemma of Toutiao content and set up a content operation system.
However, after the rapid development of Toutiao App today, the bottleneck period will soon come. From 2018 to 2021, Toutiao's CEO changed three terms. According to QuestMobile, its daily active users barely increased from August 2018 to August 2019, and they also declined slightly, falling from 120 million to 115 million.
Zhao Tian began to fade out of the operation line at the end of 2017, and then dropped from the level of Chen Linping to reporting to Chen Lin.
This may also be related to the "status" of operations in Internet companies. Another operator of a major Internet company said that the difficulty of operation is not only due to bytes. Compared with technology, it is more replaceable. "When a project is cut, product technology can be transferred, and general operations are cut directly."
According to a report in Periscope 2020, among Douyin's start-up operations staff, except for Li Tian, who is in charge of operations, the rest are no longer in the company.
After 2019, Zhao Tian is rarely seen in the media. Xiaoxia’s project was abolished, and he felt that it was unreasonable, "Our team is good, but the data is actually good."
As a middle-level, the most extreme failure is the abolition of the project. In the process of Byte's growth, due to the success of new businesses represented by Douyin, it has gained the reputation of "APP factory", but on the other hand, this fast-growing giant is in In the process of rising, there were more failed businesses, including the most famous Wukong Q&A and social attempts.
Byte's current product portfolio (picture: screenshot from the official website of ByteDance)
03, always looking for better people
Those middle-levels who can't do well will of course leave soon, but those who do well may not be able to stay.
"You know Zhu Jie, Zhu Jie is fierce." Xiao Fei said.
Zhu Jie used to be the head of Douyin Music. An opera background, she planned "China's New Singers" and facilitated the cooperation between some independent musicians and Douyin. In 2018, 70% of the most popular songs in China's Top 100 Player of the Year came from Douyin.
According to Tencent's periscope, Zhu Jie chose to leave because he could not reach a consensus with the airborne leader Mu Fei. One year after Zhu Jie left, Mu Fei left and Cao Zhen took over.
Xiao Fei believes that, in fact, everyone knows that Zhu Jie was originally the person in charge of Douyin Music, and she will be airborne on top of her. The intention is self-evident. "Zhu Jie is not doing a bad job, but the company feels that it has found better people." She believes that in the rapid development of Byte, the company has been looking for better people in the market to replace the current people.
Liu Zhen may be a similar example. Zhang Yiming invited the senior vice president of Uber to Bytedance in 2016 to be responsible for international business. However, the space for her to exert her abilities is gradually limited.
With the acquisition of Music.ly by ByteDance, and its founder Alex Zhu joined Byte and took over the international business in 2019, Liu Zhen's space to play has been reduced to overseas investment and legal affairs. With the arrival of former Disney executive Kevin Meyer, Liu Zhen's authority may be further reduced to domestic legal affairs. In May 2020, Liu Zhen left ByteDance.
"Sometimes, the person you interview may actually be replacing you. It doesn't feel very good to be replaced or transplanted at any time." Xiao Fei said.
From the external environment, the business grows rapidly, and it can attract better people. This allows Byte to continue to iterate the middle layer to promote the business.
Xiao Fei left in 2019. In addition to being unwilling to be iterated, he said that he was too tired and "the liver is not moving."
Liu Siyi, the founder of "Qunxiang", who once stayed at Bytedance briefly, believes that Bytedance is a company that aggressively executes redundant recruitment.
"Internally speaking, redundancy means that everyone has to compete, fight, and have room for horse racing, and everyone needs to be impatient to open up territory. Because in large companies, idleness is a sign of death. Instead, Yu is an activator that activates employees to find new directions in the ocean of 996. Of course, the price is that many people are really busy with formalism..." He wrote in an article.
04. Worry about stalling
Byte has not yet reached the busy stage of formalism, but it is already a real big company.
At the beginning of 2021, Bytedance's global employees in the eighth year of its establishment have reached 100,000, surpassing Tencent's staff size. In 2020 alone, it has added 40,000 employees, which means that an average of about 150 people register for employment every working day.
With the expansion of the company's scale, the functions of various departments have overlapped, and the shortcomings of redundancy have begun to appear: competition between businesses and internal friction.
On the other hand, the cake has not grown much. After two apps with over 100 million DAU, ByteDance hasn't released any explosive products for a long time. In 2020, the once most international Chinese Internet company's overseas business was blocked, blocked by the Indian government, and faced a crisis of selling its American business. In China, education and games have not been able to grow.
This makes the middle-level coordination more complicated. In addition to normal communication, it also adds the subtext of challenging each other between departments, "Everyone wants to compete for influence and voice."
"Maybe some leaders think it is faster to run on each other." An employee who requested anonymity said. For example, operations, user growth, and markets are competing with each other.
To do a good job is to speak well, to show that your contribution and influence are very important. Tina's leader participated in the department report, a simple speech, which often had to be revised back and forth for two hours.
In some departments, "storytelling" and "upward management" have become essential skills. Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly OKR.
"I don't have the energy to think about how things should be better in the long-term, and become a bi-weekly goal to serve one after another, and how to'survive'." Tina said, she may spend half of her working time reporting and polishing her speech. On, the rest of the time is really doing things.
This is just the opposite of the values of "frankness and clarity" and "opposition to upward management" advocated by ByteDance.
However, as far as we know it now, the communication of the technical department is much simpler and more pragmatic.
Tang Ze has worked at BYTE for a year. His feeling is that compared to the previous job at a major Internet company, this place is more direct and pragmatic. But the uncertainty of work is even greater. In the last club, everyone knows what they can do in one or two years. "(Bytes) Many tasks come suddenly. It kind of treats people as resources."
05, ants on the hot pot
"It's not deceived too much, or abused too deeply."-Zhihu user furburger summarizes the working status of bytes in this way.
Either as a leader, manage upward, not only on books, not on reality, only on the top. Keep receiving orders, distributing tasks, reminding orders, recovering conclusions, questioning the output, overturning or reluctantly accepting, personal PUA, a vicious circle.
Either as an enforcer, resist positively, ineffectively, resist negatively, execute with emotion, put pressure on yourself, put pressure on the counterpart, quarrel with each other, arrogant words, write weekly reports, and barely get through.
You look at the unfamiliar colleagues around you, and think that they can work happily every day, do things in a rush, don't be too envious. It wasn't until one day that you attended her resignation party that you realized that everyone was ants on the hot pot, anxious, suspicious, resisting, resisting, and even wanting to worship the Internet. "
Anxiety and nervousness are also frequently heard words in our conversations with former employees.
An employee of Bytedance said to Quan Now: "All the senior executives, including Zhang Nan, who I can contact, are very anxious every day... But as far as I know, people with the same status at Tencent actually live more comfortably. of."
The speed and pace of the Internet is already N times that of the traditional industry, but the byte is faster than some "established" Internet companies. According to a late report, when ByteDance implements a product function, it only takes a week at the earliest from preparation to go online to resumption of the situation. And similar things may take two weeks in Meituan.
Byte is good at blitzkrieg and has always advocated "strengthening miracles." When entering a field, a lot of resources are usually invested quickly, and multiple teams are advancing multiple projects at the same time. But once it is found that ROI is not good, it is quickly turned off. Although this allows quick trial and error, this mechanism often fails when faced with a project with a longer input-output cycle.
Sometimes the blitz also consumes resources quickly. When a former employee was working on educational products, he had employees in more than 50 regional markets. But in just a few months, the company laid off 40% of the people. "I don't think the company made a clear decision at the time."
Another middle-level person who left Byte last year believes that sometimes abandoning the project may be because the person in charge above "made it", "In fact, our project may be completed after a period of time."
This adds to the uncertainty. Everyone has good memories in Byte, and they have a good way out after leaving, but the pressure of being left anytime and anywhere is even more impressive, and even recalling this period is generally not too long. Describes it as a "survivor game."