✒ A candid account of the workplace practices at China’s large tech companies.

Some slangs / terms mentioned in the article:

Forced ranking — at the end of the financial year, nearly everyone gets a hefty bonus. The losers – those bottom-ranked by management – get little or nothing no matter how productive they are. Often they take it as a sign they should leave.

996 ICU — a colloquial saying among tech workers that if you work 9am to 9pm, six days a week, as some managers demand, you’ll end up in intensive care.

Fortified city — a reference to a 1940s novel which satirised marriage and other aspects of middle-class Chinese society: when you’re outside, you want to get in. But when you’re inside, you want to get out.

Involution — a term popularised by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1960s in work describing unusual aspects of one rural economy in Java, Indonesia. Over the course of centuries, ever-increasing amounts of labour had poured in but output remained constant. No innovation had occurred.

Hot-housing / Closed-door projects — an attempt to recreate the start-up atmosphere whereby a dozen or so designers, engineers and product managers hunker down in one room for a month to work round the clock.