Chapter 13 4. Huawei's wolf competition

In Shenzhen, there is a saying: When you go to Huawei to do business, don’t mention your education background lightly, because the guard at the door who asks you to register is likely to have a master’s degree, and the cleaner in the company may be an undergraduate student.This sentence shows that Huawei, as a representative of "knowledge-intensive" industries, has an overall high degree of education for its employees. With the rapid expansion of Huawei in recent years, as a giant in the electronics industry, it has naturally become the dream arena of countless college students.However, the road to enter Huawei is not easy. Throughout history, Huawei has favored highly educated students from prestigious universities.

Before 1997, 40% of Huawei's employees were graduates of Huazhong University of Technology. In 1998, Huawei and ZTE staged another "talent battle" in Tsinghua Park.Since then, until 2002, a large number of graduates entered Huawei every year. In 1999, Huawei recruited 2,000 college graduates at one time.By 2000, a total of 4,000 graduates had been recruited. In 2001, Huawei recruited the best students from famous universities across the country one by one.It is said that in a "recruitment of 10,000 people" that made Huawei famous, Huawei even uttered a wild statement: "All engineering masters are required, and the top ten undergraduates are all required." According to Huawei Chairman Ren Zhengfei, Huawei averages Recruit about 3000 people.Now, more than 85% of Huawei's employees have a bachelor's degree, and more than 70% of the R&D personnel are masters, doctors, and postdoctoral fellows.

Huawei's high education requirements are just a microcosm of Shenzhen's high-tech enterprises. In 2008, Shenzhen held the "Tenth China International High-tech Achievements Fair Talent and Intellectual Exchange Meeting". More than 200 companies participated in the meeting, mainly in electronics, computers, communications, medicine, energy, Biochemistry, machinery manufacturing, automation and other industries, these high-tech industries have high requirements for talents' education, professional background, work experience, etc. Although resources are abundant, the threshold is high and the entrance is small.

In Ren Zhengfei's eyes, Huawei is a three-high enterprise with "high efficiency, high pressure, and high wages". He believes that "high wages" are the most tempting, because "under great rewards, there must be brave men."And this is what attracts countless highly educated students from colleges and universities. Many students won the final position after competing with dozens of people on all sides. This position is full of "smoke" when they are obtained. However, Huawei The "battle" begins when you step on the threshold. When a graduate has just become a new employee of Huawei, he will read such a sentence in the "Letter to Employees": "Practice transforms people and creates a generation of Huawei people. Do you want to be an expert? All from Starting from the workers, this has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people in the company. After one week after entering the company, the doctor, master, bachelor, and the status obtained in the mainland have all disappeared, and everything can only be positioned based on reality, which has been accepted by the vast majority of people in the company. Hope You accept the challenge of fate, advance unyieldingly, and do not hesitate to encounter a broken head. How can you become a talent without going through hardships?"

When a new employee becomes an old employee, he will be familiar with the sentence mentioned in the article "How long can Huawei's red flag last": "When we embarked on this road and there was no way out, we paid The price is high, our top leaders sacrificed their health for it. The people who came after are still killing their lives in order to be the best in the industry. When the Minister of Commerce of Saudi Arabia came to visit, he found that there were beds on the cabinets in our office Mattress, and brought all his entourage in to hear us explain what the mattress was for, and he believed that a country must have a fighting spirit if it is to become rich. The struggle needs to be persevering from generation to generation.”

"Struggle" can be seen almost everywhere in Huawei, and the most symbolic one is the mattress culture.In the early days of Huawei's establishment, there were only five or six developers in the R&D department. They worked day and night to study technical solutions, develop, verify, and test product equipment... There were no holidays and weekends, and there were no days and nights: during lunch breaks, lying on the ground; working overtime Don’t go home late, stay with the mattress; sleep when you’re tired, get up when you wake up, and work again. A mattress is equivalent to half a home.

This mattress culture is closely related to the nature of Huawei's industry. "Silicon Valley That Sleeps" once described the hard struggle of Silicon Valley, where American high-tech companies are concentrated: Countless people in Silicon Valley raced against time, spent many sleepless nights, and achieved great success. The prosperity of Silicon Valley has also led the rhythm of the entire electronics industry.Huawei has always adhered to the belief that "if you don't make progress in one day, you may be out; if you don't study for three days, you can't catch up with the industry giants. This is a harsh fact." The entire company is full of urgency.

Because of the mattress culture and rapid product updates, Huawei employees have to endure high-intensity work pressure and carry out arduous development with a short cycle and heavy workload. Just like a Huawei employee said: "Huawei does have a lot of overtime, especially when the project schedule is very tight (the project with a slow schedule hardly exists in Huawei), generally speaking, it is required to work overtime for one day on weekends. , Huawei stipulates that you must go to work on the last Saturday of each month, so you may only have 3 or 4 days off in January. There is a high probability of working overtime during the Spring Festival. Generally, you start working overtime on the sixth or seventh day of the Lunar New Year’s Day holiday. Usually work Whether you are tired or not and whether you have to work overtime at night also varies from person to person. If you are very capable and can finish a month's work in two or three weeks, then no one will force you to work overtime at night (unless the product is the most critical one month) There may be unified requirements). Of course, such people are a minority, about one out of dozens, and most people still need to work overtime at night or on weekends to complete the task.”

In May 2006, Hu Xinyu, a 25-year-old employee of Huawei, died of "viral encephalitis", but before the onset of the disease, he had worked overtime for more than 30 consecutive days.According to an interview with his girlfriend Zhang Baoke by "Southern Weekend", at that time, Hu was preparing for a key closed research and development project. After the project started, Hu Xinyu "only returned home 4 times in more than 30 days. Work until 3 in the morning, sleep on the mattress in the laboratory, and start working again at 9 in the morning." Although, Huawei spokesman Fu Jun said that Hu Xinyu's overtime work was voluntary, and Huawei's "overtime policy" stipulates that at night Overtime work after 10 o'clock must be approved by the company, and overnight stays in the office are not allowed.However, Zhang Baoke believes that "this is because the project is tight and there is no way to do it. It is a disguised use of overloaded work schedule and workload to force employees to work overtime."

The Hu Xinyu incident is just an escalation of Huawei's overtime incident. Overtime is commonplace in Huawei.A person who was stationed at Huawei for a short time also deeply felt this overtime culture. This person named "Jun" wrote in his blog: The company took over a Huawei project. Although it is not big, the level of confidentiality is very high, and the code and information are top secret. The contact person over there told us that if the code is to be released, his boss needs to sign and ask the boss. The boss's signature, and the boss's boss's boss's signature.

Therefore, under this situation, our project team moved to Huawei and worked on the project directly in Huawei's office for more than a month.Now, I have been there for almost a week, and I still see and hear: Huawei is indeed like the legend, with a strong atmosphere of overtime work. After work every day, it is almost impossible to feel any changes in the number of people in the office. It is only after nine o'clock in the evening that I see the overtime army going out to wait for the shuttle bus. The remaining small part of the projects may be ready overnight...Huawei has a lot of shuttle buses, from Line 1 to Line 8, but almost every bus is full at 9 o'clock, and everyone still has money in their hands. Holding a small bag of food distributed overtime... I often hear Huawei people chatting in my spare time at work, and the beginning is almost always this way: A: Do you work overtime today? B: Of course we must add it! A: Hey, me too. I’ve added it for n days, and it’s about to die... In fact, apart from Huawei, overtime in Shenzhen's IT industry is very common. "In our business, there is no company that encourages you to work overtime. There is only so much work, and you have to complete it no matter what. This industry is highly competitive, and the strings in your heart have to be tensed every day. So people It is absurd to say that we are 'before the age of 40 for money, and after the age of 40', it is absurd, but it is true, you have no choice." This is the voice of a Shenzhen IT person surnamed Huang. In 2009, Zhu Bo, a middle-level cadre of Silk Road Digital Technology Co., Ltd., a well-known digital visual technology application company in Shenzhen, died suddenly from overwork due to continuous overtime.Liu Qiang, a colleague who has worked with Zhu Bo for 3 years, believes that "when Silk Road Digital first started, it was all overtime. (We) often slept in the company without going home. It would be more abrupt to leave early without working overtime. Everyone works overtime. I haven’t been home for 5 consecutive days. The company even bought a folding bed for the office. Moreover, this job is very mentally intensive, so you need to concentrate on reading the drawings. I promise you won’t Mistake." IT elites like Zhu Bo have become "cannon fodder". In addition to the competition in the electronics industry itself, Huawei itself has adopted a strict employee incentive system such as "performance appraisal" and "last elimination".The so-called "last elimination" is to evaluate the comprehensive performance of employees and lay off employees at a rate of 5%. Before 2007, when an employee's assessment reached two D's in total, the department head would talk to the employee and persuade the employee to resign. If they refused to resign, Huawei would not expel the employee immediately, but would not renew the contract after the contract expired. about.However, since 2008, Huawei, an IT leader, has officially launched the "5% elimination system", and the eliminated employees will be dismissed immediately.The final elimination is like an invisible whip, which makes Huawei's employees dare not slack off at all times. After news of layoffs came out in 2008, Huawei employees also consciously worked overtime to prevent being laid off. Moreover, such performance appraisals are also linked to performance bonuses.Li Qiang (pseudonym), a Huawei employee, disclosed Huawei's treatment on the Internet. He said, "General employees who enter Huawei, the basic salary of undergraduates is about 5,000 yuan, and the basic salary of graduate students is about 6,000 yuan. If it comes to the end of the year, there will be a large amount of performance. Bonuses are generally at least tens of thousands. However, not every employee can get this performance bonus, because employees have to conduct performance appraisals every month. Performance appraisals are divided into ABC three grades. According to Li Qiang’s estimation, each grade every year The difference in the total performance bonus is more than 5,000 yuan. The performance appraisal is fixed and distributed according to the proportion of employees. Generally, grade A accounts for about 5% of the total number of employees, grade B accounts for 45%, grade C accounts for 45%, and 5% of employees will It is regarded as the last category: waiting for investigation. If employees who get C or waiting for investigation for several months in a row, not only will they not get a bonus, but it will also mean that they will be transferred internally or their salary will be reduced. For employees, being transferred to low wages The loss of income is not small. The performance assessment of employees is often based on whether the employees complete the work according to the quality and quantity. However, the ability to complete the work according to the quality and quantity means that the employees must work overtime to keep up with Shanghua’s fast pace will not prevent me from becoming a laggard in the entire engineering process.” Although the employees working in Huawei have enviable academic qualifications, salaries, and benefits, they also have indescribable pressure and bitterness.As indicated by the statistical results in a survey, the average salary of IT practitioners is about 3,900 yuan, which is much higher than that of other industries.However, such a high-paying group has a job-hopping rate of 30%!It is worth noting that, in addition to the 53% who want to have greater development and change jobs, as many as 43% of the people often change jobs because of overtime work, including heavy labor and physical fatigue. In 2010, the Shenzhen talent market released recruitment information: From the perspective of the number of recruiting units, the top ten industries are: electronics industry, manufacturing industry, computer industry, financial industry, communication industry, commerce, construction industry, scientific research/ Technical service/geological survey industry, logistics industry, and intermediary service industry, the number of recruiting units in these ten industries accounted for 50% of the overall number of recruiting units.The electronics and IT industry is almost "dominant" among Shenzhen's high-tech industries. Therefore, although electronics and IT companies in Shenzhen can get generous salaries, they face very heavy competition and pressure.