ChinAI #184: Year 4 of ChinAI (10k readers)

The "Age-35 Predicament" at Big Tech Companies

Greetings from a world where…

ChinAI is now four years old, which means it should be able to pour water with adult supervision and answer simple questions like “what is a crayon for?”

We recently passed 10k total subscribers! I know I harp on the need for “slow news” and unsexy translation topics that, by design, don’t attract the masses, but at the end of the day, we all want our work to be recognized and we all like round benchmark numbers. Still, if the goal is a more diverse ecosystem of perspectives on China’s AI development, I truly believe that newsletters dominated by a singular (often male) voice can be detrimental if they get too big. It’s not a simple question — “what is a newsletter for?” — but hopefully we’ll get better at grappling with it by the five year mark.

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As always, the searchable archive of all past issues is here.

Feature Translation: The Predicament of Age 35 at Big Tech Companies

Context: Earlier this year, Yang Xi, a 38-year-old programmer, went viral with a short video about his negotiated resignation at a big Internet company. This week’s feature translation (original Chinese article) uses Yang’s experience as an entry point to this question: what’s it like being 35 years old at a Chinese big tech company?

Caijing ELaw (财经E法) is becoming one of my favorite WeChat public accounts. Affiliated with Caijing Magazine, a respected business media platform known for publishing investigative, critical pieces, this publication focuses on internet governance issues.

Key Takeaways: The 35-year-old crisis" (35岁危机) at big tech companies

• As they near age 40, older programmers get teased: “It's time for you to report to Didi (as a driver), and it's time to report to Meituan (as a delivery worker)."

• There’s a cruel reality behind the jokes: Yang Xi and others in his age cohort have families and can no longer endure high-intensity overtime; they struggle more to learn new technologies. While they write more refined code and possess more experience, they constantly face the pressure of being replaced.

• Ran Tao, former head of Huawei’s global recruitment team, emphasizes the narrowness of promotion channels from mid-level to high-level positions. The biggest question for workers aged 35-45, according to Ran, is: “Is it possible for me to rush to the VP (Vice President) level and become a somewhat renowned person in the industry.”

This age-35 predicament is connected with burnout:

• Based on her fieldwork, Xia Bingqing, an associate professor at East China Normal University, observes that as the Internet industry has become more centralized, the work at these large tech companies (大厂) has become more standardized and repetitive, like that of a factory worker on an assembly line. In fact, this trend is the origin of the Chinese term for big tech company (大厂), which also means big factory.

• Yang Xi attributes his burnout to that process: “It is purely the manual work of moving bricks.”

• The 38-year-old Li Ming recently left an Internet giant, where he had worked on the technical side for the past ten years, to do product operations work at an up-and-coming company. Regarding his previous work, he said: “When you are doing meaningless and worthless things, you will get tired.”

Meaning and survival via side-hustles:

• In April 2022, Liu Meng, at the exact age of 35 years, was laid off from a big tech company, where she worked in general services. She hasn’t figured out next steps yet but she’s not in a rush. Her side business selling maternal and infant products covers her children’s daily expenses.

• Most of Yang Xi’s income also comes from investments and side hustles. He started driving for Didi during his commute time starting in 2017. If everything works out, he drives someone home from work who is 95% on the same route.

• Others do what Li Ming did and try to join smaller, more entrepreneurial companies. From the article: “According to the data released by Maimai in April 2022, more than 40% of employees over the age of 35 who leave large tech companies choose small and medium-sized enterprises with promising prospects, and 38.2% choose to start their own businesses.”

This speaks to a phenomenon that extends beyond the Internet industry. The “35-year-old crisis” (35岁危机) has entered the public consciousness in part because it also applies to other fields, including civil service, where applicants over the age of 35 are either explicitly or implicitly rejected. Dr. Xia Bingqing states, “The Internet industry just gets more attention from people.”

FULL TRANSLATION: Why is age 35 such a hurdle at big tech companies?

ChinAI Links (Four to Forward)

My four favorite issues of ChinAI from this past year:

• ChinAI #144: Artificial Challenged Intelligence [人工智障]: humorous memes about AI failures.

• ChinAI #148: The AI Wolf Refuses to Play the Game: a misspecified AI system goes viral in China (thanks to Zixian Ma for help translating some of the tricky technical sections.

• ChinAI #157: Resistance in an Algorithmic Society: a story about a Douban group dedicated to “Anti-Technology Dependence [反技术依赖]”

• ChinAI #159: White Paper on China's Computing Power: at the end of the day, an informative white paper will always find a home here.

Thank you for reading and engaging.

These are Jeff Ding's (sometimes) weekly translations of Chinese-language musings on AI and related topics. Jeff is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Check out the archive of all past issues here & please subscribe here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay for a subscription will support access for all).

Any suggestions or feedback? Let me know at chinainewsletter@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jjding99