The first sign that 34-year-old Bai's job at short-video app Kuaishou was in jeopardy was the firing of a 35-year-old colleague.
"Shocked and anxious," said Lao Bai, who uses a nickname to avoid retaliation from his former employer. The developer was fired just months shy of his 35th birthday, becoming yet another casualty of a restructuring known within the company as "Limestone." Kuaishou is recruiting junior employees around the age of 35, according to five former and current employees. Kuaishou was told that his dismissal was part of the company's overall layoff plan. Kuaishou declined to comment.
The so-called "35-year threshold" has long plagued workers in white-collar occupations, with older workers widely believed to be less willing to work overtime due to family responsibilities.
As China's tech sector reels from Beijing's regulatory crackdown and economic slowdown, tens of thousands of jobs have been eliminated in the past few months, with middle-aged workers considered particularly vulnerable. Tech companies make no secret of their preference for younger and unmarried workers.
“Age discrimination in the technology industry is a big problem,” said Yang Baoquan, a Beijing-based labor lawyer. “One view is that older workers cannot keep up with the latest technological developments, they don’t have the energy to continue working hard, and they are too Expensive."
While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on attributes such as race, gender and religion, it does not explicitly mention age. But Young said some interpreted the law more broadly to prohibit discrimination against older people, meaning employers wouldn't explicitly cite age as a reason for firing.
Executives at Chinese technology companies have long said publicly that they prefer younger workers. In 2019, Tencent President Liu Chiping announced a plan to reorganize 10% of the company's management staff, saying that "their jobs will be taken over by younger people and new colleagues who may be more passionate." Baidu CEO Robin Li announced the company's plan to "get younger by promoting more employees born after 1980 and 1990" in an internal letter in 2019 that was also made public that year.
This thinking is ingrained in most technology companies.
"Between the ages of 20 and 30, most people are full of energy. You are more willing to go forward and sacrifice yourself for the company. But once you become a parent and your body starts to age, how will you keep up with the 996 work schedule?" A former Meituan salesperson the manager said, referring to China's tech industry's notorious six-day work week, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
ByteDance and e-commerce giant Pinduoduo are among the youngest recruiters among Chinese technology companies, data shows. According to the latest data from workplace social networking site Maimai in 2020, the average age of its employees is 27 years old. Maimai data also shows that the average age of Kuaishou employees is 28 years old and the average age of Didi Chuxing employees is 33 years old. According to statistics from the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the average age of Chinese workers is 38.3 years old.
This trend has become more entrenched as the tech industry has seen waves of layoffs, driven by an economic slowdown and regulatory concerns.
Kuaishou's share price has fallen 88% since it listed in Hong Kong in 2021, and its headcount fell by 16% between December 2021 (when it had 28,000 employees) and June 2023, according to its latest financial report.
"The technology industry expanded too fast before the epidemic, and then the government's regulatory crackdown began. We are now cutting expensive middle managers," said a manager at another Internet company.
The “35-year-old threshold” is a major source of anxiety for technology workers. A survey last year by recruitment platform Lagou Zhaopin found that 87% of programmers were "very worried" about being fired or unable to find a new job after turning 35.
Lawyer Yang said it is difficult for people over 35 to find new jobs after losing their jobs.
Many civil service recruitment examinations in China limit the age to under 35. Job ads in service industries, including restaurants and hotels, also prefer younger candidates. That leaves tech workers in their 30s with few options when it comes to changing careers or finding temporary work opportunities between roles.
A 38-year-old programmer who was recently laid off from a major ride-hailing group said finding a new job was difficult. "The job market is very bad, even worse than it was last year, especially for an older engineer like me," he said.
In the end, Lao Bai felt that he was one of the lucky few.
"I have two children and my wife no longer works. At that time, another technology company was only recruiting for a management position, and I was lucky to get it. Without this opportunity, I would have been unemployed like many former Kuaishou employees."
This article is reproduced from Omelette , Translator: BALI
Original English text: FT