I came across this while organizing my notes and wanted to post it on my blog.
Author: Anonymous user
Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/29614511/answer/45025842
Source: Zhihu
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This matter has to be anonymous. Because I am an interested party, too close to the people on Haozi's team, and I know certain things.
The situation should be as follows. At the time, Alibaba Cloud ECS was working on a project, a project called VPC. This project had supposedly been underway for a year and had still not been officially released. The project was done wrong from the very beginning. I heard from a friend that right from the start, Haozi argued with the Alibaba Cloud ECS people that the technical plan they were going to implement was wrong. But the project was too big — reportedly 30-40 people across many teams — and Haozi had no way to control it. In my friend's words, Alibaba Cloud has too many gods.
This project involved inhumane overtime from the very beginning: from Monday to Sunday, working until 2-3 a.m. every day, lasting 3-4 months in total. Can you believe this kind of overtime?
My friend was also on this project. My friend and I complained every day about the many technical problems that appeared in this project; some problems were quite ridiculous — exactly the kind of mistakes that only technical laypeople would make.
Unable to control this project, Haozi did not allow his own people to work overtime. He believed those low-level mistakes were all caused by overtime, and everyone knew he was opposed to overtime. I heard from my friend that at the time, he half-jokingly said to the people in his team: if you work overtime past 8 o'clock, your performance rating is 3.25 and your values grade is C. (I think he was probably trying to satirize those people who would risk their lives for KPIs.)
In the end, this project still failed, and it is reportedly still undergoing a massive rework. The project had been worked on for three months, was full of bugs, and could not go live; it reportedly alarmed senior management, and so accountability came down from above. Then, the person in charge of this project told the big boss above that part of the reason for this project was that Haozi's team was not up to par — they did not work overtime. And so, the next day, his boss directly had my friend and the other members of Haozi's team transferred to that team which worked overtime until the early hours every day. They talked for a whole day, and not a single person wanted to go over.
But what were the facts? The two people from Haozi's team who participated not only completed their own modules on time without working overtime, but the number of bugs they produced accounted for only a very small fraction.
But what was the result? The boss forcibly made a decision: the people did not have to go over, but their work would be assigned by that side. Haozi was completely sidelined, and Haozi's team thus effectively ceased to exist.
In the past couple of days, after Haozi criticized on Weibo that PR article about the "cold winter" that was riddled with logical errors, it alarmed the company's PR department, and his new boss directly reassigned Haozi's team away — my friend and the entire team, including Haozi, were completely unaware. From this point of view, Alibaba's management is very brutal indeed.
This should be one of those examples Haozi posted on Weibo of persecution suffered for having different "values."