The author | Cheng Yi
Edited | Anna Qin
WeChat public number: slightly larger reference (ID: hyzibenlun)
Chinese Internet accesses more than 200 billion GIGabytes of traffic a year, behind which is a huge community of content moderators, acting as a "human firewall" to audit the security and quality of information transmitted to the network.
The death of the B station auditor "Twilight Wood Heart" has made the outside world pay attention to the content review position: 24 hours a year * 365 days a day scheduling system, and the workload of reviewing hundreds or even thousands of pieces of content every day.
They're just a part of the Internet Invisible Man.
When the Internet develops into a 24-hour connection, from graphics, videos and even to the metaverse, the multi-form of presentation continues to iterate and evolve, but its most basic front-line employees, still like network blue-collar workers, are "bundled" in front of the computer by click rate and conversion rate, completing fixed, repetitive, procedural work.
They hide behind internet platforms, acting as water deliverers for the platforms, maintaining the operation of the behemoth.
01 Working 6 days a week, I once thought I would die suddenly
I am in charge of the news feed on the portal, which is the pop-up window of various apps received by the mobile phone.
Push is divided into national, personalized and regional three, the national push is pushed to all users, basically a public topic, the two sessions, officials fell, large-scale sports events, etc., personalized push according to the user's preferences to recommend financial, military, entertainment and other content. Regions are pushed by province and city.
Basically, I have to work 6 days a week, because I will definitely arrange duty on weekends and holidays. The average monthly man-hours are 200 hours. The company pays overtime pay in accordance with the statutory requirements, which is doubled on weekends and 3 times on holidays.
I joined the company when I was recruited in 2015 and left at the end of 2017. I heard that after I left my job, the company's treatment was not as good as before, and the weekend duty was calculated according to normal overtime, no longer 2 times the salary.
In 2015 and 2016, it was the time when content apps were busy grabbing users. Companies want to click and users for a long time, and the number of pushes per day is not very restrained. We push the country on average 8 times a day, 7:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. It is also interspersed with personalized pushes and pushes of major unexpected events. There are many pop-up windows.
Pictured: Stills from "The Character of Mortals"
Taking the Winter Olympics as an example, if I follow the requirements of my time in office, basically every time the Chinese team wins a gold, there will be a push. Now where dare to disturb users so much, the supervision is very strict. At the behest of Operation Clear, entertainment news has been more tightly regulated. For example, the news of Huang Xiaoming and Baby's divorce should have pushed the whole country according to the past, but now I dare not push it like this, and may also be recommended to users who are interested in entertainment news according to personalization.
Our company's news department is divided into three shifts, divided into three shifts: morning, middle and evening. But our push group does not have to work at night, users sleep at night, and push is basically invalid. The push of the night shift is the responsibility of the night shift editor. We are the morning shift: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the middle shift: 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Relatively speaking, the early shift is more difficult to work, and it is quite difficult to get up. Generally I get up at 5 o'clock, take a taxi to the company, and the taxi fare for the early shift is reimbursed by the company. In the winter, the morning shift is more difficult, the day is not yet light at 5 o'clock, and the weather is very cold.
The push work is like a gear, one meshing and one meshing rotation. Arrive at the company at 6 a.m., browse the news, get ready for a 7 a.m. push, and then go to breakfast. After coming back, prepare a 9-point push, a 12-point push, and a 2-point push. Prepare materials one stage by one by one in time.
And this job has not grown, it is to synthesize the content, start a title, and push it out. Rare creativity is whether the title attracts attention or not. However, according to the leader, the push work is quite challenging, to be sensitive to hot spots, but also to have the ability to avoid risks, but also to know how to attract users.
Work also led to a lack of socializing, a single weekend break, a day off, and just wanted to lie at home. It is not easy to attend parties on weekdays. The morning shift leaves at 3 p.m., and my friend has not yet left work. I had to go home first, but when I got in, it was much harder to go out again. In the middle class, I can only choose a noon party, hurry, and I can't say a few words with my friends.
Push work, the level of each family is displayed very intuitively, the push time is fast and slow, the title is not attractive, and the content is not full. You can see the results of your work at a glance. Moreover, there are so many things in the news of a day, the difference between each push is not too much, basically it is the same topic comparison, in fact, it is the inner volume, to see who can roll who, to see whose clicks and open rate data is good, the work pressure is still quite large.
Particularly pronounced pressure comes from dealing with emergencies. In the face of suddenness, each family must seize the time to push, the earlier the push, the better the traffic. Leaders sometimes send screenshots in the work group, which one pushes first, which one has a good title. Although the leader did not criticize, the screenshot has proved that my push handling of emergencies is not as good as other people's homes, and it is quite socially dead.
After more than a year of work, when I encounter emergencies, I will still be nervous and afraid of not doing well. Although the push results do not directly affect the salary, everyone wants to do better.
When I was in mid-2017, I felt that this job could not be done, it was too tiring. During that time, one of my colleagues left the job, the staff was tight, and I took two consecutive months, only 2 days a month. I actually felt that I had not rested, and I was afraid that I would die suddenly during that time.
Push work is basically prepared for young people, especially newly graduated college students, small leaders of our group, the work is not more than 3 years. Quite a few are recruited by the school, and our group is more graduates of Lanzhou University and Nankai University.
My average monthly salary after tax is 13K to 14K, and when I encounter eleven long holidays, I can break through 16K after payroll tax, and for undergraduates who have just graduated, the salary is still OK. Moreover, the distinction between working hours and living time is very good, going to work is very busy, to catch up with speed, no one is looking for it after work. Unlike the public opinion work I am doing now, I also have to work overtime after work, and the leader requires 24 hours on standby, and there is no overtime cost.
However, push work is difficult to retain people, the pace of work is fast, but also tired. The colleagues who joined at the same time as me have all left their jobs and have jumped to other Internet companies. There are graduate students, who continue to go to school, and there are also people like me who left Beijing and changed cities to live again.
If you look at it from a salary point of view, my current job is much higher than before in the Internet company to do push, not a lot. But the pace of work is not pushed as fast, the blunt knife cuts the flesh, and the pain is not so obvious.
02 On the night shift, no one talks, very lonely
I work as an editor on a financial website. Our website cannot directly reprint the manuscripts of other portals and media, and it is easy to be sued for infringement. Therefore, the content we publish needs to be edited, or secondary processing, such as synthesizing the content of several articles, integrating into one, or comprehensively compiling foreign content and transporting it back to China.
My department is called the Press Center, and there are three shifts and shifts. But basically, the night shift only arranges young people who are not married, and those who are married are all in the morning and middle shifts. Although there are more than 30 people in our group, no more than 5 people can actually work the night shift, 12 months a year, just in 5 people, one person is assigned at least two months, it is still quite hard. Moreover, there are 3 girls among the 5 people, and they are symbolically worth a month. The night shift is usually "preferred" to boys by default.
Stay up at night. Night shifts are from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. One person is left in a group on the night shift, nearly 100 workstations on the whole floor, no more than 5 people in the night shift, and the workstations of different groups are far apart, and they are not familiar with each other, so they can't talk. At night, friends are asleep, no one chats, and it feels quite lonely. Because no one talks to me during the day, when I get home, my roommates have to wash up to work, and when I go to work, they may be on their way home.
For me, night shift means not speaking to a real human in a month.
The night shift was subsidized, starting at 120 yuan, then rising to 150 yuan, and still no one wanted to be on duty. Changing the biological clock is quite laborious, like the first week of my night shift, it is difficult to sleep during the day after work, almost until the afternoon, tired and unable to fall asleep. The same is true from the night shift to the morning shift and the middle shift, and the biological clock is difficult to adjust back in a short time. And the shift change, which caused the biological clock to fluctuate for several months, made me feel very emotionally sensitive.
Our company is a website, there is no App, and the timeliness of chasing hot spots is not strong. The pace of work is not so fast. Website traffic is also average, Alexa ranking, has not entered the top 300, the department also rarely review the data, feel that the website has content updates every day. In the case of night shifts, for example, from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m., there is basically no news or data update. I always wonder, what is the significance of our third-rate website, going to the night shift? Internet standard? Other websites have, we must also have?
Everyone doesn't like the evening shift, especially the girls. I have the impression that there is only one female colleague, because she needs money to straighten her teeth, and she has worked night shifts for two consecutive months. Others are passively waiting for the leadership arrangement.
There are very few young people in our department, mainly female employees in their 30s and early 40s, because the office location is biased and the salary is not high. We have a sister in the group, the basic salary is less than 3,000 yuan, that was in 2015, she came to the company for 6 years, almost no salary increase. Like my salary of 5K, meal allowance, pay supplement, plus overtime pay on weekends and holidays, after-tax salary is less than 7K, if you work the night shift, the payroll is more than 8K after tax. If I count the Internet industry, the salary is very crotchful.
Therefore, everyone attaches great importance to the three salaries of the holidays. Generally, new employees can't take turns, and priority is given to the old employees of the department, who have to raise families and babies, and the team leader is more sympathetic. Like our new employees, if they have the opportunity of three salaries, they must tell the team leader in advance whether they can help arrange it.
I stayed at the company for a year and then left. At that time, it was also very difficult to change jobs, and I looked for three months. I applied to do network editing, but when I wrote the test, I would not have some basic network knowledge about background processing, saying that I was doing news editing, I was integrated, and there was no news literacy at all.
At that time, I also went to today's headline interview, and it took 50 minutes to take a taxi to the interview, and it may not take more than 10 minutes to sit down and talk to the interviewer. It was a simple question to ask a few questions, let me go, gave me a deep sense of frustration, the interviewer is not willing to pretend to talk to me more. It was as if being able to arrange for me to come to the interview was a special gift to me. This has been more than six years, I have changed my job twice, interviewed more than a dozen companies, and the most memorable is that time.
03 In 2015, the order was soft, and now no one pays attention
I do website UI design. For example, if the user opens WeChat, the following "WeChat, Address Book, Discovery, I", these four first-level entrances, belong to the UI design. My job is to do that.
In 2014 and 2015, the atmosphere of mass entrepreneurship and the development momentum of the mobile Internet were superimposed, and there were especially many companies doing Apps. Many small startups can't have a professional app development and design team, and a lot of the work is outsourced.
Also to see this trend, I and two classmates also started a business, set up a small studio, specializing in outsourcing UI design work. Those two years were particularly busy, with at least four or five orders a month, one project after another, and there was no vacancy at all. Sometimes there are too many orders, we can't finish it ourselves, and we subcontract the order to others to make a little difference.
In those years, I made a little money, conservatively estimated to earn 500,000 yuan a year, and also let me buy a house in Beijing.
However, in recent years, small companies that do website UI design have basically not lived, and few companies have developed new apps. We also have no orders, the company has been written off, become a flexible employee, take over private work, help enterprises or local governments to design official websites. This kind of living money is very small, I have a single calculation, an interactive entrance is worth 30 yuan.
For the last three years, I have not found a stable job. The big Internet factories can't get in, and the small companies have closed down too quickly, and if they haven't done it for a few months, the company will disappear. The Internet industry is a large-scale business, there is money to be made, small companies can not afford to lose, and the scale cannot be developed. In the year of the 2020 epidemic, I had nearly 7 months without a fixed job. The little money earned from private work is not enough to repay the mortgage.
The house I bought in Beijing, the mortgage is 8K in January, and the pressure is not small. I have not lived in the house, has been rented, the monthly rent of 6500 yuan, I rent a single room in Changping, the rent is 2000 yuan. The difference between the rents, I use to repay the mortgage and save costs.
In the 14 years since I came to Beijing, my biggest achievement is to buy a house and leave a bunch of debts. My family persuaded me to sell my house in Beijing and return to my hometown, but my hometown was in the countryside and there were no employment opportunities. Farming, I won't. I also passed the 35-year-old age limit.
When the outside world mentions the Internet, it is like high salaries, benefits, 996, that is only a small number of people who can enter the big factory. The vast majority of practitioners, like me, may not be able to enter the big factory and cannot go back to their hometown.