Last week a job market news hit me: IBM is closing its China R&D operation, affecting more than 1000 jobs. This is not the first tech giant who retreated from China, and will not be the last – in May 2024, another tech giant Microsoft had asked China-based cloud computing and artificial intelligence operations employees to consider relocating out of the country, affecting 700 to 800 people in total.
On an Chinese Internet forum, some people had recollected their memories with IBM, mostly former or current IBM employees. One partitular post stated that working in a foreign-owned company like IBM you feel you are treated like a humankind, while in our domestic companies you are treated like cattles. While I cannot agree with every aspect of this statement, I do agree that domestic componies are lack of respect of their employees.
Having worked in a foreign-owned software company for 3 years before being hired by an domestic Internet giant, I have fully experienced the culture differences between the two types of corporations. In that small foreign company, employees’ time, growth, privacy are greatly respected; while in the domestic company, although a tech giant, people’s personal awareness is constantly dismissed – in other words, employee is completely owned by the company.
Why is this? While I know little about the forming of corporate culture, I would suggest that this difference stems from multiple reasons.
First of all, economic development is thought of as the most import goal in the top-level design, human source is a great source of development power. Under the development-first thought framework, all that can be used will be used (as a tool or source), thinking little about the needs of the tools. Through the years, the society has also accepted that design, meaning that employers, employees, and the supervising orgnizations have all agreed that top-level design. Accidentally some one would discover he/she has been traped in an bad situation and tries to change, but soon will find it useless since the power of the entire society is so huge and stops.
Secondly, social resource is scarce relative to absolute population, people have to compete for resource. This is common in East Asia – China, Korea, Japan. Who cares about working an extra hour if he is starving? Spoken in other words, the first day a man is born in such places, he is doomed to work hard to survive.
There is yet another obvious reason to consider: the unfairness from supervising governance. While the supervisor keeps tolerant to domestic companies’ flagrant disobedient to labour laws, it shows zero-tolerance to foreign entities. the reason to tolerant to domestic companies is to lower their operation costs (since all employee awareness activities costs money), to keep relative competition superiority in the global markets.
All above reasons are obvious, but change is difficult. I wonder if one day our nation had gained the absolute power in global competition our people would live a easier life.