Graduate Complains to Overtime Work at Tencent

On Wednesday, a topic named “fresh graduate employees of Wechat Group of Tencent accused his leader” went viral on Chinese social media.

On Tuesday night, the WeChat products department of the Tencent Wechat Group released a prize list in its internal social group. Subsequently, a newly graduated employee expressed his dissatisfaction with his real ID in the 600-member group and accused the company of boasting abnormal values which encourage employees to work overtime. After questioning, the employee bluntly said that he would quit the company.

In fact, many media outlets have previously reported that Tencent will implement the 965 working system (working from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., five days a week). Employees need to apply to the company for overtime work after 7:00 p.m. However, many employees said that they had not received this notice.

Huang Tieming, head of WeCom, responded in Tencent‘s internal forum on Wednesday. Huang said he recognized the employee’s frank attitude and had a phone call with this employee on Tuesday night to get some feedback.

This employee had only recently joined the department two months ago. Facing great work pressure and a recent unfortunate death of his friend, the employee expressed his opinions on the high-intensity work environment in the online group.

Huang also said that the department will discuss a set of specific plans to solve such problems as soon as possible, including better planning, healthy and reasonable working hours, clear evaluation objectives, among other criteria.

SEE ALSO: Tencent Fires 70 Staff in Anti-graft Campaign

Overtime work, which has been discussed for many years but is still difficult to be solved, doesn’t just happen in the tech field. On November 5, 2021, an employee of the 11th Division of BYD Automobile Co., Ltd. died suddenly in his rental house after working seven consecutive night shifts.