Age 35 becomes a worry for Chinese technology engineers

According to the Financial Times, in China, the trend of choosing young people who are sensitive to technology and willing to increase. Meanwhile, technology workers aged 35 are considered "old workers", not willing to work overtime because they still have responsibilities at home. Therefore, the risk of losing their jobs for people over 35 years old in this country of billions of people has been increasing over the past few years, in the context of China's technology industry being tightened.

Beijing-based lawyer Yang Baoquan said that older people are said to not be able to keep up with technological advances and not have enough energy to do high-pressure jobs while the company has to pay high salaries.

According to China's Labor Law, employers cannot discriminate based on characteristics such as ethnicity, gender and religion, but the issue of age is not explicitly mentioned.

For a long time, Chinese technology leaders have publicly expressed their preference for young people. According to them, when they are 20-30 years old, workers are full of energy, ready to move forward. But when they become parents, they will not be able to follow the 996 work culture - only working hours from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week, especially popular in the technology sector.

At major Chinese technology companies such as ByteDance and Pinduoduo, the average employee age is 27, at Kuaishou it is 28, according to data from recruitment site Maimai.

According to the China General Confederation of Labor, the average age of workers in this country is 38.3 years old.

The trend of rejuvenating the apparatus is increasingly clear in the context of continuous layoffs and tightening of business activities in the technology industry. The leader of a large technology company in China said that the technology sector was growing too fast before the pandemic and the government's tightening campaigns forced the company to cut the management team receiving high salaries.

Recruitment platform Lagou Zhaopin conducted a survey last year, 87% of programmers said they were "very worried" about being fired or not being able to find a new job after turning 35.

Lesley Montoya

Update 24 April 2024