Meeting an engineer from Alipay (China)

Introduction

A few days ago, during a trip to China 🇨🇳, I had the chance to meet a Data engineer from Alipay. I was able to talk with him for a long time and try to understand the world of tech in this very special country. This article is not intended to delve deeply into the technical aspect, but more to share with you a different vision of work.

Who is it ?

My interlocutor has been a Data engineer for 8 years at Alipay and this is the only company he has worked for in China, but there have been other experiences abroad (internships). Its technical scope is limited, it manages a single data domain, but it is substantial, because it is close to 10 Petabytes. Its major problem is to make Hive work (well) with this quantity of data.

“Apache Hive is a distributed, fault-tolerant data warehouse system that enables large-scale analytics and makes it easy to read, write, and manage petabytes of data residing in distributed storage using SQL ."

Alipay what is it?

Alipay is one of the largest tech companies in China. This company created an application that has +600 million users in China and +1.2 billion worldwide. Alipay is a type of application that we don’t have in the West, a “mega app”.

A “mega app” is a mobile application that offers a multitude of different features within a single platform. Unlike traditional apps that focus on a specific function or service, a mega-app combines multiple services or utilities in one place.

In our case, a user with Alipay can pay online or directly with a merchant, rent a self-service scooter, order a taxi, book a hotel, translate text, send messages… And many other things.

It’s an application that we use on a daily basis in China, it is almost essential like its competitor WeChat. This essentialization makes the Alipay application one of the most challenging from a technical point of view. This is a point to remember when reading this article: you must compare Alipay to one of the GAFAMs.

Note that no foreigner works in this company to his knowledge.

Here are some screenshots of the application so that you have an idea in mind, although it is difficult to represent the application given its number of features:

Recruitment

Recruitment, for its part, is quite classic compared to that of GAFAM and will be similar for other large tech companies in China.

1. Telephone exchange with HR
2. Algorithmic testing
3. Architecture-based technical testing
4. “The Pressure”, a question and answer session which named it like this.
5. Final interview to discuss salary; It was during the last interview that this point was discussed. You have to have the context in mind, the service is not common in China (so freelance is almost impossible) and only 4/5 companies can give such high salaries, so a candidate cannot be disappointed, because he will hardly be able to have more.

Work

Daily life

All IT workers at a big company like Alipay work 12-hour days, for example 9 a.m.-9 p.m. or 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; they still have an hour and a half break for lunch, in general, they eat for 30 minutes and save the last hour to sleep, it is quite common in China to take a nap, the office chairs are adapted, in some large groups, there is a sort of dormitory.

As for weekends, they have 2 days off like us. You can work if you wish to advance your goals, but we will never impose it on you, it is up to you.

Holidays, there are about 2 weeks + Chinese New Year (1 week), which is a lot in China, but in reality, it is difficult to take them, because there is a lot of work to be done, they will not be paid or rescheduled if not taken. Nothing very surprising in Asia.

The organization

Each data engineer is responsible for a business domain and the only one working on it. This means that in the event of an absence, no one works on the domain if the duration is short, but if the absence is longer, the domain will be picked up by the team leader in the majority of the time. Common technologies and quality documentation make it easy to recover a domain.

Teleworking is authorized two days a week, but prohibited on Monday and Friday.

Quite a few tools are developed internally and shared freely on Github. In the event of a performance issue or missing functionality, a dedicated team is there to improve the tools.

SCRUM, agility & co, we forget, it doesn’t exist for them, so no morning/daily, retro, etc…

Salary

Working in a company of this caliber pays a lot of money compared to the cost of living. There is no taboo about it, so it was easy for me to know his salary. It amounts to €3,100 (not ¥) after taxes, which is significant when you know that the average salary is €829 in Chengdu (I was unable to obtain the median salary).

Meal vouchers do not exist in China, but a budget of ¥20 per lunch (cafeteria) is granted to him in addition to his salary, which is a “substantial” sum for the city where he lives, but if he worked in Beijing or Shanghai, the 20 yuan wouldn’t be much.

To this is then added a 30% bonus if he meets his annual objectives, but they are very difficult to achieve and take a lot of time. He also told me that in certain other companies of the same caliber, the success bonus is much higher, sometimes +2 years of salary; the higher the bonus, the more difficult the objectives are to achieve.

Perspective of evolution

Two choices are possible:

1. Change domain, for example from back-end developer to data engineer
2. Move up a level, that is to say become a manager, but someone has to leave or also be promoted, which is quite rare.

But their time is running out…

A high level athlete

What surprised me the most is that their career is similar to a career as a high-level athlete. At 35, you can no longer continue to work in a company of this magnitude, because it is almost impossible to maintain the pace beyond this age, according to them. There are no exceptions to this rule, from what I have gathered.

The rest of his career

But what happens after? Several choices are available to them:

1. Continue IT at a smaller company, but their salary will drop.
2. Change path and leave IT, which is common.
3. Create a business, but this is not easy, because as mentioned previously, the service hardly exists in China. My interlocutor admitted to me that he wanted to try to change things on this subject.

Technologies

The world of data is not my specialty, so I was not able to go as far as I would have hoped in my exchange with him, but I still learned some interesting things. The technologies he uses on a daily basis are the same ones that can be found in Europe (with the exception of Alibaba Cloud which is not very developed here): -Spark -Hive - C++ -Python -Alibaba Cloud -SQL

Then I scanned a little wider to see what he knew:

Conclusion

After a few hours of discussions, I noticed that from a technical point of view, the technologists are very similar if not to say the same, but it is from a managerial point of view or from their career that the differences are made. I still find it a shame to lose such valuable expertise after ten years, but small businesses can then benefit from quality expertise that they would certainly never have could have without this rule, which may allow better evolution of these structures subsequently.