- Yuri Zanoni is a tech worker who made the switch from Amazon to Alibaba in 2020.
- He says the 996 work culture and numerous pandemic lockdowns were huge points of stress.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yuri Zanoni, a 33-year-old tech worker based in Shanghai. This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider verified his employment and salary.
Back in 2019, I was living in Sao Paulo and working for Amazon when I got a LinkedIn message from an Alibaba recruiter.
They were looking for someone with e-commerce experience — I was working for their biggest competitor — and who was willing to make the move to China.
The job offer felt like a dream come true. They were offering compensation that was more than twice what I was making at Amazon — which was around $25,000 annually — as well as several big steps up promotion-wise.
But today, after three years of adapting to the intense work culture and numerous lockdowns, I've come to develop a real love-hate relationship with the work culture in China.
Moving from Sao Paulo to Hangzhou was an isolating experience
I moved to Hangzhou in 2020.
The first few months of working in Hangzhou were terrifying. Besides my manager, only a handful of my colleagues were proficient in English.
Even though I was already proficient in some Mandarin — I had spent a few years learning it in Macau and Taiwan as a university student — it was nowhere near good enough for a lot of workplace interactions.
Back then, I was mainly working on Alibaba's Brazil operations, doing localisation work and content strategy. Despite often being the only Portuguese speaker in the room, my lack of Mandarin proficiency meant that I often couldn't convey my insights on the market I grew up in.
I started feeling really isolated, especially because I lived close to Alibaba's Campus — what we called the company's headquarters — which was far from the rest of the city. I'd always lived in big cities before, so the loneliness was really affecting my mental health.
China's 996 work culture introduced me to a whole new level of grind
Like many other Chinese tech companies, Alibaba has an intense 996 work culture. That means working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
That was a big shock to me when I first moved, because I felt pressure to arrive before everyone and to stay until after my manager had left. If I wanted to leave early, I'd either have to sneak out of the office or get dinged on my performance review.
Before moving to Hangzhou, I had never seen people bring so much of their home into the office. My colleagues would bring into the office their mattresses, pillows, and quilts, along with a ton of food.
That was really new to me. I try to separate the personal from the professional in my life, and it was a huge shift from working at Amazon.
Eventually, after growing tired of the work culture and life in Hangzhou — which I found wasn't the best city for a 30-year-old single international to live in — I started looking for jobs in Shanghai.
Living in Shanghai was amazing, until the lockdowns came
In 2021, I moved to Shanghai to start working for ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, as a content strategist. From the minute I moved there, I felt like it was the home I didn't even realize I was looking for.
Shanghai is more international than Hangzhou. It's a city you can really lose yourself in. There's so much going on culturally and in the nightlife, and the size of the city means that you can always reinvent yourself. Plus, I was able to find an apartment in the heart of the city, in Shanghai's French Concession neighborhood.
ByteDance had less of a grindset work culture than Alibaba. I also felt more integrated because of my colleagues spoke English, especially since I was working with teams based in Los Angeles and Singapore.
But then came the lockdowns. In that first year of living in Shanghai, I would estimate that I spent around 15% of the year under some kind of lockdown restriction.
And these were no small lockdowns: You were confined to your home and not even allowed out onto your balcony. It was a really psychologically stressful time to be in Shanghai.
Despite all of that, I don't regret moving here
I often disagree with the worldview of some of the people I meet, but coming here has been the right move for me.
I currently make more than three times what I was making at Amazon in 2019. And as someone who works in tech, China is a really interesting place to be. It feels like everything starts here, because of how quickly the tech sector moves.
And now that China has reopened to the world, it feels like Shanghai is reemerging. Crowds and visitors are back, I'm making new friends, and my Mandarin is getting better.
Because I spent so much of the past three years mostly in Hangzhou and Shanghai, there's still so much I've yet to see, both in China and the rest of Asia. I'm really looking forward to seeing the rest of it.