The phrase "major tech company CEO conducts midnight inspections" might ring a bell from last August. At that time, several users claiming to be DingTalk employees posted online that CEO Wuzhao (Chen Hang) patrolled the office area between midnight and 12:30 AM. After finding very few people at their workstations, he reportedly criticized all departments the next day, questioning why employees had left early.
Eight months later, a 70,000-word resignation essay titled "Inside Ding" by a DingTalk employee has struck a chord with countless workers, exposing the lesser-seen 'Side B' of the workplace in China's internet giants and sparking deep resonance. This has led many to wonder: what exactly is happening "inside Ding"? Why is it that a team developing an AI tool meant to "liberate the workplace" has itself become a specimen of "imprisoning the workplace"?
What the 70,000-Word Essay Reveals
On June 4th, a lengthy 75,000-word resignation essay titled "Inside Ding" was published on Alibaba's internal network and quickly spread beyond it. The author is Teng Yaxin, a core product manager for DingTalk's AI tool project "ONE". She provided a complete account of the product's journey from its initial launch, its peak daily active users reaching three million, to its eventual disbandment. She also candidly described the real workplace experiences of the entire team.
Four days later, Ma Ruila, a former DingTalk vice president who left in May of this year, responded with an essay titled "Outside Ding," expressing empathy: "That kind of high pressure, that feeling of effort yielding no results, that cycle of frequent reporting, rapid iteration with no visible improvement—I know it."
In her essay, Teng used metaphors like "changing the era," "Operation Wangshu," and "Golden Snitch" to depict a series of workplace dysfunctions: teams blindly catering to superiors, the spread of toxic internal competition, decision-making swayed by leaders' personal whims, and meaningless overtime. While the specific details in the article cannot be individually verified, the widespread dissemination and feedback from netizens indicate that such workplace issues are already widespread, with many workers finding it all too easy to see themselves in the story.
— The product team focused on pleasing superiors, prioritizing appearances over actual results. "The product didn't achieve fame, but the reporting chain was incredibly smooth." More effort was spent on crafting reports and PowerPoint presentations than on refining the product itself, with significant energy drained into writing materials and filling out templates. The team pursued quick wins, chasing only short-term outcomes that were visible, screenshot-able, and could be presented to senior management for approval, while work requiring long-term cultivation and value accumulation was neglected.
— The team fell into unhealthy competition, with ineffective overtime becoming the norm. Leaders would patrol the office like the "Golden Snitch" from Harry Potter; if they found an employee using social media, they would demand a handwritten self-criticism and impose public punishment. Leaders also initiated "Operation Wangshu," requiring employees to monitor the work hours of competing products. If lights were on late in the office across the street, their own team was not allowed to leave.
— Product decisions were hijacked by leaders' personal preferences. Managers' "chef's aesthetic" led to arbitrary changes in product content, with frequent adjustments to the logo, visual system, and product positioning. With each so-called "era change," all employees had to hastily reinterpret the development direction.
The Parallel Online and Offline Narrative
The viral success of "Inside Ding" has exposed a facet of contemporary workplace issues: a value distortion where decisions prioritize superiors over product value, compounded by workplace burnout from the all-consuming internal competition of a performance-driven society. Upper-level decisions stray from the essence of the product and user needs, merely catering to perceptions and packaging outcomes, abandoning professional integrity and product responsibility. Lower-level employees are trapped in formalism, ineffective iterations, and performative overtime, caught in endless, meaningless labor.
Furthermore, from the product's perspective, the ONE AI tool initially promoted a "work finds people" model, attempting to use AI technology to liberate workers from repetitive tasks and redundant information. Later, because the tool's algorithms favored management, it instead amplified the "sense of oppression" in workplace hierarchies, even becoming a tool for workplace exploitation. The platform's "read status sync" feature fostered an extreme "read anxiety." Even if an employee was on break or lacked the conditions to handle work, once a message was read, management could see it in real-time, indirectly forcing employees to respond and take on work unconditionally and immediately. This AI technology ceased to be a tool empowering labor and instead became a round-the-clock surveillance and control shackle binding employees. This is also a reason the tool ultimately declined.
The "Inside Ding" essay creates a parallel narrative between online and offline realities.
On the online level, this tool leverages powerful technology to maximize supervision and control from superiors over subordinates. AI technology efficiently and ruthlessly identifies even the slightest delay or slack in an employee's handling of work information, precisely recording and presenting it to leaders, becoming the "most convenient" tool for corporate rewards and punishments.
On the offline level, the development and iteration of the "ONE" project exhibit typical symptoms of "big company malaise," serving as a vivid example of ineffective workplace competition. Employees are constantly busy all day without understanding the true meaning of their busyness; teams continuously produce in volume, yet remain detached from genuine user needs.
"Overtime equals attitude, internal competition equals loyalty, obedience equals correctness, busyness matters more than users." This distorted workplace creed spreads like a virus. Everyone resents it, yet remains deeply entangled and finds it difficult to extricate themselves.
The Timely Need to Curb 'Internal Competition'
German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in The Burnout Society: "Every age has its signature affliction. The affliction of our age is burnout." When efficient technology becomes a means of mental exploitation, and ineffective busyness is solidified as the workplace norm, DingTalk's "ONE" project becomes a microcosm of contemporary workplace burnout. The original intent of AI was to liberate labor, but it ultimately turned into a monitoring tool forcing employees to maintain an "active status." "Read anxiety" blurs the boundary between work and rest, keeping employees in a state of forced online availability and constant standby anxiety. The harder they work, the more they feel a sense of emptiness; the more they iterate, the harder it becomes to produce results.
In many internet companies, especially leading giants, phenomena like ineffective iteration, overnight competition, reporting as the top priority, and blindly benchmarking against competitors have made workplace burnout increasingly concrete. Upper-level managers arbitrarily adjust direction to please their superiors without bearing responsibility for the final product outcome. Grassroots employees are bound by the shackles of "must produce, must improve, must meet targets." Even if the direction is chaotic and the work is ineffective, they dare not stop. Over time, employees gradually lose the ability to relax and have mental space, equating busyness with value and internal competition with effort. They evolve from passively obeying rules to actively overdrawing themselves, becoming "workplace prisoners."
This meaningless busyness creates a false prosperity of全员拼搏 (all-out struggle), continuously consuming young people's energy, eroding professional passion, and透支ing physical and mental health. Everyone is swept into the torrent of internal competition, afraid to stop or slack off, ultimately trapped in a vicious cycle of "the busier you are, the emptier you feel; the more you compete internally, the more exhausted you become."
Breaking this vicious cycle of "busier yet more hollow, more competitive yet more fatigued" makes the practical significance of curbing "internal competition-style rivalry" increasingly prominent. In 2025, "comprehensively curbing 'internal competition-style' rivalry" was included in the government work report for the first time. Subsequent central government documents, such as the Action Plan to Boost Consumption, explicitly place safeguarding workers' rights to rest and leave in an important position, strictly prohibit illegal extension of working hours, and continuously strengthen supervision of working hours and enforcement oversight. This lays a policy foundation and provides institutional safeguards for reshaping a healthy and orderly workplace ecosystem.
Performative overtime and ineffective "internal competition" are symptoms of "big company malaise," but the ailment is not confined to "big companies." Labor is the essence of humanity. Genuine labor realizes self-worth through creation, infusing one's will, thoughts, and creativity into the objective world. Genuine labor may be tiring, but it is not空虚 (empty). Genuine labor may be hard, but it does not make one迷失 (lost).
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