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Text / Wang Haolin
Source: Zhongmian (ID: ZhongMian_ZM)
The post-90s in the new car industry are starting a collective escape plan.
Once, this was the sunrise job they were very fascinated by. The huge halo of “Wei Xiaoli” and the myth of the market value of 100 billion at every turn made the young people born in the 90s willing to jump out of their comfort zone and rush to the gilded land that can lead to wealth. However, after bowing and entering the game, they found that this place is far from the imaginary, milky and flower-covered avenue.
“Everything is fast”, “Everyone is in a hurry”, “Growth is limited”. . . The work vision they hoped for has not been realized, but instead has become a screw in the team, with a bloated organizational structure, layers of reporting workflows, and endless business trips. . . Let them start to reflect, is it worth it?
Under the illusory aura of financial freedom, they are forced to return to reality.
01 Entry: Everything is fast
“Sometimes you can see new stores when you go to a shopping mall.”
“This industry is too fast.” “The changes of a brand, a car, and a company are huge. It took only half a year for a car to go from idea to release, from mass production to delivery, and then to the top in sales. , speeding on the road, all very fast.” Zhang Yang said.
After graduating from Zhongchuan Journalism in 2015, Zhang Yang and his classmates embarked on a completely different path: with his love for the auto industry, he joined Blue Label and was responsible for the marketing of traditional auto companies. In 2018, he jumped to a new energy vehicle company and was responsible for product dissemination. In layman’s terms, it is the public relations of the automobile industry, which communicates the information that the sub-project needs to communicate with designers and engineers, and then uses the media as a bridge to spread.
Because the headquarters is in Guangzhou, and the position of product communication is in Beijing. In Zhang Yang’s memory, “basically on Mondays and Tuesdays or if something happens temporarily, I will fly to Guangzhou at any time.”
Like Zhang Yang, after graduating in 2016 and failing to start a business, Yang Jian started to work in a media in Beijing. For five years, the comfortable life in the system made him feel boring, and even the air was a little depressing. Taking into account the reasons of reality and age, Yang Jian sprouted the idea of returning to his hometown to work. He used his savings for a few years to buy a house in his hometown, and he took a fancy to the new energy industry as a sunrise industry, so he chose to work in a car company.
When Yang Jiangang joined the company, the Beijing branch still rented a shared office space in Wangjing, Beijing, and the Guangzhou headquarters was still in the incubation space of the university town, “feeling like a leather bag company”. Later, the Beijing branch moved to Zhongguancun, and the Guangzhou headquarters also built a building. Everything happened quickly.
Unlike Yang Jian, who joined the industry halfway through, Wang Ning, who has 13 years of experience in the automotive industry, has been working in a German auto parts company since his junior year, and is the only intern who has been retained for a few years. Because of his outstanding performance, he became a management team at the age of twenty-seven.
As early as 2014, she came into contact with new energy car companies, which was the golden age of new energy, and many people even achieved financial freedom with options. Although the new energy car companies received policy support at that time, starting from scratch meant giving up a lot, and she had a smooth life in the traditional car companies and did not expect to change jobs.
Until the last two years, she found that the pace of the company was getting slower and slower, and new projects had not been launched until she left. There is neither exposure to new things nor any upward path. “The bottleneck is not the individual, but the company organization.” “Because it is very large, it will not die out so fast, you just watch it die out slowly.”
Until this year, a new energy car company threw an olive branch, and she took over and joined the job smoothly. But are new energy car companies necessarily good places to go?
02 Dilemma: Internal friction is endless
“There is no working state as imagined, and 90% of the work content overlaps with traditional car companies.” I thought that if I could enter a new energy car company, my work content would undergo earth-shaking changes. But Wang Ning found that nothing in the core changed,
Select suppliers for fixed-point research and development, outsourcing, technical exchanges, quotations, bid opening, and site selection. . . The only difference is to adapt to the needs of Internet companies. Except for the busy work. She teased that “Feishu is very efficient” here, it can make people 007 work anytime and anywhere, and has a good network status. In addition, there are extremely limited things that can be masters and lead. She felt that the other party’s reason for recruiting her was just “more than ten years of work experience”, and she was more skilled in doing these jobs.
In the more than two years of the new energy car company, Li Yan felt the great progress in his ability. “In a traditional car company, a leader would not give an important task to a young man. But in a new energy car company, they are courageous. No matter what title or age you are, he finds that you can, I’ll leave this job to you.”
However, car companies still have restrictions on young people. Even in new energy car companies, the age structure of colleagues is larger than that of Internet companies. The rhythm of the real economy still exists, and it is impossible to give young people faster promotion space and speed like Internet companies. development speed.
From the point of view of young people entering the new car industry, new energy car companies seem to have given a space for promotion, but in fact, the interior has become flat, and promotion is nothing more than a salary increase. “This is different from the real title given to you by traditional car companies.”
Yang Jian’s car company has switched from traditional car companies to new energy vehicles, and his feelings are more obvious. In his company, the concept agreed by the management is not suitable for new energy vehicles, and ordinary employees are difficult to innovate in order to cater to the preferences of the upper class, and the reform is conservative.
And traditional car companies want to share the cake of the market, sometimes the existing foundation is not an advantage – this means transforming or even abandoning the original fuel vehicle production line, and even the technical means of the past decades, but also breaking the path dependence The thinking framework, fast forward to the thinking mode of the Internet.
A person in a vehicle engineering position summarized several characteristics of traditional positions on a social platform: the main force is mainly post-80s; the elderly have rich project experience, and the ascending channel is narrow; the overall atmosphere tends to be conservative.
Due to his long working life, after joining the company, Yang Jian’s salary and level were directly benchmarked to the management, and endless internal frictions followed. From the project initiation report to the approval process, he spends a lot of time getting paper materials and signing each department through the motions. The old employees of car companies have outdated ideas. The May 1 marketing campaign is to use slashes for youth, and everyone is required to take an Internet nickname. “Wrap it with this kind of stupid stuff.”
A few months after joining the company to catch up with the selection of outstanding employees of the year, a large part of the indicators should refer to the overtime hours. As the listing approached, Yang Jian worked overtime until midnight every day, arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and closed on weekends.
Because it is a new line, the business is handled by people with rich experience, but when they finished the work, the company began to parachute the old man to be the leader, “You have smoothed the road, and now someone will pick peaches”, This made him extremely insecure. As far as he knows, their new energy vehicle design also has big problems. When in charge of public relations, some media claimed that their products were plagiarized. The person in charge asked him to write a clarification. He found a colleague in the product department, and the other party said reluctantly that only the U-shaped lamp was designed by them, and the others were plagiarized.
Yang Jian was speechless. Originally, building a car was a behavior from 0 to 1, but now he has bought other cars and dismantled them, just like cats and tigers. “If other car companies on the market sell well, we will make any car.” There is a lot of helplessness in the tone.
03 Escape: It can’t be solved
In the ranking of the top ten expansion industries in 2021 by “Financial Eleven”, new energy was not selected. The report also mentioned: If starting from daily perception, the new energy vehicle industry should be an industry that expands significantly. The industry failed to make the list, despite a sharp rise in revenue and a slow increase in operating profit.
The momentum is huge, but the profit margin cannot keep up. At the same time, the salary level is also criticized by the employees. Li Yan’s monthly salary was 16k when he first joined the job. After working for a year, the personnel told him that there were three salary adjustment places in the department, and he deliberately won one from the leader for him. Li Yan was a little overjoyed, but found out that it only increased by 500, “It’s very cold, I said don’t fight for it.” Later, the second salary increase was a general adjustment, and it rose to 18k.
“When talking about salary, it became an Internet company again.” The same situation also happened to Yang Jian. When talking about salary, the other party said that he could adjust his salary every year, but after he joined the company, he found that he could only adjust a few hundred at a time.
Li Yan said that in a company with tens of thousands of people, fulfilling some promises requires trade-offs and time, but it is still unbearable for individuals, “I understand, but I don’t accept it. Li Yan only knows that he has done work that should not be done at this level. , half a year, a year, still did not wait for promotion. “Since it is the work intensity of the Internet, just go to the Internet company. “He made the choice to leave.
In the second week of his entry, Yang Jian began to regret it, but he tried to persuade himself that on the track of new energy vehicles, all car companies were “running poison”, and it would be good to survive. Give the company a little time and stick to it, but in the end, “it really can’t be resolved.”
The competition in the industry is to increase the vitality of the enterprise, but it is time-consuming and laborious. Yang Jian knew that it would take him at least three years to have a comprehensive understanding of the industry after joining a car company, but he has been here for half a year and almost seven months now, and the things he does are not nutritious, and his new ideas will not get the boss’s approval. not agree.
“Do you really want to make yourself so humble?” The employees who came in the same group as him have already disappeared. The deputy director of the platform told Yang Jian that he would last a few more months at most, and Yang Jian also made the decision to leave. . Before leaving, the director of the media center and him promised to re-divide a department to specialize in graphic and video reports for vertical media. Yang Jian refused without hesitation, “I don’t like it here, it’s useless to tell me this.”
In contrast, Wang Ning’s choice to resign seems a lot more natural. In her opinion, new energy vehicles used to be the outlet, but now they have reached the same state as traditional car companies.
In the past, it took 3 to 5 years to develop a car. Under the catalysis of the Internet, the research and development cycle has been reduced to 25 months or 20 months. “It is no exaggeration to say that the drastic changes in one year can catch up with the traditional industry in 10 years.” She continued. Analysis shows that the manufacturing industry itself is an asset-heavy industry that requires real investment. In fact, new energy vehicles spend more time on financing, but ignore more research and development in basic technology.
For example, she said that German car companies will not go public, they will spend more time developing technology, but they can still be profitable. The basic business logic is to invest in R&D to manufacture a good product and then sell it at a high price. “But that’s not the case with new energy vehicles. It cares more about publicity and service. As a person from the traditional automobile industry, she always believes that the ultimate goal of automobiles is safety and comfort.” Of course, if you look at it from the perspective of capital, you will feel that (new energy car) is very beautiful. “But it’s kind of ridiculous that a car stays in the pursuit of beauty. ‘ she said.
The dream of wealth and freedom is broken, talents are fleeing, and it is time to disenchant the new car industry.
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