TMTPOST -- June 30 is a bad day for many employees of China’s large technology companies. This year, HR departments were hurrying to complete the layoff process by that date.“There is a layoff list, and you are on the list,” the HR lady told Ni Ping bluntly in mid-May.Ni had been expecting it. In March and April, rumors were circulating that a new wave of layoffs would happen in internet companies. AI-themed training sessions, token-use competition and hidden performance assessments were the new normal. Even with much preparation for this, he broke down emotionally. “I do not want to go through it again,” he told NextFin.Ni had worked in CTrip as a back-end software engineer for about a year, with a monthly salary of 25,000 yuan. He worked in CTrip’s most lucrative hotel business unit.With only one-year experience but a relatively high salary, Ni was a natural target for dismissal. Old employees are more familiar with the company’s business and they tend to use AI more efficiently.AI’s effects of artificial intelligence in China are similar to those in developed countries. Young Chinese coding engineers are bearing the forefront of the AI shock.When Tao Xia joined China's online travel giant Ctrip, he thought he had landed one of the country's most comfortable technology jobs.The company had long been known in China's internet industry as a relatively relaxed workplace. Software engineers typically started work around 10:30 a.m., took two-hour lunch breaks, left the office by 7 p.m., and updated the company's flagship app every two weeks.Then artificial intelligence happened. Not long after Tao joined, advances in AI coding tools dramatically accelerated development cycles. Product iterations that once took two weeks were compressed into one. The workday stretched correspondingly."Now I'm working until 10:30 every night," Tao said.The irony, he said, is that the intensified pace has little to do with business growth."It's not because business is booming," he said. "It's because if you don't create new work, your department becomes marginalized. And marginalized departments get cut."Across China's largest technology companies, the AI boom has unleashed a paradoxical phenomenon: while executives proclaim that artificial intelligence will deliver unprecedented productivity gains, workers describe an environment of escalating anxiety, shrinking job security and increasingly frantic efforts to prove their value in an AI-driven future.At companies including Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Meituan, Baidu and Ctrip, employees say AI has become both a strategic imperative and a source of organizational upheaval, triggering layoffs, restructurings and intense internal competition.For China's internet giants, many of whose core businesses have entered mature phases with slowing growth, AI offers both a promise of renewal and a justification for aggressive cost-cutting.High Performers No Longer SafeZhang Hua never imagined he would be among the first casualties.On a Friday morning in May, just half an hour before work started, his department at Meituan called an all-hands meeting."HR simply announced the decision and told everyone this was happening," he recalled.Zhang had every reason to believe he was secure. Before joining Meituan, he had been recruited by ByteDance under its prestigious "Super Special Offer" program for elite graduates, commanding one of the highest salaries among his peers. At Meituan, he was entrusted with several core projects and had expected a promotion this year.None of it mattered.In the latest wave of layoffs, even top performers were not spared. In a neighboring team, two employees who had received "exceeded expectations" performance ratings last year were dismissed. Zhang's own team was effectively eliminated."On paper, the team still exists," he said. "In reality, nobody is left."Elsewhere inside China's technology sector, employees report similar scenes. A large user-growth group at Meituan that once had hundreds of members has reportedly been reduced by about half. At Alibaba, businesses including mapping service Amap and online travel platform Fliggy have undergone significant restructuring.The uncertainty surrounding AI investments has intensified pressure on legacy businesses."No one knows whether these new AI businesses will succeed or when they will succeed," said one employee. "When old businesses stop growing, companies become much more determined to improve efficiency everywhere — which ultimately means layoffs."Anxiety Cascades Through the OrganizationA former ByteDance product manager who now works at an AI startup said AI coding tools such as Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have transformed software development timelines."Products that used to take us two months to build at ByteDance can now be completed in two weeks," he said. "My team can create a demo in three hours and validate an idea within a week."The implications for corporate hierarchies are profound."A product manager increasingly resembles a CEO," he said. "Organizations can be dramatically compressed because there is far less information loss."Signals from senior executives quickly ripple through China's corporate bureaucracy.In March, Meituan CEO Wang Xing told executives that AI agents had made a greater impression on him than ChatGPT itself."AI agents are destined to create enormous productivity gains," Wang said, according to employees familiar with the meeting. "They will also fundamentally change organizations and ways of working."Shortly afterward, Meituan held a company-wide online meeting promoting its internal AI platform, known as "Longxia," encouraging employees to install the tool and convert as much of their daily work as possible into reusable AI "skills."Wang Lei, who works in merchant operations at Meituan, said employees were subsequently required to include a new section in their weekly reports detailing how they had used AI to improve efficiency and what reusable AI workflows they had created.At Alibaba, pressure took a different form.One algorithm engineer said he unexpectedly received a departmental ranking showing employees' monthly AI token consumption. His own usage totaled 17 billion tokens, placing him first and earning public praise. Management indicated that future performance reviews and promotions could incorporate such rankings."The ranking disappeared after a month," he said. "Maybe management realized it wasn't very reliable."But other monitoring systems soon followed.Managers required employees to upload hourly work reports between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. every workday. AI agents automatically recorded coding activity and conversations to generate summaries that employees themselves could not edit.Employees describe a cascading dynamic: senior executives worry about falling behind in AI, middle managers intensify demands to demonstrate commitment, and frontline workers scramble to comply."My manager doesn't really know what AI can do," Wang said. "But he says he won't allow anyone on our team to fall behind in this AI wave."Some managers privately warn employees that failure to embrace AI could make them impossible to protect during future layoffs."Sometimes they'll tell you over dinner, 'If you don't learn AI now, I won't be able to help you later,'" Chen said.Expectations Collide With RealityYet workers say executives' expectations often far exceed current technological realities.Hua Hua, who worked in customer operations at Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall businesses, said managers frequently assume AI can solve problems that remain extremely difficult in practice.One example involves identifying potential best-selling products before they go viral. Executives envisioned using AI to inspect all products on the platform to identify emerging hits. But with tens of millions of products listed daily, the computational and financial costs proved prohibitive.Teams could only test hundreds of thousands of products at a time, resulting in poor prediction accuracy."As an employee, you can't tell your boss that their expectations are unrealistic," Hua said.At times, she said, she felt like "a donkey being whipped from behind.""Being tired isn't the worst part," she said. "The worst part is having no direction and no positive feedback. You're just turning the wheel endlessly without knowing where you're going."A chief technology officer at an AI company said productivity gains from AI depend on prerequisites many companies lack."The foundation is data," he said. "Many companies haven't even completed their digital transformation. And many bottlenecks are human processes that AI alone cannot solve."Software Engineers Face the Harshest ReckoningFor software engineers, however, AI's impact has become increasingly difficult to dismiss.Li Ming, a former front-end engineer at Baidu, said he was first stunned by AI's capabilities when he used Claude Code earlier this year."For the same complex task, domestic AI models might require five or six rounds of interaction," he said. "Claude could solve it in two or three rounds and often do a better job."He experienced a second shock in April when Chinese AI startup Zhipu released its GLM-5.1 model."It was cheap, and its performance was good enough to replace Claude Code," he said."At that moment, I realized my job was at risk."A month later, he appeared on a layoff list.For decades, China's technology industry maintained strict divisions between front-end developers, back-end engineers, testers and algorithm specialists. Those distinctions increasingly appear to be disappearing.At one Alibaba development unit, employees were instructed in May to suspend all non-urgent projects and build AI agents capable of handling future business requests. Product managers would interact directly with the agents, while engineers would only modify the agents themselves.Management suggested that by October, teams that built the best agents would take over responsibilities from weaker teams.At Tencent, engineers developed an AI-powered system capable of automatically fixing software bugs. Human programmers merely verify the fix and approve the code merge. According to employees, the system currently achieves an accuracy rate of roughly 50%.Meanwhile, Alibaba has created internal "full-stack" teams requiring front-end, back-end and testing engineers to become "super individuals" capable of handling all aspects of software development. Meituan has begun implementing similar changes.The transition has proven painful.Han Ling, who was recently reassigned as a full-stack engineer, said she received little training before being assigned her first project."I have to do front-end development, back-end development and testing all by myself," she said. "Everything is scheduled backward from launch deadlines."She frequently remains at work after 9 p.m."I'm exhausted," she said.A New Race BeginsBeginning late last year, China's leading technology companies aggressively subsidized employees' use of AI tools.At Tencent's cloud and smart industries division, some employees received monthly AI token allowances worth as much as $2,000. Those who exhausted their allocations could apply for additional credits. Token consumption was incorporated into performance evaluations."When your usage is too low, your manager asks why," one employee said.Some workers reportedly lent unused AI credits to colleagues.The logic behind such investments is straightforward. If AI increases productivity fivefold, companies face a choice: expand output or reduce headcount."We're not laying anyone off," said the chief executive of a software company. "After spending years developing engineers with deep industry expertise, every one of them is an asset. If AI makes us five times more productive, we should grow the business five times larger."The challenge, however, is whether sufficient market demand still exists."The departments with the least growth are usually the ones going all-in on AI," said Cang, the former Meituan employee. "They need a new story to tell."That dynamic has become particularly acute at Chinese internet companies whose once-dominant businesses have matured.At Meituan, intense competition in food delivery reportedly consumed billions of dollars in subsidies, putting pressure on profits and accelerating cost-cutting efforts. At Baidu, traditional advertising revenues continue to face challenges. At Alibaba, businesses such as Fliggy and Amap have long occupied peripheral positions within the group.At the same time, companies are launching dozens of internal AI projects in search of future growth engines.A product manager at ByteDance, identified as Zhang Lei, said he is currently participating in an internal startup project developing AI productivity software for business customers.From the outset, his team eliminated dedicated design and testing roles, emphasizing instead how many jobs the product could eventually replace.Another colleague developing AI customer service agents has a 2026 objective directly tied to reducing customer service headcount."In every big company, there are dozens of teams racing in the same direction," Zhang said. "If one team succeeds, the company will shift resources to them."Saying Goodbye to an EraAs his severance period approached its end in June, Lin spent weeks interviewing with companies including Alibaba's Taobao, Kuaishou and ByteDance.He still hopes to remain in China's big-tech ecosystem."It's extremely difficult," he said.In his view, leaving a major technology company for a smaller firm represents a permanent loss of status and opportunity.Others have chosen different paths.After leaving Alibaba, Jiang joined a traditional automobile manufacturer. Her new role no longer requires her to justify every task through the lens of AI."My current project doesn't launch until September 30," she said. "The work fits my abilities, and I have enough time. It really makes a difference to your mental state."She has noticed a growing trend among applicants."Whenever we open a position," she said, "huge numbers of former Alibaba employees apply. People are rushing into manufacturing."Cang, meanwhile, has abandoned the pursuit of another big-tech job altogether."I don't want to compete to become the surviving 10%," he said.After being laid off by Meituan in May, he launched a startup focused on developing products for patients with rare diseases overseas. Alongside his primary business, he continues building smaller applications that can often be completed in just a few days.The pace, he noted, is still far faster than anything he experienced at a large technology company.Born in 2000, Cang believes he was always destined to become an entrepreneur."If this layoff hadn't happened," he said, "I probably wouldn't have done it now. The company made the decision for me."更多精彩内容，关注钛媒体微信号（ID：taimeiti），或者下载钛媒体App