Why I left a leading Chinese tech company (think BAT - Baidu / Alibaba / Tencent) after one year

Understand that most of the readers here target to break into IB/ PE/ HF/ Consulting, nevertheless, if anyone here is ever curious about working in a (Chinese) tech company, hopefully this post could shed some lights onto that path (excuse my English since I’m not a native speaker and it’s my first post after reading and taking so much here over the past few years)

My background

Graduated from a local top 3 college in Hong Kong with a Finance major and somehow managed to start my career in a FIG focused principal investments team of a global non-bank financial institution. Quite an exciting role at the beginning, esp. for a fresh graduate, but towards the end of my 6-year tenure, things started to become so repetitive (I guess that’s the downside when you work in an in-house shop for too long) that I was bored out of my mind. Started looking for options and was lured by the BAT brand name and ended up joining it focusing on its overseas investments. After 3 months I decided to quit as soon as hitting the 1-year anniversary mark and I did just that back in Sep. Having been travelling for the past few months, I decided to sit down and reflect upon the main reasons why I quittec and below are the 3 main reasons / observations:

1. Culture
2. Positioning of people with finance background
3. Hiring

Culture

Culture of a Chinese tech company is surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) Chinese. The hardware of the company does resemble a tech company, but the most important thing, the soft side such as people’s mentality, is extremely Chinese. Extremely hierarchical and inefficient that makes the prior financial institution (with more than 100 years of history) I worked in look like a start-up. Internal processes are extremely disorganized. I have been told the explosive growth of the Internet sector over the past 10 years in China means any company that wanted to take on that ride needed to develop extremely fast, sometimes at the expense of its internal processes. Because of the lack of internal processes / control, there’s no clear allocation of work for different teams, such that, in some cases, numerous teams can work on the same task and compete against each other, and in others, nobody wants to touch a shitty task (and people can actually get away with that). Because of the lack of clear cut responsibilites and duties, managers or team heads can come up with execues to hire people and build their own team to do what they want to do (usually investment…). Facetime is extremely important as that’s usually how your boss and more importantly your peers judged how hard you worked. The company has system that tracks the time you tap in and tap out. If you clock in too late or clock out too early, emails will be sent to your boss.

Positioning of people with finance background

I have read it in another post before, generally it feels like you are just a supporting staff if you are not in the real “business teams”. It felt like I was just there to support the “business teams” to do a deal and to help them solve whatever finance related issues they don’t want to touch on. (That said, I came from a FIG background and things may be different if you are coming from TMT). Everyone (surprsinly with no prior deal or investment related experience) from every other team is trying to convince everyone else that they should be included in the deal and so a deal team could have as many as 20 people. It was actually in one of those deals where I realized there’s a limit to how many people (around 10 or 12) can do a call over Wechat (Chinese Whatsapp). A massive deal team like that ultimately gave rise to issues such as lack of coordination, lack of ownership and so impossible to properly evaluate and judge one’s contribution and performance (hence people can easily get away with underperformance and a lot of back stabbing when shit hits the fan).

Hiring

Hiring managers are generally rather inexperienced when it comes to hiring candidates who don’t have the mainland Chinese background. As such, those candidates are generally hired based on their education background or the name of their previous employers. Obviously, not everyone or every team is like that, but, unfortunately many are. I have met a person (in finance) who’s hired because she is a postdoc (in PE investing). Not sure how it’s like in other regions, but usually in Hong Kong that wouldn’t even be considered as an advantage, unless you are a postdoc with one of those more technical backgrounds. Honestly, who goes for PhD in PE investing…? Bankers with ECM background were hired to do M&A stuff. Research analysts were hired to do internal consulting (may be that’s less of a stretch), etc. I’m not saying people can only stick to what they have always been doing，but it just takes more time for them to know what they are doing. And in an extremely disorganized corporate with huge employee turnover every year, it just takes forever to figure that out. This creates a vicious circle that makes an already messy corporate even messier.

After-thought

FOMO seems to run deep in senior management’s blood. As we all know, having a lot of cash doesn’t make you a good investor, although it helps you ring the bell. As Henry Kravis said “don’t congratulate me when I get into a deal, any fool can overpay to get in. Congratulate me only when I get out of a deal”. I guess the sheer number of investments the company made over the past years makes it a daunting task to gauge its investment performance (I doubt even the senior management has any idea about the overall return…). After all, any (financial) under-performance can be conveniently argued as “strategic value add”...

I’m definitely not writing this to deter anyone from joining a tech or a Chinese tech company. There are many perks, as you can imagine, in working for such a company. By all means, I treasure the experience so much because it allows me to understand more about myself and what I really want. After all, one can only find out who you truly are when you are out of your comfort zone. But it’s always better to know what you sign up for before you make a decision (hopefully an informed one), which, I believe, is what WSO is for.