Turning 40 in China's Tech: A Birthday Spent Counting Layoffs
Age discrimination in Chinese tech is a numbers game: a 40-year-old's salary equals two junior engineers, so headcount cuts target him first. The essay also shows that AI's impact goes beyond productivity, reshaping job security and the sense of craft for a generation of coders.
Turning 40 in a Chinese tech company now means watching your team shrink in real time. The author's team of four colleagues born in the 1980s is down to one, with the last departure announced on his lunar birthday. A team lead warns that high-level engineers are more vulnerable because one layoff replaces two salaries, and internal postings show no client-side openings at all. The only transfer options are backend roles demanding skills the author doesn't have, and the headcounts get withdrawn before he can apply.
The essay mixes these workplace realities with personal reflection: a mortgage, an unemployment benefit of 2,088 yuan a month for one year, and the sense that a 40-year-old's worth is measured against younger, cheaper engineers. He reaches out to a former classmate now leading an AI group, but that door closes because his background is pure engineering. The author's own take on AI is sour; he left a management job at a big company four years ago to be a regular engineer again, and now finds that AI agents writing code has stripped away the satisfaction of what he calls 'traditional programming'.
The team lead's advice to find roles elsewhere to 'leave room for other brothers' frames layoffs as a collective survival strategy, where individual job hunting becomes a sacrifice for the group, a sharp contrast to Western individualist career moves.
The author's dismissal of AI-generated code as lacking the joy of 'traditional programming' reveals a generational divide: developers who learned to code before AI treat it as a craft, not a utility, and resent automation that erases that skill.
The internal job search shows how quickly client-side skills become obsolete in a market tilting toward AI algorithms and backend roles, so a veteran engineer's experience counts for less than his current stack.
The author's joke about the birthday message asking 'How do you know I'm a 1? What if I'm a 0?' uses the gay slang for top/bottom, adding a layer of dark humor to the corporate perfunctory greetings.