By the time he arrived at Alibaba, Tim had been working to get there for years. Raised in a small town in Zhejiang province, he’d competed to be at the top of every school class.
As a student at one of China’s best universities, he knew tech giants rarely hire without prior work experience, so he competed for internships at social media companies Tencent and ByteDance. And as a recent graduate, he competed in four rounds of interviews and a written exam before finally receiving an offer.
After a few months working at the company’s Hangzhou campus, Tim was called into a meeting with the other four graduates hired in his round. “At the end of the year,” their team leader told them, “one of you will lose.”