Can't Survive, Thinking of Going Into Outsourcing? Read My Contract-Worker Experience First

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Background: 15 years of work experience, always a full-time employee before this, having worked for years at big companies like NetEase and Youzan. Now laid off at 35, under survival pressure, I’ve just joined an outsourcing firm. I’ve recorded several videos before advising everyone never to choose outsourcing if you have any other option, unless you literally have nothing to eat. A lot of people said I was like the empress who asked why the starving peasants didn’t eat meat. Once, an Alibaba Cloud outsourcing gig came to me too, and I even passed the interview. Honestly, at the time I couldn’t be bothered, because I knew outsourcing was a trap — the internet is flooded with stories of people being pulled off projects, benched, and forced into arbitration. But with today’s share, I want to say: what everyone sees is only the tip of the iceberg, and what I see myself is only the tip of the iceberg too. Today I’m joining an outsourcing company to let you experience just how much it screws people over. But in this environment, many ordinary people have no right to choose and no right to negotiate. Unless you’ve jumped outside the three loans and stepped out of the five insurances.

1. From a Big-Tech Full-Time Role to Outsourcing: Not a Downgrade, but Being Backed Into a Corner

I spent 3 years at a big-tech company in Hangzhou and nearly 6 years at a large e-commerce company. Before that, my social insurance and housing fund were always paid in full by default, and every year there was a year-end bonus of 13 to 16 months’ salary. Laid off at 35, I looked for work for over half a year and found nothing suitable. This isn’t just my individual case — it’s a systemic abandonment. A few days ago I interviewed for an ops role at a small company of just over 100 people, and the person who went in with me was a 35-year-old ops developer my own age. He’d worked for many years, got laid off, found a job, worked three months, and got laid off again. I do self-media and put together an unemployment group chat; the dozens of people in it are all out of work and benched. For a family like mine — I bought a house at the peak in 2019 and now have a small child to feed — the pressure and anxiety of long-term unemployment weigh on me heavily, and I lie awake anxious every night. I need an income.

In the comments of a video I posted on Bilibili, someone said the highly educated are all going into outsourcing now.

At this point I couldn’t care less about face, past glory, or reflection. I just want a job to support my family. In fact, I never really looked up to these so-called big-tech resumes either. Us lowly wage slaves are really no different from slaves in ancient times. NetEase looks glamorous as a big company, but the pay is actually very low — worse than some outsourcing roles. Outsourcing and full-time work are essentially both about serving the boss; don’t think there’s any difference. Some might say the money is a bit more, but I think that’s a paradox. If outsourcing provided the boss the same cost-effective service as full-time staff, how long do you think your full-time role would last before you got cut? The whole reason they bring in outsourcing is that they feel you full-timers are paid too much, so the boss wants to try outsourcing to see if he can cut costs. And once he tastes the sweetness, watch whether that knife comes down on you. For example, hiring an outsourced worker at 15k while a full-time role costs 20k or more. That’s arithmetic an elementary schooler could do. I don’t want to over-explain. Even if they don’t cut you for now, you’ll produce like crazy out of fear of being cut, which benefits the boss. Because once you’re cut, there’s a very high probability you won’t find the same role at the same salary. Take me: I used to make 20-something thousand, now I can only take half. More critically, outsourcing carries no N+1 burden, no social-insurance and housing-fund base pressure, and no hidden cost of long-term employment. To the boss, this isn’t “cost-effectiveness” — it’s a pure cost line that can be cut off at any time.

Now, I’m about to join an outsourcing company and be dispatched to a certain internet giant. I know outsourcing is a trap, but I have no other choice.

In fact, I’ve never even walked through the front door of this outsourcing company, let alone know where it’s located; maybe I’ll only go there when I get pulled off a project and have to sit in the office on standby. I’d interviewed for the full-time version of this role before, and my resume probably didn’t even clear the system, because of my education and age. Those past experiences simply don’t matter to a big company. A former colleague of mine (two jobs back) has worked at this company for years; he said their team only hires outsourced workers now — no headcount for full-time at all, and if there is any, they want young people with 985/211 degrees. I obviously don’t fit. He said he’d refer me for an outsourcing role, that their project was fairly stable and could be a long-term gig, so with a try-it-and-see attitude I handed him my resume. That same day their outsourcing partner called me to arrange an interview. The interview went smoothly — we talked for over 40 minutes. There was supposed to be a second round with hand-written code, but the outsourcing HR told me the client said it wasn’t necessary, maybe they’d learned enough about me already, because a former front-line technical-support intern from my old team had also gone over there after leaving. They’d probably asked around about my background indirectly.

At first the outsourcing HR gave me feedback that the client thought I might be unstable, because my previous work history was pretty good, and they worried I’d hold a grudge against outsourcing. What could I say? To say I have no grudge would be impossible — I hadn’t even signed these contracts yet, so claiming I didn’t care would be a lie. But it also seemed I had no choice.

Then came the contract signing and onboarding. Not a transition, not temporary. I seriously signed a three-year labor contract, clocking in every day, supposedly doing the same work as full-time employees.

But is it really the same?

Soon after joining you quickly realize: your access level is nowhere near that of full-time employees. You can’t see the whole company org chart, only the small slice of your own department; there are piles of internal systems, and you can access only a handful; some documents, code repositories, meetings, and group chats you clearly need for work, but you just can’t get in. It’s not that you don’t know how to use them — the system simply never granted you permission.

Why? Because you’re not “one of us.”

Even if you sit in the same row of desks as full-time employees every day, use the same computers, eat at the same cafeteria, and attend the same stand-ups, in the system you’re still an external account. The client’s information-security policies, confidentiality rules, and intranet permissions naturally wall you off from the core. You’re like a drop of oil mixed into water — you look like you’re together, but you’ve never truly blended.

Some might say: going into outsourcing with 15 years of experience — doesn’t that mean you’ve hit a wall?

I don’t want to explain whether I’ve “hit a wall.” What I want to say is: when you’re over 35, big tech has no headcount, mid-size companies are laying off, small companies are going under, and startups are nine-deaths-one-survival, outsourcing isn’t a “choice” — it’s “the only option left that lets you earn money while standing up.”

But only after I signed that contract did I discover:

This “only option” may itself be a carefully designed trap.

First, let’s clarify a few concepts: outsourcing, dispatch, BPO

Before going on, it’s worth separating a few terms that often get mixed up. Many people hear “outsourcing” and think it’s one thing, but there are big differences inside it.

Labor dispatch vs. staff outsourcing

The legal relationship of labor dispatch is “three parties, two contracts”: you sign a labor contract with the dispatch company, get dispatched to work at the host employer, and are managed by the host employer. If something goes wrong at the host employer, the dispatch company is the legal employer and bears employer liability. After the 2012 revision of the Labor Contract Law, labor dispatch was restricted to “temporary, auxiliary, substitutable” roles, and continuous use on the same role cannot exceed 6 months.

Staff outsourcing (also called role outsourcing or project outsourcing) is a “two-party contract”: you sign a labor contract with the outsourcing company, and the outsourcing company signs a service contract with the client. You’re managed by the outsourcing company and nominally “provide services” to the client, rather than being “an employee of” the client. Legally the client is not your employer, and many of the protections meant for full-time employees are bypassed.

In reality, big companies basically all use staff outsourcing. It looks like dispatch — you physically work at the client, take the client’s orders — but the legal relationship is even looser than dispatch, and the client’s liability is smaller.

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) vs. staff outsourcing

BPO pays by “business results.” For example, outsourcing an entire call center, a financial shared-services center, or a data-labeling team, where the client settles by volume processed, connection rate, and accuracy. Under this model, the outsourcing company has some management autonomy, and employee performance is assessed by the outsourcing company.

Staff outsourcing pays by “headcount.” The client says “I want 10 Java developers,” and the outsourcing company charges per head per month. You sit at the client’s desk, are directly managed by the client’s project manager, and do the most core work of the client’s business, but your labor relationship hangs off the outsourcing company. Your daily reports, weekly reports, OKRs, and code reviews are all managed by the client.

The one I signed is typical staff outsourcing: the power to use labor sits with the client, the cost liability sits with the outsourcing company, and the risk all sits with the employee.

2. Why Us Specifically: Four Ledgers

A few days ago I saw a Xinhua report that called companies laying off middle-aged employees “releasing” them. I found it laughable — what does “release” mean? Releasing labor, or releasing cost?

A person who works diligently for over a decade ends up as a number on a report that needs to be “released.” This isn’t an individual case but a systemic abandonment. Put the individual cases together and you can see a complete logic of “middle-aged clearance.” It balances at least four ledgers.

1. The cost ledger: people at 35 are too expensive

At 35, earning over 20k a month, having done execution-level work for over a decade. In middle age, your stamina, your ability to pull all-nighters, and your on-call response speed really can’t match a 25- or 26-year-old. Your output isn’t necessarily higher, but your cost stays high.

When the economy is rising and the business is expanding, this cost is nothing; but once the business contracts and profits slide, the middle-aged become the first numbers pulled out for scrutiny.

The boss won’t say outright, “You’re too expensive.” They’ll say “organizational optimization,” “cost reduction and efficiency,” “focus on the core.” But strip away the rhetoric and the core is one sentence: your salary ÷ your replaceability — the ratio is too high.

More critically, a company can’t just cut your pay directly. Labor law is right there; a forced pay cut is illegal and easily triggers arbitration and public-opinion risk. The most compliant, most decent, most once-and-for-all approach is to buy you out at N+1 and let you go.

But this ledger isn’t done. People at 35 being expensive isn’t just about salary — there’s another layer of cost that companies won’t say out loud, but HR and hiring managers silently score: employment risk.

In middle age, your body is long past its twenties state. Cervical spondylosis, lumbar disc herniation, high blood pressure, fatty liver, chronic gastritis, plus the thyroid nodules, kidney stones, and arrhythmia that run high in the internet industry — these ailments won’t be written on your resume, but they’ll be written in your physical exam report. You might think you can still take it, but in the company’s eyes, these are ticking time bombs one by one.

Overtime is the norm in the internet industry: all-nighters for launches, back-to-back version iterations, on-call whenever a project is tight. Young bodies recover fast — three or four hours of sleep and they’re good as new; what about people over 35? One all-nighter takes three days to recover from, and blood pressure, blood sugar, and heart start sounding alarms. The company isn’t afraid of your overtime; it’s afraid of something happening to you at your desk. If there really is a mishap — sudden death, heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage — the company faces not an N+1 problem but massive compensation, a public-opinion crisis, regulatory accountability, even a wrongful-death lawsuit.

So in the eyes of many employers, cutting a worker over 35 is essentially also a “risk clearance.” They won’t say “your body isn’t up to it, I’m afraid you’ll drop dead”; they’ll only say “the organization needs to get younger,” “the team needs more energy,” “we need people with more drive.” But translate that and the meaning is the same: at your age, your pay is high, your output isn’t necessarily high, and your body might give out — both the cost-effectiveness and the risk-return ratio are too poor.

This is also why outsourcing has instead become a “shelter” for the middle-aged. Outsourcing companies don’t care about your physical exam report, because the employment relationship sits with them, and if something happens they can pass it down layer by layer; big companies toss out the high-risk, high-cost “old bones,” saving money and shedding liability at once. From a full-time role “optimized” into an outsourcing role, on the surface it’s a job change; in reality the company has turned you from a “high-cost, high-risk asset” into “low-cost, disposable consumable.”

2. The demographics ledger: over ten million graduates a year — you have to give young people a chance

Of course, this isn’t because companies are kind-hearted; it’s because policy offers subsidies and fresh graduates are cheap.

This logic is colder and more realistic.

Over ten million college students graduate each year, and youth unemployment is one of the core indicators of social stability. At the policy level, companies are encouraged to expand hiring of fresh graduates — subsidies, tax breaks, household-registration quotas, all kinds of incentives pointing in one direction: get young people in the door first.

For companies, hiring fresh graduates is also a sure-win deal.

For the same role, a fresh graduate’s total package might be only 60% or even half of a middle-aged worker’s. They have no mortgage, no children, no elderly-support burden, and can accept a lower base salary, higher overtime intensity, and blurrier boundaries of responsibility. More importantly, they still believe in “growth,” “training,” and “a promising future,” and are willing to trade time and stamina for a resume.

Middle-aged people are different. We’ve seen too many projects, heard too many empty promises, and know which overtime is meaningful and which is just depletion. We calculate the price of our labor, refuse meaningless depletion, and choose to rest when our bodies sound alarms.

In the company’s eyes, this is called “hard to manage.”

So a complete blood-transfusion logic naturally forms: replace the middle-aged’s high price and clear-headedness with young people’s low price and obedience. The total number of roles doesn’t grow, the budget is basically fixed, so hiring one more fresh graduate means freeing up one full-time slot. Whose slot? Of course, the most expensive batch of people.

3. The consumption ledger: the middle-aged have already spent their big money

This is the most ironic layer, and a point many people haven’t spelled out — I figured it out myself.

At our age, most likely we’re already married, have bought a house, and carry a mortgage. The big money that needed to be spent has basically been spent. The house is bought, the car replaced, the child born; family expenses are heavy, but the peak of big-ticket consumption has passed.

But young people are different. They need their first proper job, need to save for a house, marriage, and children. Give them full-time roles and they can keep entering this cycle of “labor—consumption—debt”: buying a house, renovating, buying a car, childcare, education… every one of these is GDP, and every one keeps land finance, banks, and the consumption supply chain running. Look at the end station of Hangzhou’s Line 3, Wushanqiancun — they’ve even built the subway out to the farmland. Why would local finance plan the subway out to such a godforsaken place? Because there’s plenty of empty land, easy to build on and sell. And who do they sell the land to? Of course, to the wave after wave of chives behind us. And we middle-aged have already gotten on the bus when we should have — I bought at the peak in ‘19, and you couldn’t get me to switch houses now, but young people are different. They’re willing to consume.

From this angle, prioritizing full-time roles for young people isn’t a simple question of “fairness” — it’s an inevitable choice for the whole economic system to keep running.

And what happens after the middle-aged are optimized out? Our spending power drops off a cliff. Since society doesn’t need my productivity for now, I’ll proactively cut all non-essential spending: no renewing memberships, no ordering takeout, no buying clothes, no dinner gatherings. I grit my teeth on the mortgage and save on everything else.

The system squeezes us out of the production side while hoping we’ll stay on the consumption side. But it forgets that people squeezed out of production simply have no ability to keep consuming.

4. The legal ledger: “voluntary” is the perfect fig leaf for this harvest

So back to that negotiated termination of the labor contract at my last company.

The company didn’t openly force me to sign; the terms were full of “negotiated” and “voluntary,” and they even gave N+1 compensation to let me leave with dignity. But if I didn’t sign, they’d give me all kinds of trouble, magnifying every tiny mistake infinitely to force me out, and then, once I’d left, I found that what remained on the market was mostly outsourcing roles, contract roles, project-based roles, even a pile of temporary roles. Full-time slots weren’t nonexistent, but either the pay was halved, or the responsibilities doubled, or the competition was so brutal there was no chance of winning. For example, at this big company I’m going to, the same full-time role requires a 985/211 degree — not because the work is so hard that only a top graduate could do it, but because there are too many people, so they deliberately set a screening threshold. Too many people, and companies use education as a low-cost filter.

My going half a year without finding something suitable isn’t because I lack ability — it’s because I proactively filtered out some garbage roles and outsourcing roles, but once you filter like that there are hardly any good roles left. Yet savings are draining, the mortgage is due every month, and family expenses can’t be reduced by a cent. At that moment, an outsourcing contract with seemingly decent income is placed in front of you — can you not sign it?

If you sign, it’s your “voluntary” choice; if you don’t, you’re “not reading the room.”

The brilliance of this rhetoric is: it converts a systemic, structural predicament into a question of personal choice. The company doesn’t have to bear the bad name of “forcing out old employees,” society doesn’t have to face the interrogation of “imbalanced distribution,” and everyone can say with a clear conscience: “He chose it himself.”

But behind the choice is a reality squeezed until only one path remains.

During my time doing self-media I’ve also recorded many videos about outsourcing. I said I’d previously turned down a 15k outsourcing role at Alibaba, and someone below commented that having a job at all was already good, why be so picky. But only I know that job also required shift work and all-nighters, which I definitely couldn’t take. I have to admit my age simply can’t compare with young people’s anymore — on Bilibili, piles of people say I look 45 at 35. Plus I know my own body: I have IgA nephropathy, ulcerative colitis, and stomach problems. I can’t take that kind of pressure. At 35, I’d rather earn a bit less than take those extra few thousand or ten thousand yuan and risk my life. I’ve seen too many cases of people working themselves to sudden death.

And even for outsourcing, my physical exam report made others a little worried too.

• History of chronic glomerulonephritis; positive urine protein; increased red blood cells on urine microscopy
• Sinus bradycardia
• Intrahepatic bile duct stones
• Possible accessory spleen
• Left kidney cyst
• Bilateral renal crystals

The one most likely to turn serious here is the nephritis history. Maybe in a few decades my condition progresses to uremia, my body gets so bad I need daily dialysis, and by then I might not even be able to find outsourcing work.

3. The Onboarding Process: No Human in Sight, Just Clicking “Confirm” Online

The whole onboarding was done by phone and WeChat. The contract was sent over — a PDF of a dozen-plus pages — and at every step the system prompted: “If you don’t click confirm, the process can’t continue.”

So I clicked. And then what did I see?

Clause One: The right to adjust your role — what you signed isn’t a labor contract, it’s an “indenture”

“Where changes occur due to Party A’s production, operation, and service needs, industrial and product structure adjustments, organizational setup, etc., requiring the transfer of Party B’s work role, Party B agrees to accept it.”

This sentence is written in black and white in the contract. Translated: the company can, for any reason, at any time, transfer you to any role, any city — and you already “agreed” when you joined.

Article 35 of the Labor Contract Law clearly stipulates: changes to a labor contract shall be made in written form and by mutual agreement. But this contract, through “prior agreement,” directly hollows out the right to negotiate.

Today I’m doing a project at a big company; tomorrow, with one word, the company sends me to another city, another role, even at a pay cut — the contract is already written, and I agreed.

Clause Two: Pay cut when pulled off a project — returned by the client, salary slashed in half

The outsourcing industry has a term called “leaving the project” (出项), meaning being returned by the client. The contract’s pay clause for “implementation-type roles” explicitly states:

“Project allowances and project bonuses are both issued on the premise that Party B is employed and on a project.”
“Changes to salary and work location caused by project adjustments or leaving a project are all situations of normal performance of the labor contract agreed by both Party A and Party B, and do not involve the issue of changing the labor contract.”

Translated: if the client doesn’t want me anymore, the project allowance and bonus can all be stopped, and the base salary may be reassessed too. And this isn’t called a “contract change” — no negotiation needed — it’s called “normal performance.”

The salary on the contract is split into “base salary + project allowance + project bonus.” After leaving a project, the project portion goes to zero and income is slashed in half. But the company doesn’t need to consult you.

The deeper reason lies in the business model between the outsourcing company and the client. In many outsourcing contracts, the client has a “probation” or “assessment” clause, during which, if they deem you “unsuitable,” they can return you at no cost or low cost. In other words, you’re actually a “sample” the outsourcing company gives the client for free to try out — if you work well, they keep you and keep taking their cut; if not, they return you, and you bear all the cost.

This is also why outsourcing companies are so sensitive to long-term leave and “slack” at work: once you can’t produce efficiently and continuously, the client has a reason to return you at any time. And after being returned, your project allowance goes to zero, and you may even be required to accept standing by at 80% pay. On the surface it’s company policy; in reality your salary is discounted to fill the cost of the outsourcing company “currying favor with the client.”

Clause Three: The salary objection period — stay silent for a month and you’re deemed to agree

“The month in which the salary is received is the objection period for that salary. If Party B fails to raise it within the objection period, Party B shall be deemed to have no objection to that salary.”

Labor law has no concept of a “salary objection period.” For an employer to use a contract stipulation to limit a worker’s time to reclaim wages to within one month is a typical standard-form clause that excludes the worker’s rights.

In theory, under Article 26 of the Labor Contract Law, such a clause should be void. But the problem is: when you actually go to court, the arbitration committee or court may think that “since you signed, you should have spotted the problem within a month.” This directly raises the cost of defending your rights.

Clause Four: Handover tied to wages — no complete handover, no money for you

“If Party B fails to complete the handover on time, Party A has the right to temporarily withhold settlement of wages, economic compensation, reimbursements, and other payments, and the issuance of the separation certificate.”
“Before Party B completes the work handover, Party A may temporarily withhold payment of economic compensation.”

This clause directly violates Article 50 of the Labor Contract Law: the employer shall issue a certificate of termination upon dissolving or ending the labor contract, and handle the transfer of the worker’s file and social insurance within 15 days. Wages and economic compensation shall be paid on time according to law and cannot be delayed on the grounds of “no handover.”

But the company writes this into the contract precisely to hold you up when you leave: you dare not do the handover as the company requires? Then forget getting your money and your separation certificate.

Clause Five: Confirmation of all rules, regulations, and/or agreements — the “rules family bucket” you’re deemed to accept upon joining

There’s another clause in the labor contract that’s easy to overlook but extremely lethal:

I have carefully read and undertake to comply with the following rules, regulations, and/or agreements, and undertake to strictly implement the following rules, regulations, and/or agreements in my future work:
(1) Position Description
(2) Confidentiality Agreement
(3) Letter of Intent to Hire
(4) Employee Handbook
(5) Onboarding Management System
(6) Probation and Confirmation Management System
(7) Personnel Adjustment Management Rules
(8) Separation Management System
(9) Labor Contract Management System
(10) Position Transfer Management System
(11) Compensation Management System
(12) Implementation-Type Employee Compensation and Performance Management System
(13) Annual Contribution Bonus Incentive Plan
(14) Value Contribution Implementation Measures
(15) Senior Management Compensation Management System
(16) Attendance Management System
(17) Benefits Management System
(18) Performance Management System
(19) Restatement of Key Points on Performance Assessment Management for Senior Management
(20) Rewards and Penalties Management System
(21) Information Security Rewards and Penalties System
(22) Training Management Measures
(23) Cadre Ethics and Discipline Management Rules
(24) Supervision Management Measures
(25) Cadre Integrity and Self-Discipline Standards
(26) Cadre Accountability Measures
(27) Standards for Economic Penalties for Cadre Rule and Discipline Violations
(28) Employee Borrowing and Reimbursement System
(29) Personnel Management System During Response to Sudden Public Events
(30) Party A’s other various rules and regulations

Below is the signature line.

This is probably the most “insidious” page in the whole contract: with a single “I have carefully read and undertake to comply,” it packages over 30 rules and regulations you’ve never even seen into your obligations all at once.

What’s worse, when signing the labor contract, these rules and regulations are written into the contract by default and you’re required to sign. No one trained you; you don’t even know where to find these agreements.

What does this mean? It means the company can, at any time in the future, pick a clause out of any one of these regulations you’ve never seen, and use it to bind you, punish you, dock your pay, or even fire you. And that signature you made when joining is the ironclad proof of “I agree.”

This isn’t notification — it’s systematic advance harvesting: locking all future rights of interpretation, punishment, and change into that one signature you made when you joined.

4. A Legal Perspective: The Systemic Risk of the “Blanket General Consent” Clause

This is a typical “blanket general consent” clause, which legally sits in a gray zone — partly valid, partly void, but with the core risk lying in the burden of proof and the cost of defending your rights.

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Legal characterization: this isn’t “confirming receipt,” it’s “prior blanket authorization”

On the surface this is a confirmation of “I have carefully read and undertake to comply,” but in substance it is:

With one signature, authorizing in one go the future unilateral making, modifying, and interpreting of 30 (or even more) rules and regulations.

Article 4 of the Labor Contract Law requires: rules and regulations directly involving workers’ vital interests shall be discussed by the employee representative congress or all employees, determined through equal consultation with the trade union or employee representatives, and publicized or communicated to workers.

The document I signed swapped “communication” for “blanket consent” and hollowed out “equal consultation” into “unilateral making.”

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Item-by-item risk analysis

Clause type	Legal risk point	Possibly void / challengeable
Position Description*, *Letter of Intent to Hire	May not match the actual role, becoming a basis for transfer	If content is vague, can argue it wasn’t clearly agreed
Confidentiality Agreement	The 500k non-compete and 50k reporting penalty written earlier	Non-compete penalty too high, compensation too low (30%), can argue for adjustment
Implementation-Type Employee Compensation and Performance Management System	Pay cut on leaving project, salary split into “base + project allowance”	Salary objection period, pay cut upon leaving project, suspected of excluding workers’ rights
Performance Management System	110-point passing line, 100 points = failing, 8% reward/penalty	Unreasonable assessment standards, penalty-nature clauses, can argue void
Separation Management System	Handover tied to wages and economic compensation	Directly violates Article 50 of the Labor Contract Law, void
Personnel Adjustment Management Rules*, *Position Transfer Management System	Unilateral transfer right	Prior consent to transfer hollows out negotiation right, can argue void
Rewards and Penalties Management System*, *Information Security Rewards and Penalties System	“Fining power” dressed up as performance assessment	Companies have no fining power; can only claim damages and must prove them
Cadre Integrity and Self-Discipline Standards*, *Cadre Accountability Measures	I signed the “employee” version, yet it contains senior-management/cadre clauses	Expands scope of obligations, unequal
“Party A’s other various rules and regulations”	Unlimited authorization	Most dangerous; any new regulation the client adds in future, you’ve “already agreed”

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The three most core legal issues

1. “Other various rules and regulations” — the unlimited-authorization clause

“(30) Party A’s other various rules and regulations”

This is the most fatal clause in the whole document. It means:

• When you sign today, there are only 30
• Tomorrow the client adds a 31st, a 32nd… no need for me to sign again, I’ve “already agreed”
• I don’t even know what these “other regulations” are

Legally: this kind of clause that blanket-authorizes future unknown rules is usually treated with strict scrutiny by courts in labor disputes. If the newly added rules and regulations directly involve workers’ vital interests (such as compensation, assessment, rewards and penalties), and haven’t gone through democratic procedure (employee discussion + consultation) and been publicized, workers have the right to claim they didn’t know and didn’t agree.

But the problem is: I signed “have carefully read and undertake to comply with… Party A’s other various rules and regulations,” which gives the company defensive evidence — “I agreed to it myself.”

2. “Undertake to strictly implement” — turning a legal duty into a contractual obligation

The law originally requires both parties to abide by labor regulations. This document turns it into my unilateral undertaking:

• Company illegally transfers me? I “undertook to strictly implement” the transfer system
• Company illegally cuts my pay? I “undertook to strictly implement” the compensation and performance system
• Company illegally docks my pay? I “undertook to strictly implement” the rewards and penalties system

In arbitration this will be used by the company to defend: “It’s not that we want to dock his pay; he himself undertook to comply with the system, and the system stipulates it this way.”

3. Thirty documents — did I really “carefully read” them?

The company requires me to sign this confirmation, but were all 30 regulatory documents provided to me to read? Is there a signed receipt record?

If the company can’t prove that I actually received all 30 documents and had the opportunity to read them, then “I have carefully read” is a false statement, and the basis of this confirmation collapses.

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Response strategy

Since I’ve already signed, here are concrete steps to reduce risk:

1. Immediately request the full set of documents (all 30) in paper or electronic form

• Require the company to provide the complete text of all 30 regulations
• Keep a record of the request (WeChat, email, recording)
• If the company refuses to provide them or provides only some, this becomes key evidence for future arbitration — “the company can’t prove I read all the documents”

2. File a “written objection” to key clauses

• After receiving the documents, file a written objection to clauses that are clearly illegal (such as the 500k non-compete, the salary objection period, handover tied to wages, etc.)
• Method: email, WeChat, EMS (keep the receipt)
• Content template:

  “I have received the XX System, but I object to Article X regarding XX, believing that clause is suspected of excluding workers’ rights / violating Article X of the Labor Contract Law. Please have the company explain or amend it.”

Purpose: to break the trap of “no objection means default consent.” I’ve raised an objection, so the company can no longer say I “accepted by default.”

3. Keep all evidence

• A photo/scan of the signature page of this confirmation
• The complete text of the 30 regulations (if the company won’t give it, record/screenshot to prove you requested it)
• Payslips, bank statements, attendance records, overtime records, WeChat communications, system screenshots
• Pay special attention: keep evidence that the company did not provide all documents

4. Pair the “passing-line strategy” with a legal firewall

I mentioned the “passing-line strategy” earlier — keeping performance in the 110–139 range is the optimal solution at the game-theory level. But game theory alone isn’t enough; you also need a few legal firewalls:

• Don’t proactively sign any new unilateral undertakings (such as assessment receipts, transfer consent forms)
• If the company forces you to sign, file a written objection + keep evidence
• For operations involving personal information such as the “expulsion query system,” explicitly refuse authorization (under the Personal Information Protection Law)

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Is this legally allowed?

If you ask only “is this confirmation legally valid,” the answer is: partly valid, partly void, overall in a gray zone:

• “Confirming receipt and reading” itself: allowed, but on the premise that the company actually provided all the documents
• “Undertake to strictly implement”: allowed, but limited to regulations that are legal and compliant
• The blanket authorization of “other various rules and regulations”: highly suspect; if future regulations involving vital interests are added without democratic procedure and publicized, workers have the right to claim they didn’t know
• Illegal clauses within the specific regulations (such as the 500k non-compete, salary objection period, handover tied to wages): void even if signed, under Article 26 of the Labor Contract Law

But the most realistic answer is:

Clauses the law doesn’t allow, the company writes anyway; once signed, the cost of defending your rights is extremely high; if you don’t sign, the onboarding process stalls. This is the design of the system — not to make you legal, but to make it something you can’t afford to fight.

Writing to this point, it’s not hard to see: this confirmation, along with the “right to adjust your role” in the labor contract and the “hand-copied receipt” in the assessment plan, are different forms of the same logic. Their purpose is the same: harvest your consent in advance, transfer all the risk to you, and make it hard to prove and costly to defend your rights.

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In one sentence

This document isn’t a “regulation confirmation”; it’s a “risk-transfer document.” Legally you can challenge the illegal clauses in it, but the premise of challenging is that you have evidence, time, and energy to go to court — and the designers of this system are betting you don’t.

So the “passing-line strategy” is right: don’t invest emotion, don’t pursue excellence, don’t expect conversion to full-time, save your energy for a side business. But at the legal level, keeping evidence, filing objections, and holding the bottom line are among the few things I can still do.

5. The Confidentiality Agreement: A 500,000-Yuan Shackle

If the labor contract is a “soft knife,” the confidentiality agreement is a “hard chain.”

Non-compete: 30% compensation, 500,000-yuan penalty

The confidentiality agreement stipulates: within two years of leaving, you cannot go to any company that “constitutes competition” with the company. The monthly non-compete compensation is 30% of the average monthly wage of the 12 months before leaving.

And the penalty? Three times the total compensation during the non-compete period, or 500,000 RMB, whichever is higher.

I’ve done internet work for 15 years. My professional network, the people I know, the technical directions I understand — most likely all lie within those few top internet companies. And these companies, in this outsourcing firm’s definition, might all be “competing enterprises.”

Even more absurd: the contract also says, “Party A has the right to adjust the scope of competing enterprises at any time and notify Party B in writing.”

Translated: today you think going to a certain company is fine; tomorrow your former company issues a notice saying that company is a competitor, and you’re instantly in breach. 500,000.

Non-compete reporting obligation: 50,000 yuan to buy your privacy

After leaving, I need to periodically report my employment status to my former company: latest employer, unified social credit code, department, position, job content, proof of the labor relationship’s existence, social insurance payment records, mailing address, contact phone.

If I fail to report on time, fail to report as required, or the report is untrue (for example, changing jobs without timely notice) — a penalty of 50,000 yuan.

This isn’t a non-compete; it’s using a penalty to forcibly buy your private information.

IP ownership: your output for a year after leaving all belongs to the company

The confidentiality agreement expands the definition of “work output” to:

“All or part of the discoveries, inventions, ideas, research… conceived, developed, or obtained by Party B alone or jointly with others during Party B’s employment with Party A and within one (1) year after leaving… and all of the foregoing are in any way related to Party A’s existing or anticipated products, plans, or services…”

This means: even if, within a year of leaving, I use my own computer, in my spare time, without using any company resources, to develop a technical solution, write an open-source project, or do a technical consultation — as long as the company deems it “related to Party A’s existing or anticipated products, plans, or services,” the IP belongs to the company.

For someone like me with technical accumulation, the lethality of this clause is even more fatal than the 500,000-yuan non-compete penalty. It could directly take away your personal IP for the next few years.

The client’s undertaking letter: a second knife sharper than the confidentiality agreement

You think once you’ve signed that pile of documents for the outsourcing company, you’re done?

No. The truly “brilliant” part is the Confidentiality Undertaking Letter the client (that is, the big company where you actually work) makes you sign.

This document isn’t a labor contract or a service agreement; it’s a unilateral undertaking you make to the client in your personal capacity. The problem is: you physically work in the client’s campus, use the client’s badge, attend the client’s meetings, and are managed by the client, but legally the client doesn’t acknowledge you as its employee at all.

This isn’t even a “white glove” anymore; it’s a “white glove with an extra layer of legal isolation film over it.”

1. The identity-severance clause

The first article states clearly:

“The undertaking party shall not act externally in the capacity of an employee of the disclosing party, including but not limited to being verified as an employee of the disclosing party on social media or making statements in that capacity.”

Translated: you work in the client’s campus, use the client’s badge, attend the client’s meetings, but legally you’re not the client’s employee. This clause completely severs your actual connection to the client.

If in the future you use “formerly worked at the client” as resume endorsement, or have posted things on Maimai, Zhihu, or a public account as a client employee, you could be accused of breach.

Your real identity is: an “invisible person” at the client’s site.

2. Scope of confidentiality: virtually all-encompassing

Besides the usual technical and business information, the undertaking letter specifically lists:

“All human-resources data or system data” — as an outsourced worker, your opportunities to touch the HR system, compensation data, and org structure are all brought into the scope of confidentiality.
“Information that a reasonable person knows or should reasonably understand to be confidential” — a subjective standard, with the right of interpretation belonging to the client.
“Where the disclosing party informs in writing that certain information is confidential, that information is brought into the scope of confidentiality” — a unilateral right of expansion.

That is, the scope of confidentiality isn’t fixed. If the client tells you today it’s confidential, it’s confidential; if the client expands the interpretation tomorrow, you can only accept it.

3. Device and storage restrictions: a natural trap for technical staff

The undertaking letter stipulates:

“Without the written permission of the disclosing party, confidential information shall not be saved locally on personal computers, laptops, phones, PADs, or other devices; confidential information shall not be copied, duplicated, cached, or saved to any external storage platform or medium in any way.”

As a technical person, my daily work is precisely writing code, saving documents, and running tests locally. This clause requires written permission for all operations, which is practically impossible to execute.

But it doesn’t need to be “executable” — it only needs to be “prosecutable.” When it really comes time to deal with you, that local copy of the code is the evidence.

4. Intellectual property: even more extreme than the outsourcing company’s agreement

The outsourcing company’s confidentiality agreement is harsh enough already: output within a year of leaving all belongs to the company.

Article 7 of the client’s undertaking letter goes further:

“Any intellectual output completed, conceived, first reduced to practice, or created in the course of performing the main contract or during the undertaking party’s provision of services to the disclosing party shall belong to the disclosing party.”

Note a few key words:

• “Any intellectual output” — not limited to work output.
• “Conceived” — even ideas count.
• “Regardless of whether the disclosing party’s resources were used or whether it was during work hours” — even if you thought of it at home after work.

The outsourcing company’s agreement claims one year after leaving; the client’s undertaking letter claims “any intellectual output” during the service period. The two documents overlap in scope, but the client’s is broader.

You physically work at the client, and the things in your head theoretically all belong to the client.

5. Penalty: a fixed 300,000 + unlimited recourse

Article 8 stipulates:

A penalty of 300,000 RMB; any shortfall continues to be pursued; the scope of recourse includes lost profits, reduced commercial revenue, arbitration fees, litigation fees, attorney fees, travel expenses, and service fees; where a crime is suspected, criminal liability shall be pursued.

300,000 is the starting price. As long as you’re deemed in breach, more can be added without limit. And the phrase “where a crime is suspected” isn’t a bluff — the crime of infringing trade secrets carries up to seven years.

6. Perpetual confidentiality obligation

Article 10:

“The confidentiality obligation for the confidential information under this letter shall bind the undertaking party in perpetuity; the invalidity, revocation, dissolution, change, or termination of the original contract shall not affect the validity of this undertaking letter.”

The outsourcing company’s agreement at least writes “until the information enters the public domain”; the client’s undertaking letter writes perpetual outright.

Project over, service agreement terminated, even a change in the client’s legal entity — none of it matters. For the rest of your life, you must keep silent about this experience.

This design of “perpetual obligation” is essentially a set of one-way liability extraction. Many clients complain on one hand that outsourced workers “have no sense of responsibility” and “no ambition,” while on the other demanding you be on call 24 hours, respond whenever summoned, and produce output matching full-time employees. This is absurd — you buy labor at outsourcing prices, yet demand the loyalty and responsibility of a full-timer; you exclude people from the formal system, yet hope they’ll feel a sense of belonging within it.

This isn’t a management problem; it’s the classic wanting the horse to run but not to eat grass. Bluntly put, it’s having it both ways.

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Looking at the two documents stacked together, you begin to understand how terrifying this design is:

• The outsourcing company controls your labor relationship: pay cuts, leaving projects, expulsion, non-compete.
• The client controls your behavioral boundaries: identity, confidentiality, IP, lifelong accountability.

What you signed isn’t one job — it’s two indentures.

Why this undertaking letter is “bullshit”

My first feeling after carefully reading this undertaking letter was: what it really wants to protect isn’t trade secrets, but the power imbalance itself.

1. The power is completely unequal

The client unilaterally defines what counts as confidential information — “informed in writing means included”;

The client unilaterally decides what you can and can’t say — “shall not act in the capacity of an employee”;

The client unilaterally and permanently locks up your IP — “any intellectual output.”

You have no room to negotiate; only to sign or not sign.

This isn’t a contract; it’s unilateral rule-making.

2. The clauses are designed to create a state of “prosecutable at any time”

Device storage restrictions: technical staff can’t possibly comply fully, but it can be activated at any time upon breach.

“What a reasonable person should reasonably understand to be confidential”: a subjective standard, with the right of interpretation belonging to the other party.

Perpetual confidentiality + a fixed 300,000-yuan penalty: the longer the time, the more easily you forget the source of some piece of information, and the more easily you cross the line.

Its core function isn’t to protect trade secrets; it’s to forge a sword forever hanging over your head.

3. The absurdity of identity severance

You clock in at the client’s campus, use the client’s systems, attend the client’s meetings, and report to the client, but legally you must pretend to have nothing to do with the client.

This reminds me of the structure back then of going to factories to do manual labor under the banner of “school-enterprise cooperation”: one thing in name, another in reality. When something goes wrong, they go by the name; when there’s a benefit, they go by the reality. You’re the one caught between the two sets of rules.

The “bullshit index” after stacking the two documents

Putting the outsourcing company’s agreement and the client’s undertaking letter side by side, you can see clearly just how absurd this design is:

Dimension	Normal labor outsourcing	The current situation
Confidentiality period	Contract term + 1–2 years	Outsourcing company “until public” + client perpetual
Non-compete	Usually none, or with compensation	Outsourcing company 2 years + client’s implicit restriction
Intellectual property	Job output belongs to client	Outsourcing company “1 year after leaving” + client “any intellectual output”
Penalty	Based on actual loss or reasonable agreement	Outsourcing company 500k + client fixed 300k + unlimited recourse
Social media	Generally no special restriction	Dual restriction, and “acting as an employee” is banned
Dispute jurisdiction	Usually one party’s location	Outsourcing company’s location + client’s location, possibly litigation in two places

This is no longer an ordinary labor contract, but a set of agreements that maximize risk transfer. Every action, every word, every line of code of yours could simultaneously trigger liability under both documents.

Some might think about all this: “They’re just contract clauses; they won’t necessarily be enforced — just to scare people.”

Then let me show you something that’s already been implemented.

This outsourcing company has built an “expulsion query” system on its own website. Anyone, with just your name and ID number, can enter a verification code and query whether you’ve been expelled by this company.

The system’s description is written crystal clear: “Only reports whether the queried person is an expelled employee of XX company.”

What is this? This isn’t a background check. A background check is when a company, during hiring, verifies with your former employer through proper channels. This is a public-web open query — anyone can look you up.

Your former colleagues can look you up. Your competitors can look you up. Even a stranger, as long as they know your name and ID number, can look up whether you’ve been expelled.

And in an undertaking I signed when joining, I found the prototype of this clause:

“I agree that, after leaving, if a new employer conducts a background check on me through proper channels, I authorize the company, on the premise of complying with privacy-protection laws and regulations, to provide a public-web query portal on the group’s official website (used only to confirm whether one is an expelled person and the type of expulsion violation), for verification purposes.”

When I saw this text at the time, I thought it was just an ordinary background-check authorization. Who would have thought it’s actually a public pillory system.

7. Assessment Rules: Before the Contract Is Even Signed, the “Voluntary” Arrives First

What reached my hands even earlier than the labor contract was an XXX Outsourcing Team Performance Assessment Plan; the other party required me to print it out, hand-write it, and mail it back.

At that point I hadn’t even signed the formal labor contract, yet the company had already sent a document requiring me to hand-copy a passage of text, sign it, and mail it back.

That passage was:

“I acknowledge the assessment rules for employees of the XXX business line, and am willing to be assessed according to the requirements of the XXX Outsourcing Team Performance Assessment Plan. If I fail to pass the assessment, I voluntarily accept rewards or deductions as required by the assessment rules. I acknowledge that these assessment rules will be updated from time to time, and the updated version, once publicized or communicated, I will strictly follow.”

Then the body of the document:

In order to standardize employees’ daily work behavior and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of both the company and employees, in accordance with the Labor Law, the Labor Contract Law, and their supporting regulations and rules, combined with XXX’s relevant systems and the client’s requirements for the work quality of project employees, the XXX Outsourcing Team Performance Assessment Plan is formulated…

1. Scope of application: all in-service employees of the XXX business line.
2. Version of the assessment rules: if the client releases a new version, it will be publicized to all staff by email; if employees raise no objection during the publicity period, the new version takes effect by default.
3. Content of the assessment rules: see the attached XXX Outsourcing Team Performance Assessment Plan.
4. Effective date: the XXX Outsourcing Team Performance Assessment Plan takes effect from March 1, 2023.

A few problems

First, the contract isn’t even signed — what am I “voluntarily” accepting?

Requiring a worker to sign in advance a confirmation accepting future assessment and rewards/penalties, when the labor relationship hasn’t yet been established and the labor contract hasn’t yet been signed, sits in a legal gray zone. You haven’t given me a contract, haven’t specified the role, haven’t specified the pay structure, yet you first make me undertake to accept assessment and deductions — this isn’t “mutual consultation,” it’s a unilateral advance constraint.

Second, the phrasing “rewards or deductions” is itself illegal.

Article 16 of the Interim Provisions on Wage Payment stipulates: where a worker’s own cause results in economic loss to the employer, the employer may, per the labor contract, require compensation for the economic loss, and the portion deducted each month shall not exceed 20% of the worker’s wages for that month.

But this document says “if I fail to pass the assessment, I voluntarily accept rewards or deductions as required by the assessment rules.” Failing to meet the assessment standard isn’t the same as causing economic loss to the company, and a “deduction” isn’t “compensation” in the legal sense. Using the vague phrasing “rewards or deductions” is essentially packaging fining power into performance assessment.

Third, “no objection during the publicity period means it takes effect by default” hollows out the right to negotiate.

Version updates are publicized by email; if employees raise no objection, they’re deemed to agree. This is exactly the same trick as the “right to adjust your role” in the labor contract: treating the worker’s silence as consent, and treating non-response as waiving rights.

The problem is, can employees really see the email? Do they really dare raise an objection? Will raising an objection get them “pulled off the project”? In a relationship of unequal power, “no objection means it takes effect by default” is a de facto unilateral right of change.

Fourth, why require “hand-copying and mailing”?

Isn’t an electronic signature enough? Isn’t system confirmation enough? It has to be hand-copied, signed, and mailed back — the only function of this process is to leave a piece of handwritten “voluntary” evidence.

If labor arbitration happens in the future, the company can produce a hand-copied receipt and say to you: “Look, this is what you wrote yourself — voluntarily accepting assessment, voluntarily accepting deductions.”

This is the same logic as the “prior consent to role adjustment” and “salary objection period” I mentioned earlier: harvest the worker’s consent in advance and transfer all the risk to the worker.

The specific score lines: 100 points means failing

That assessment plan has even more blatant detailed rules. The score after performance calculation corresponds directly to wage rewards and penalties:

• Calculated score X < 110: 8% penalty
• Calculated score 110 ≤ X < 140: no reward or penalty
• Calculated score X ≥ 140: 8% reward

And two special ranges are worded even more chillingly:

• Where the calculated score is below 100, it will be treated specially, possibly considering immediate removal;
• Where the calculated score is above 150, it will be treated specially, considering additional bonus incentives.

Translated: your performance pay isn’t determined by your actual output, but by a black-box scoring formula made by the client. And the passing line of this formula is not 60, not 80 — it’s 110.

Even more ironic is that internal line in the plan: “Hitting 100 — that’s failing.”

100 points, in the traditional understanding, is already a full score. But in this assessment system, 100 points not only earns no reward, it actually means “failing,” meaning you might be “removed immediately.”

This isn’t performance assessment; it’s artificially raising the assessment baseline and then shoving the majority into the penalty zone. No matter how well you do, as long as you’re not in the top 20%, you’re “paying a fine” to the company.

8. This Isn’t One Company’s Evil — It’s an Industry’s Systemic Harvest

I spent a lot of time analyzing this contract. But the more I analyze, the more frightened I become.

The Hammonds (J.L. and Barbara Hammonds) once sharply pointed out:

The upper classes wanted workers to have only the value of slaves. Workers should be industrious, focused, never consider themselves, be loyal only to the master, dependent on the master, and they should recognize that their most fitting place in the national economy is the place slaves occupied in the era of the plantation economy.

Over a hundred years later, the plantation has become the office building, the overseer has become the project manager, and the whip has become the performance assessment score. But that line “never consider yourself, be loyal only to the master” forms a terrifying echo with the outsourcing contract’s “right to adjust your role,” “no objection means it takes effect by default,” and “hand-copied receipt.”

When you put these things together — the labor contract’s prior consent to transfer, the pay cut upon leaving a project, the salary objection period, handover holding up your money, the 500,000-yuan non-compete penalty, the public expulsion query, the performance where only 110 counts as passing, and the assessment receipt without which you can’t onboard — what do you see?

What I see is a modern version of the bonded laborer and Camel Xiangzi.

I increasingly understand why, in the middle and late periods of ancient dynasties, there was land annexation and peasant uprising. Today’s setup is structurally almost identical to the logic of the ancient landlord Zhou Papi:

Ancient	Now
Land is the means of production; peasants don’t have it	Knowledge, data, and platforms are the means of production; wage workers don’t have them
Rent the landlord’s land; most of the harvest is handed over	Rent the company’s systems, clients, and brand; output belongs to the company
Sign an indenture, sell your labor	Sign a service agreement, hand over your IP
Leave the land and you can’t survive	Leave the platform and you face a “non-compete”
The landlord says you’re lazy and unambitious	The documents say outsourced workers lack ambition and are inefficient

The core has always been the same: the party that owns the means of production uses institutional design to make the party that doesn’t own them able only to depend on it.

Ancient landlords bound people to the land through deeds, leases, and usury; modern big companies and outsourcing companies bind people to the platform through contracts, confidentiality agreements, non-competes, and expulsion query systems. The form has changed; the structure of squeezing out benefit hasn’t.

The difference is that bonded laborers were sold to factories, and Camel Xiangzi had his ideals crushed by society; whereas we today “voluntarily” sign document after document, selling ourselves into this system with our own hands. The system doesn’t need chains — it only needs you to click “confirm,” hand-copy a passage, and press a fingerprint.

So now I deeply understand why so many young people choose not to marry, not to have children, not to buy a house, and to lie flat.

It’s not that they’re lazy. It’s not that they lack ambition. It’s that when they see their parents’ or seniors’ generation work like this for fifteen or twenty years, only to end up with a “right to adjust your role” and an “expulsion query system,” they soberly realize: in this system, the harder you work, the more tightly you’re bound. Since you’re a consumable no matter what, you might as well save your strength for yourself.

What’s frightening isn’t this outsourcing company. What’s frightening is: if this model is imitated across the industry, what will it become?

Imagine:

• All outsourcing companies build an “expulsion query system”
• They band together to form an “outsourced-employee blacklist” alliance
• You’re expelled by one company and the whole industry knows
• You want to switch to another outsourcing firm — no way
• You want to convert to full-time — even harder
• You want to take on independent gigs — your credit is already ruined

This is effectively building a “social credit system” controlled by private companies, but with no oversight, no appeal mechanism, and no deletion mechanism.

And in this system, internet veterans like me — over 35, forced into outsourcing — would be reduced completely to industry outcasts.

Expelled by one company, the whole industry knows. Bargaining power is pushed down. Career choices are locked. In the end, you can only accept increasingly harsh contracts on increasingly worse terms.

Taking Japan as a Mirror: Echoes of Japan’s 1990s “Employment Ice Age” Generation

Writing to this point, the more I analyze, the more a chill runs down my spine. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this scene — Japan thirty years ago already played it out once.

That batch of Japanese college graduates born in the 1970s were called the “Employment Ice Age generation.” As children they caught the economic takeoff; their parents told them “education changes destiny,” and they endured the pressure of “exam hell” to get into prestigious schools, thinking graduation would land them at a big corporation, a car, and a house. But in 1992, the year they graduated, they ran smack into the bursting of the bubble economy.

Japanese companies then faced the same predicament we do today: old employees couldn’t be cut (lifetime employment), and fresh graduates were cheap and easy to use. So companies began shrinking hiring on a large scale; the government first delayed employment and lowered the bar for graduate school, and in 1995, 64% of national-university students chose to pursue a master’s — exactly like today’s craze for graduate-school and civil-service exams here.

But stalling can’t last. In 1996, the Japanese government revised the Worker Dispatch Act, vigorously promoting labor dispatch and using temporary workers as a new “employment reservoir.” After the reform, lifetime employment became basically off-limits to college students. Over the following 10 years, one in every two Japanese college graduates was a temporary worker, and in 2003 the labor-dispatch proportion among young people under 30 reached 40%.

Even more cruel: since companies could cut temporary workers at will, their tolerance for newcomers’ mistakes was near zero. College students had to be “combat-ready” the moment they graduated — no training, no room for error, only use-and-discard.

Taking Japan as a Mirror cites a figure: only 47% of these temporary workers successfully converted to permanent within 10 years. More than half worked ten years and were still dispatched.

And how did Japanese society view this batch of people at the time? It said they “didn’t work hard enough” and “lacked ambition,” calling them the “collapsed generation of the ‘70s.” Yet most of them had been top students who believed “effort guarantees victory” since childhood, believers in the credential society. It’s not that they didn’t work hard — society was sick, but no one told them.

This reminds me of those armchair critics on today’s Chinese internet: “Your education isn’t good enough,” “Your ability isn’t there,” “Why don’t you take the civil-service exam,” “Why don’t you do a side hustle.” What’s the difference between the people saying this and those who blamed Japan’s “Employment Ice Age generation” back then?

That batch of Japanese people ultimately became the group with the lowest income and the lowest marriage rate. They couldn’t afford a house, couldn’t afford to marry, couldn’t afford children; “otaku” and “parasite singles” began to rise. Many didn’t not want to strive — they discovered that no matter how hard they tried, the life they’d planned couldn’t be realized.

There’s another term in the book that impressed me: “dispatch families.” In Japanese society this is a derogatory term referring to families where both parents are dispatched workers with unstable jobs. The children of these families grew up poor and heavily discriminated against from a young age, and 61% harbored resentment toward their parents and society. One in every six Japanese families met the poverty standard, and the poverty rate for single-parent families reached 44.5%.

We today mock “full-time children”; Japan went through the same stage back then — those college students’ parents were wealthy baby boomers who could pay their children’s living expenses, so there wasn’t much of a material crisis. But this kind of “mooching off parents” isn’t laziness; it’s the family’s last buffer under systemic unemployment.

Japan later also experienced a wave of returning home for work. Large numbers of young people couldn’t get stable jobs in big cities, and couldn’t return to their hometowns either, becoming a “drifting tribe,” forced to give up marriage, childbearing, and property. “A hometown you can’t return to, a city you can’t stay in” — placed on today’s young Chinese, isn’t that line just as piercing?

So when we see today’s internet giants using outsourcing on a large scale, 35 becoming a workplace watershed, young people’s craze for graduate-school and civil-service exams, and housing prices and debt pressure, don’t think this is some “Chinese characteristic.” This is the standard script of capital-structure transformation during an economic downturn — Japan already played it out thirty years ago.

There’s a line in Taking Japan as a Mirror that puts it well: the story within a cycle is still a cycle. No matter how the story changes, no matter how unique, on some future day the same tears will eventually moisten different eyes.

What we’re going through today is merely a rerun of that global recession in its Chinese version. The only difference is whether we can see the script clearly in advance and avoid a few of the pitfalls Japan already stepped into.

9. The White Glove: Risk Isolation and Blame-Shifting

It’s not that they can’t do it — it’s that they dare not. A big company’s brand value, government relations, ESG reports, and social-responsibility narrative all require it to on the surface comply with labor law, pay full social insurance, and give reasonable compensation. But if it really employed people at this cost structure, the profit model would collapse.

So the existence of outsourcing companies is essentially a risk-isolation architecture:

Risk type	Direct hiring by the big company	Through an outsourcing company
Social-insurance compliance	Must pay in full	Outsourcing company pays at the minimum base; the big company is “unaware”
Illegal termination	Must negotiate N+1 compensation	Returned to the outsourcing company, which “negotiates” (often based on base salary)
Cutting the 35-plus	High public-opinion risk	Handled by the outsourcing company; the big company maintains “we merely ended the cooperation”
Labor arbitration	The defendant is the big company	The defendant is the outsourcing company; the big company isn’t even a party to the lawsuit
Government inspection	Faced directly	The outsourcing company bears the administrative penalty for “non-compliant employment”

Key insight: The outsourcing company isn’t “helping the big company save money”; it’s helping the big company “be legally non-compliant.” Part of the outsourcing fee the big company pays is the premium for buying this “isolation layer.”

The ingenuity of the “white glove”

It lets the big company do two things at once:

1. Externally claim “we value employee rights” and “we offer competitive compensation and benefits”
2. Internally control labor costs through the outsourcing ratio, achieving “cost reduction and efficiency”

And when public opinion questions it, the standard line is: “They aren’t our employees; they’re the outsourcing company’s employees. We respect our partner’s employment practices.” — responsibility pushed away completely clean.

But this isn’t unique to any one country or industry either.

When I first entered the industry in 2014, the company I was at already had outsourcing. But outsourcing has never been unique to one company; it long ago went global: Japanese firms, Google, Meta, and India’s IT outsourcing industry all use outsourcing on a large, systematic scale. They don’t treat outsourcing as a temporary stopgap but embed it long-term into their labor structure.

A typical example is Google: according to reports, its global outsourced and temporary workers once exceeded 120,000, even surpassing the number of full-time employees at the time. Through this approach, Google saved enormous labor costs. Source: 36Kr

When people describe outsourcing as a “Chinese characteristic” or “a problem unique to internet giants,” they’re actually helping the true beneficiaries deflect attention. Outsourcing is a globally universal cost-accounting model; it’s just that in different countries and industries it wears different disguises:

• In Silicon Valley it’s called a “contractor” or “vendor,” sharing office floors with full-time employees, but with completely different badge colors, email suffixes, and stock options;
• In Japan it’s called “dispatch” or “subcontract,” and once you’re in, it’s for a dozen-plus years, with conversion to permanent harder than climbing to heaven;
• In India it directly formed a vast BPO industry, taking on customer service, testing, and development outsourcing for companies worldwide.

There’s no difference in essence: using a non-employment relationship to dump labor costs, legal risks, and social responsibility all onto a party further downstream in the chain.

So don’t treat this as a local phenomenon of “domestic internet being too competitive.” This is the optimal solution that global capital jointly chooses at the compliance boundary — as long as profits are high enough and accountability is hard enough, outsourcing will keep being scaled up.

The three-layer benefit-squeeze structure

But there’s a deeper problem here: the outsourcing company itself is also a link that’s over-extracted. The unit price the big company pays the outsourcing company is squeezed very low, and to make a profit the outsourcing company can only further compress the social-insurance base, compensation standards, and management investment. So the one who ultimately bears all the cost is the outsourced employee at the very end of the chain.

This is a three-layer benefit-squeeze structure:

• Big company: obtains cheap labor + risk isolation
• Outsourcing company: earns a thin margin + bears legal risk
• Outsourced employee: bears all the cost (low social insurance, low compensation, no growth, returned at any time)

So “white glove” isn’t just a metaphor — it’s institutional design

It lets the big company:

• Maintain the public image of a “compliant enterprise”
• Enjoy the dividends of cheap labor
• Have a complete “blame-shifting chain” when problems arise

And you, as an outsourced employee, were never on the player list of this game from the start. You’re a chip to be used, not a player taking part in the game.

Implications for the current strategy

The reason the “passing-line strategy” works is precisely that you see through the essence of this isolation architecture. You know:

• The big company won’t convert you to full-time, because that would break the white glove’s function
• The outsourcing company won’t fight for your rights, because its profit comes from compressing your cost
• So the only reliable strategy is to withdraw from both systems at once: don’t seek an upward path within the big company’s system, and don’t pursue the “outstanding employee” recognition within the outsourcing company’s system

Your side business and startup preparation are about building a third system — one where you own the property rights, bear the risk, and enjoy the returns yourself.

10. You’re Not the Only One Going Through This

I’m writing this article not to manufacture anxiety. I know many people reading it are in the same situation as me:

• In your 30s, with big-company experience, now facing a transition
• Outsourcing isn’t a “good choice,” it’s “the only choice that lets you keep standing”
• You may be looking at a similar contract right now, hesitating whether to sign

About the phrase “you’re not good enough”

Writing to this point, I’m sure someone in the comments will say:

“You’re just not good enough, aren’t you? Is your education not up to par? If you had a bachelor’s degree, would you really end up in outsourcing?”

Let me answer the education question first: I do have only an associate degree.

But what I want to say is: my friends with bachelor’s degrees, interviewing for this same full-time role, get filtered out for their age all the same.

At 35, you hand in your resume, HR glances at your age, and you’re screened out in the first round. Whether you have a bachelor’s or a master’s, or big-company experience, hardly matters anymore. In their hiring system, 35 is a hard threshold.

If you say it’s an education problem, then when I went to NetEase and Youzan before, they also required a bachelor’s degree or above back then, yet I got in all the same — because I was young then.

Even more piercing: being able to join Company A doesn’t mean you meet Company B’s hiring standards. Same internet giants, same similar roles — at my previous company I was competent and got good performance, but switch to another interview and I can’t even clear the resume stage. It’s not that the skills the role requires are truly worlds apart; it’s that in their filter, age, education, cost, and risk — any one of them can block you dead.

Those who say “you just need a bachelor’s degree to get a full-time role” most likely haven’t yet experienced the job market after 35. Your youth right now is your biggest asset, but it also makes you mistakenly think this asset will never depreciate.

The fundamental reason is simply that you’ve gotten old. Companies would rather hire young people who are cheap, easy to use, and can self-drive to grind themselves. I’m not saying young people don’t work hard; I’m saying companies are doing a calculation: young people cost less, are obedient, can work overtime, have bodies that can take it, and come with built-in “growth-type” self-motivation. By comparison, middle-aged people over 35 have high pay, many family burdens, bodies sounding alarms, and are hard to PUA — so in the company’s eyes their cost-effectiveness is a notch worse.

This structure isn’t unique to one company; it’s the norm I now see with my own eyes.

I’ve seen teams of a dozen-plus people where 70% are outsourced. The rest are a few interns and the occasional full-timer, with one full-time employee as the manager overseeing a pile of outsourced workers. This is the real team structure under cost reduction and efficiency — using the fewest high-cost full-time slots to lever the greatest labor output. The finance department at my last company was also this model: one somewhat older full-time employee, leading a bunch of interns and a bunch of outsourced workers.

So you ask why middle-aged people are even willing to do outsourcing? Because the door to full-time roles closed on people over 35 long ago. Outsourcing isn’t a fallback; it’s the only entry point left, after being screened out by age, where you can still get work.

Writing to this point, I suddenly think of Song Jiang and his crew in Water Margin.

In the Song dynasty there was a kind of soldier called the “branded convict soldier” — criminals who had committed crimes, tattooed on the face, and exiled to serve in the army. They weren’t proper soldiers; they were criminals, consumables, second-class citizens. Wherever they went they were looked down on; proper soldiers despised them, and common folk avoided them when they saw them. That golden branded tattoo on the face was their lifelong mark: you’re not a good citizen, you’re one who’s been branded and exiled.

Before Song Jiang wrote his rebellious poem at Xunyang Tower, his face was already branded with the golden tattoo. He had ability, ambition, and prestige in the jianghu — but what good was it? As long as that mark was on his face, wherever he went people pointed and called him a “branded convict soldier.” No matter how strong you are, you’re a criminal; no matter how capable, you can’t enter the mainstream.

I think today’s outsourced workers are the modern version of the “branded convict soldier.”

You’re “dispatched” to a big company, doing work much like a full-timer’s, or even dirtier and more exhausting work. But you’re not one of the big company’s people: your badge is a different color, your permissions are different, your email suffix is different, and your social insurance is paid at the minimum base. You’re excluded from core meetings, can’t touch key data, aren’t included in year-end awards, and are the first thought of for layoffs.

Even more terrifying: once this “outsourced” label is stuck on you, like the golden tattoo on Song Jiang’s face, it follows you for a very, very long time. When HR sees outsourcing experience on your resume, their first reaction isn’t “what abilities does this person have,” but “why did he go into outsourcing? Is he not good enough? Was he eliminated by a big company?” — this is exactly the same logic as Song-dynasty people shouting “branded convict soldier” the moment they saw a tattoo.

And we people over 35 are even more like a middle-aged group “branded and exiled” by this society.

Thirty-five is like an invisible exile order. Companies don’t ask about your experience, your ability, or whether your body can still take it; they only look at the birth year on your resume. Past 35, your resume sinks without a trace, interview opportunities drop off a cliff, salary negotiation gets pushed down, and after joining you’re disliked as “too old, can’t work overtime like the young ones.” It’s not that you’re not excellent enough — it’s that society has stuck the “too old” label on you.

One is a tattoo on the face; the other is an age on the resume. In essence both brand people and turn them into second-class citizens.

In Water Margin, Song Jiang eventually led a crowd of “branded convict soldiers” abandoned by the system up to Liangshan Marsh and rose in revolt. Many of them had originally been good citizens, driven to banditry because they had nowhere left to go.

We today may not need to go up to Liangshan, but we must see reality clearly: when workers over 35, when outsourced personnel, are systematically treated differently, this society is mass-producing “modern branded convict soldiers.” You mock them today as “not hardworking” and “unambitious”; tomorrow that label may be stuck on your own face.

What’s more, there’s a most ironic question no one answers:

Why do full-time roles gatekeep on education and age, yet with the same background, outsourcing lets you in?

If I really am not good enough, then why wouldn’t the outsourcing role want me? If my education really isn’t enough, then why doesn’t the outsourcing company care?

The answer is simple: it’s not that I’m no good; it’s that full-time roles have to bear higher employment costs, longer hiring cycles, and stricter compliance risks, so they use education and age as filters to keep risk out. And outsourcing roles don’t need these, because outsourcing was never “long-term employment” from the start — it’s “short-term rental.”

The more you can endure hardship, the cheaper you are, and the less you dare defend your rights, the better you fit the outsourcing hiring standard. That’s the truth.

You’re not wrong to think that way. All I can say is: you’re still too young.

About “converting to full-time”

There’s one more thing I want to bring up separately.

My former direct supervisor at NetEase is now unemployed too. He was a top graduate of Zhejiang University in his youth, and even his age couldn’t escape the fate of unemployment. He specifically reached out to talk with me once, saying: “You should work hard and try to convert to full-time soon.”

I replied with just one sentence: “Not anymore. I’ve seen through it.”

It’s not that I don’t want to convert to full-time. It’s that too much reality is right in front of me. A colleague of mine at a certain big company told me their boss’s OKR this year is “cost reduction and efficiency.” How to reduce cost? One outsourced worker in, one full-timer out. Outsourced workers cost less, have social insurance paid at the minimum base, get compensation based on base salary, and can be returned at any time when not wanted. If you hire a full-time employee instead, social insurance must be paid in full, leaving requires negotiated separation and compensation, and management costs shoot straight up. In this situation, do you think the company really wants outsourced workers to convert to full-time? Isn’t that laughable? Why are all the big companies using this model now? Surely because the returns are far greater than hiring full-timers; conversion doesn’t fit the company’s cost-optimal solution.

Conversion to full-time was never an upward path for outsourced workers; it’s the carrot dangling in front of the donkey. It makes you think that as long as you work hard there’s hope, making you willingly accept lower treatment, harsher assessment, and more unequal contracts.

But this carrot has not even a 1% chance. You can only look at it; you can’t eat it.

So I want to advise everyone struggling in outsourcing: don’t harbor illusions about converting to full-time.

Not because you’re not good enough, but because in this cost-accounting model, you were defined as a “consumable” from the very start.

A consumable doesn’t need growth, doesn’t need conversion, doesn’t need to be cared about.

It only needs to keep running until it’s used up.

I want to tell those who, like me, have no choice but outsourcing a few things:

1. Before signing, read the contract clause by clause

Don’t click those “I have read and agree” standard-form clauses with your eyes closed. Every “agree” could become a bullet a few years later.

Focus on these clauses:

• Right to adjust your role: Does it allow the company to transfer you unilaterally?
• Pay structure: Is the salary split into “base + project allowance + bonus,” with the project portion going to zero after leaving a project?
• Assessment reward/penalty clause: Does it require you to “voluntarily” accept assessment deductions before the labor contract is signed?
• Non-compete: What’s the compensation standard? What’s the penalty?
• Salary objection period: Does it limit your time to reclaim wages?
• Handover clause: Does it tie wage settlement and the separation certificate to the handover?

This one probably won’t help — no one can read a dozen-plus documents word for word, and they keep pressing you to sign. You seem to have a choice, but in fact you have none.

2. Keep evidence

Payslips, bank statements, attendance records, overtime records, WeChat communications, all system screenshots. These aren’t “for a future lawsuit”; they’re for having the confidence when you need to say no.

3. “Signed” doesn’t equal “the clause is valid”

Under Article 26 of the Labor Contract Law, clauses where the employer exempts itself from legal liability and excludes workers’ rights are void even if signed. If you find the clause itself is illegal, you can argue it’s void in arbitration or litigation.

4. Don’t let “outsourcing” define you

Consciously protect your personal brand: within legal and compliant bounds, keep producing output, keep accumulating, and keep giving yourself choices.

5. It’s just a job — don’t make the job your everything

What I want to say last is: whether you’re a full-time or an outsourced employee now, no matter how much you earn or how much responsibility you bear, this is always just a job.

Don’t make it your whole life; don’t make it the sole source of your self-worth. The company’s performance assessment can’t define you, and the contract clauses can’t define you either.

Within legal and compliant bounds, start your own side business as soon as possible, and accumulate your own assets, your own clients, your own work. Not to get rich quick, but so that the next time you’re “pulled off a project,” optimized, or expelled, you’ll have the confidence to say:

“I can choose not to go down your path.”

There’s a paradox here that many people haven’t seen through: the more soberly you refuse to become a “high-running consumable,” the lower your “replaceability” in your current role actually becomes. Because you only give passing-line output, the company finds it harder to find a “more cost-effective” replacement. At the same time, you pour the energy you’ve saved into a side business, building an independent cash flow detached from this cost-accounting model. If you’re ruthless, I’ll be ruthless too — this isn’t an employment relationship, it’s a game-theoretic one. This sentence isn’t an emotional outburst; it’s a restructuring of the relationship. You no longer treat the company as an employer “that should be responsible for me,” but as a client temporarily renting your time. The client pays, you provide service, and the service standard follows the contract — no more, no less.

The benefits of this mindset shift:

• Not expecting conversion, you won’t be led around by the “carrot”
• Not pursuing outstanding performance, you won’t be blackmailed by “awards” into extra labor
• Not investing emotion, you won’t fall into self-doubt when “returned”

This isn’t passive slacking; it’s using the other party’s game rules to counter the other party.

Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor:

“Apart from the few favored children of fortune, for most people, in today’s flexible labor market, staying with one job for life brings enormous risk and invites psychological and emotional disaster.”

So, don’t invest your whole heart in a job. Hold the passing line, and save your surplus energy for yourself. Your side business, your assets, your buffer — those are your real fallback.

This is the true way for us to preserve the right to choose.

11. The Real Solution: Control Consumption, Take Back Control of Your Life

Writing to this point, I want to add one more thing.

If right now, like me, you have no better choice for the moment and can only accept this outsourcing job — that’s fine, survive first. But surviving doesn’t mean lying flat, and it certainly doesn’t mean handing the money you earned so hard back to consumerism to be harvested.

One deep realization I’ve had these past few years is: working for others is essentially putting on an invisible shackle and becoming a slave. The labor contract is a shackle, the performance assessment is a shackle, the age-35 threshold is a shackle, and consumerism is a shackle too. The former locks up your time and labor; the latter locks up the resources you could have used to buy freedom.

So what can really let you slowly withdraw from this system isn’t just a side business, isn’t just job-hopping — there’s a more basic but more easily overlooked path: control consumption, live a minimalist life.

Mobile payment destroyed cash’s “physical pain”

In the cash era, handing over a 100-yuan note, you experienced a physical stripping — the paper disappeared from your palm, the thickness of your wallet changed, the change jingled in coins. The brain encoded it as a “loss event.”

Mobile payment compresses all this into a fingerprint or face recognition, completed within 0.3 seconds, and the brain doesn’t have time to trigger loss aversion.

Even more terrifying, mobile payment also weakens “account boundaries.” Salary card, credit card, Huabei, Baitiao are nested layer upon layer; when you spend 100 yuan, you’re not even sure whether the money flowed out of “mine” or “borrowed.” The act of paying is seamlessly woven into the consumption scene, and you’re barely aware of “paying” as a separate step.

The result is: consumerism doesn’t need “people with money”; it only needs “people who dare to spend.” Mobile payment mass-produces these “numb consumers” — you’re numb to 100 yuan, and you’ll gradually become numb to 1,000 yuan too, until the bill arrives and you wake with a start.

I cut all my credit cards and installments, keeping only one debit card and never paying in installments, precisely to fight this systematic de-frictioning by “adding friction.” The platform’s design logic is to make you “numb,” while your survival strategy needs you to “feel.”

In an economic downturn cycle, guard your cash flow first

In the current environment, if outsourcing is your only choice, then you must recognize one thing even more: your income is unstable, but your desires can be stable, even shrinking.

Don’t overdraw on big-ticket items, don’t be kidnapped by the “upgrade your life” narrative, and don’t turn your hard-earned outsourcing wages into the latest phone, luxury goods, or a house and car beyond your means.

Every unnecessary purchase prolongs the time you’re imprisoned by this system. Spend ten thousand less, and you have ten thousand more of the confidence to say no; owe one less installment, and you have one less rope binding you.

Long-term goal: either convert to full-time, or stop working for others

Controlling consumption isn’t the goal; the goal is to use the time and resources you save to find a real way out.

There are two paths:

1. Keep looking for a full-time role — it’s hard, but not entirely without a chance. Keep your resume updated, keep interviewing, keep your industry sensitivity. The moment an opportunity appears, leave outsourcing immediately.
2. Build your own system — a side business, a startup, freelancing, asset income. Any way that lets you stop depending on “being employed” to survive is worth investing in.

Working for others is essentially trading your own time and freedom for a highly controlled income. Outsourcing magnifies this control to the extreme. If you don’t want to be controlled like this your whole life, you must leave yourself an economic buffer and leave yourself room to leap in ability.

Every cent you can save is the ransom for your future freedom.

12. In Closing

I’m 35 this year.

I never imagined that one day I’d sit in front of a computer and write an article saying:

“I signed a contract that frightens me. It’s also the most documents I’ve signed in all my years of work.” This isn’t an onboarding contract at all — it’s mortgaging myself for an unstable job with a 50% income cut.

But I said it. Because I want fewer people, when they reach my stage, to discover only then that they’ve already been locked in.

If you’re considering outsourcing, or already in it, I hope this article helps you see clearly what’s hidden in the contract. I’ll still say what I always say: unless you literally can’t survive, don’t sign any outsourcing offer — this is blood-payment.

If you have friends around you considering outsourcing, please forward this to them.

We’re not trying to manufacture anxiety. We’re trying to preserve the last bit of the right to choose.

Disclaimer: This article is based on the author’s real onboarding experience, and the contract clauses involved all come from genuinely signed documents. All real company names in the text have been hidden, referred to as “a certain outsourcing firm” and “a certain big company.” This article does not constitute legal advice and is for the reference of peers only. For specific rights-defense strategies, please consult a professional labor lawyer.

文章作者：阿文

文章链接： https://www.awen.me/post/239127c4.html

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