My biggest surprises when I moved from Alibaba to Booking.com

Whenever I mention that I used to work for Alibaba in China to my colleagues in Booking.com where I now work, most of their reactions —especially the developers — would be, “Oh, 996 right? How was that?” If you’re not aware, the controversial term was made popular by Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, when he defended the long working hours (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week) of Chinese tech companies.

It's true that people in Alibaba worked long hours, but here's another reality which I've witnessed:
9am: Arrive at desk
9–9:30am: Grab cheap and delicious breakfast with colleagues
11:30am-12:30pm: Lunch
12:30–1pm: Afternoon nap (It was a culture shock for me as a Singaporean too, but the Chinese believe that afternoon naps are essential to be reenergised for the later half of the day.)
5:30pm: Get subsidised dinner at the office with colleagues (As a foreigner, I never felt the pressure to go along with this and I would leave the office at around 6:30pm.)
7pm: Resume work
9pm: If there’s a lot of work to be done, stay till 9pm because that means you’re entitled to a free ‘overtime’ taxi ride home.

And as far as I know, not many people work on weekends regularly.

That was my reality in China for 3.5 years. Then I joined a Dutch company in Amsterdam, and the work culture couldn’t be more different. I knew I’d be able to enjoy more downtime (I went from a contract that had 7 days of paid leave to 29 days), but there are also many fundamental differences — and some surprising similarities — in the way both companies functioned.

Work doesn't define who you are

Europeans in general believe in a good work-life balance. But I learned that the Dutch believe more strongly about this than people in their neighbouring countries.

During my onboarding — which I was given an entire month to do — my manager told me that work here is seen as a means to do what you truly love to do outside of work. And I believe that for a lot of Europeans it’s to holiday in Spain. It’s acceptable for people to take 4-week holidays in summer here, no questions asked, no expectation to reply messages while they’re away either. It’s fantastic.

But allowing so much flexibility without any strict rules is also a double edged sword, because there’ll always be people who take advantage of this freedom. Sometimes my non-European colleagues and I would discuss how interesting it is that people here feel so comfortable with taking work so easily, as it’s been drilled into us that we need to show — well, at least fake — utmost diligence. 

Here, it’s perfectly OK to tell your manager that you want to stay exactly where you are, without any ambitions to get a promotion. For everyone in Alibaba, even if you don’t want to climb the corporate ladder, you don’t make that known as the company expects all their employees to put in 200% to achieve stretch goals. As Jack Ma once said, “Today is difficult, tomorrow is much more difficult, but the day after tomorrow is beautiful. Most people die tomorrow evening.” 

Since remote working became the norm in the Netherlands after the pandemic, it’s now also acceptable for colleagues to run personal errands like going to the dentist or picking up the kids from school during working hours. It was my first experience with the work from home policy, and the newfound freedom makes me feel that for once an employer treats me like a human being rather than just an employee. Back in China, after the initial Covid-19 breakout, they managed to stabilise things enough such that as long as you or your area were not marked high-risk, you were expected to turn up at the office every day.

Collaborative decision-making

Alibaba was my introduction to working in big tech, and it was also the first time that I had to figure out what it meant to be a content strategist / copywriter / translator for digital products. Big decisions were by people above my pay grade. Work got assigned to individual contributors by the content team’s manager, who took in requests from Product, Marketing, and other teams that require content support.

While individual contributors were not part of the decision-making process, we were encouraged to challenge the status quo and find better ways to execute things. We were expected to give our managers our suggestions, who will listen and possibly take your advice, but the decision would always lie with them.

Here in Booking.com, decision-making is collaborative and rather organic, as everyone involved in the project needs to be given the opportunity to give their two cents on what and how things should be done. It feels great to be included in such a transparent decision-making process, but this flat hierarchy also means that things move a lot slower. In Alibaba, as well as in the companies I’ve worked with in Singapore, we prefer to spend less time going over the different possible approaches and focus on executing quickly instead.

In Asia, we are more comfortable working in a top-down fashion where the goals are simply communicated by leadership, and us minions just need to focus on finding the best way to achieve those goals. I do see the benefit of getting more feedback earlier in the process though, as this helps leaders identify blind spots.

The thing with encouraging different opinions though, is that everyone would need to put in extra effort to find a way to sift through all the comments and find a consensus to move forward. There'll be plenty of debates and discussions, as people are encouraged to push back on things. Colleagues who are agreeable all the time are viewed as indifferent rather than cooperative.

Back in Alibaba, there was a lot more willingness to agree quickly towards a common goal. Individual opinions seldom take centre stage in meetings, as we would focus the discussion on the execution strategy instead. Everyone would have their opinions though, but they were usually discussed candidly outside of work hours.

UX adoption

As Alibaba’s content strategy team was fairly new when I joined, I often looked online to learn about the UX writing craft. Reading the materials published by institutions like the Nielsen Norman Group, Google, and UX Collective convinced me that tech companies in the West were way ahead in terms of how they’ve adopted UX into their business.

So I was quite bemused to learn that convincing businesses and stakeholders of the value of UX is still a challenge on this side of the world. It’s always a mixed bag when it comes to colleagues… there’ll always be colleagues who value UXers’ inputs and some who think we’re just here to slow things down.

All the UX writers I’ve met in China and the Netherlands struggle with balancing quality and speed, maintaining content consistency as the company scales, a lack of data to inform their decisions, and the biggest headache of them all… dismissive stakeholders.

Because UX is often not at the top of the food chain, networking and other soft skills are also important to get ahead. In both countries, those who get get promoted are the ones who not only do good work but get their contribution recognised by leaders.

I’m personally grateful for the path I took, going through the trenches at Alibaba first to learn in a more structured and rigid environment. Its boundaries taught me what was expected of a UX writer, and the competitive culture trained me to work efficiently. Now the challenge for me is to adopt the European way of working where I’m expected to proactively influence decisions. Which, as an introvert, takes a lot out of me. But that’s another essay for another day…