Just yesterday, four Alibaba Group Security Department employees were fired for using "extraordinary" means to snap up 124 boxes of mooncakes. The official explanation given by Ali is that they used technical means to cheat and touched the red line of integrity. There are rules in the game and there is a bottom line in everything.

The whole story is simple: Ali prepares a box of mooncakes for employees every year, but this year’s mooncakes are particularly popular, so Ali temporarily developed an internal reservation page for everyone to snap up the remaining mooncakes at cost price. According to one of the expelled parties, after he discovered that someone was using a program to cheat orders, he wrote a script. The effect was similar to the 12306 ticket grabbing plug-in. However, he did not expect that the page would always place orders but would not jump to the payment page, so he grabbed 16 orders at once. He immediately called the administration and asked to unsubscribe.

This is what happened at 4pm yesterday. Half an hour later, he was unexpectedly interviewed for this reason. The company issued a termination contract at 5:30, and he left the company half an hour later.

It is said that five people originally participated in the rush to buy mooncakes through technical means, and the other one was an old employee of Alibaba Cloud. Regarding his handling results, "Brother Dao", the person in charge of Alibaba Cloud Cloud Shield, said that Alibaba Cloud is still under discussion.

Under the anonymous self-report of the person involved on Zhihu, there are a total of 61 pages of responses. People who eat melons have expressed their confusion. Why did they order a few more boxes of mooncakes and get into such a fuss that they were about to be expelled? Some people even made an extreme analogy, "If you use a plug-in to buy train tickets on 12306, won't you be expelled from the country?"

Those who are familiar with Alibaba know that this approach is in line with their style. In terms of values, Jack Ma’s external performance can be said to be mysophobic. He said very early on, "We will never change ourselves because of interests, nor will we give up our principles because of pressure. We will face any challenges and would rather close our company than give up our principles."

From the outside, it seems that nothing is trivial in Jack Ma's eyes, or that nothing is simple. His bottom line was touched at every turn, and there was no sand in his eyes. No matter who it is, once they make any small moves, they must pay the price.

In 2011, 2,326 "Chinese suppliers" on Alibaba's B2B platform were suspected of fraud. This was the service Alibaba provided at the time for domestic small and medium-sized enterprises to expand overseas markets. When the incident broke out, then-CEO Wei Zhe and COO Li Xuhui resigned, and more than 100 supervisors and sales staff suspected of fraud were fired. This is the first time Jack Ma has shown his "iron-fisted" attitude in a high-profile manner, which he calls his courage to take the initiative to expose his wounds to others.

Since then, businesses and waiters have been shut down or fired almost every year due to violations. On March 24, 2015, 26 illegal stores were permanently closed due to improper profit-making; on January 30, 2016, 22 more merchants were removed from the list.

To rectify its roots, Alibaba is one of the companies that emphasizes its values the most. Firing employees is not just "showing off" or "borrowing your head" to alert the team as the outside world calls it. In terms of employment assessment, Jack Ma’s values ​​are an important reference standard.

In the daily assessment of Alibaba, the performance is very good, but the values ​​are particularly poor. That is, the annual sales can be extremely high, but there is no emphasis on team spirit or teamwork.When it comes to quality service, we call such people "wild dogs" and our attitude is very firm: kill them! Kill him without mercy. Because such people cause great harm to the team. We also want to kill those people who have good values, are particularly enthusiastic, kind, and friendly, but whose performance never improves. We call them "little white rabbits." After all, we are a company, not a relief center. We cannot create benefits for the enterprise, and of course we cannot stay in the enterprise. However, for the "little white rabbit", you can apply to the leader for a "death-free gold medal", and the supervisor will decide whether to retain it. "Wild Dogs" don't have this opportunity.

Some entrepreneurs, like Jack Ma, require values to be reflected in small things. Many startups actively build corporate culture at a very early stage.

Huawei likes to talk about values. Ren Zhengfei queued up at the airport late at night to take a taxi, and Ren Zhengfei personally prepared meals in the cafeteria... When news like this comes out, the media always likes to swarm over it, but from the perspective of Huawei, this is a normal thing. They promote hands-on, egalitarianism.

Tencent, also in Shenzhen, has a famous code called "Ruixue". The reason is that during peak lunch hours in several buildings located at the headquarters, employees on the lower floors often cannot squeeze into the elevators, so they choose to go up first and then go down. As a result, employees on high floors have a hard time going downstairs. At that time, Chen Yidan, one of the main founders of Tencent, initiated the "Auspicious Snow" behavior to encourage employees to reject the above behavior and adhere to the company's values of integrity.

This is a moral constraint, not a law. It is reinforced through various prompts, and most people follow Ruixue's behavior. But over the years, I haven’t heard of anyone being fired from Tencent for violating Ruixue’s behavior. But during the lunch rush every day, is it true that no one in the Tencent headquarters building goes against the grain?

Going back to the tragic resignation caused by 124 boxes of mooncakes, the fired employee admitted that he had used technology to suppress others, causing unfairness to others, and accepted the consequences. But when it comes to values, integrity, and improper profits, he has to raise a question mark. “I refuse to admit that there is a problem with my character. ”

Another former Alibaba employee who had left his job many years ago and was blown away by a few mooncakes said, “The political atmosphere at Alibaba is a little too much, the class struggle is too close, and any issue can be elevated to a value issue. ”

In the early years, Jack Ma once said in an interview about the "Xinxintong" brand, "Only Xinxintong customers can make honest comments. Every comment is recorded in detail. So far, no competitor has maliciously slandered the company in the records. If there are bad records in your record, we will publish it on a list. If you do something bad, I will make it worse for you to live than to die. ”

The following is Alibaba’s official response to this matter:

Today, Alibaba’s “Intranet Flash Sale of Mooncakes Incident” has attracted everyone’s attention. It is Alibaba's tradition to prepare mooncakes for employees' families during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and each employee can receive a box. This year's mooncakes are very popular because of their cute appearance. Many employees hope to buy a few more boxes to give to their relatives and friends. forTherefore, the company administratively decided to sell the few remaining mooncakes to employees at cost price through the intranet, and temporarily developed an internal reservation page.

During the domestic sales of mooncakes, the company discovered that four security waiters used technical means to cheat and purchased a total of 124 extra boxes of mooncakes. After frank communication with several waiters, the company reluctantly made the decision to ask them to leave the company. The starting point of the waiter was to buy a few more boxes of mooncakes to give to his family, but this resulted in unfair welfare distribution to other employees. More importantly, the waiter in the Security Department, as a defender of the platform rules, used tools to cheat and touched the red line of integrity.

Wang Shuai, chairman of the Alibaba Group’s Marketing and Public Relations Committee, said: Today’s controversial decision reminds us and every employee once again that the game has rules, and accidents are always inevitable. There is nothing you can do because everything has a bottom line. It's a shame but I wish them better futures.