@huoru_tarnish: Zhang Yiming is the real master of palace intrigue. Many people still tout his "loves technology, engineer persona," but the reality is completely different.
Summary
This tweet argues that Zhang Yiming is not simply an engineer who loves technology, but a master of office politics who secured his position through a series of power plays, citing the development of Douyin and Volcano as examples.
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Cached at: 08/05/26, 06:27 PM
Zhang Yiming is the true master of palace intrigue.
Many people are still hyping his “love of technology, geeky engineer persona,” but reality is nothing like that at all.
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One year after undergrad, he was a team lead; two years in, he was head of the tech department, directly managing 50+ people (including a bunch of Tsinghua and Peking University PhDs). Even as team lead, he had basically stopped writing code; the time he actually spent coding after leaving school was less than a year. That’s not a position you get by “escaping the gravity of mediocrity and coding until 2 or 3 a.m. every day” — it’s the result of maxed-out political sensitivity and refusing to set boundaries.
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In Douyin’s early days, he didn’t care at all — barely showed up to meetings, eyes only on Huoshan. When Douyin actually took off, the person he’d personally groomed and elevated got kicked upstairs with one disguise after another, eventually landing as head of Jianying and stripped of his VP title. Almost all of the early core ops and product people left without making a sound. Compare that to Baidu, where people get headhunted every day — the gap tells you everything.
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He knew when to retreat, and pushed his roommate forward. The roommate ran Feishu in the early days and got ground into the dust by DingTalk and WeCom; only after he moved to HR did Feishu slowly start to improve, and it’s still losing money to this day. The crux: he lacks real talent, so he just follows orders. When he took over the throne, he was even forced to struggle through 20 minutes of broken English at the global all-hands meeting. The other one, by contrast, was basically sidelined.
In the end, internet companies are still organizations. Systems, power, distribution, personnel, struggles, politics… those are what truly determine the ceiling.
Zhang Yiming has this game figured out completely.
OK, let’s be friends.
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