Indian-origin team leader locks out Chinese team, core team undergoes "blood purge," teaching a harsh lesson to Chinese enterprises!
By late June 2026, an internal management incident reportedly erupted at a private software company in Shanghai. An Indian-origin R&D team leader who had joined just four months earlier locked down the company’s core code repository with seven alumni from his alma mater, all hired by him.
All access permissions for local employees were revoked, bringing the entire R&D team to a standstill for two days. According to Sina Finance, the involved Indian team leader and his seven fellow alumni have since been fully terminated by the company.
The company specializes in cross-border e-commerce SaaS systems. The original team consisted of nine members, all working on domestic business using local developers. To build what was touted as an "international R&D team," the company proactively contacted headhunters, requesting top-tier talent. The headhunter recommended an Indian-origin engineer—a graduate of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), with three years of experience at Amazon India. His resume was impressive, his background polished.
The boss immediately took a liking to him. After a single interview, he made the decision on the spot: “You’ll be the R&D team leader.” Within four months, the original nine-member team transformed into a team of nine Indians. Once onboard, the new team leader moved quickly.
In the first month, he emailed HR requesting team expansion, recommending several “former colleagues.” HR didn’t question it and approved. In the second month, seven new Indian employees joined one after another. With him included, the team of nine became entirely composed of Indians. Two veteran local employees were marginalized, assigned only peripheral modules.
In the third month, he began restructuring the permission system, citing “code security compliance upgrades.” He narrowed write access to the core code repository to himself and the seven others. Even the two local programmers lost the ability to submit PRs.
In the fourth month, one morning, everyone arrived at work to find they could no longer access the code repository. The system displayed: “Your account has been disabled. Please contact the administrator.” The two local programmers approached the team leader. He shrugged: “I’m conducting a permission audit. Some legacy accounts need cleaning up. I’ll reassign your work accordingly.”
Reassign? How can you reassign work when you can’t even see the code? When the company’s management finally learned about this, they didn’t act immediately. Why? Because this team leader was personally recruited by the CTO. The CTO had already made a public pledge before the board to “upgrade technology.” Admitting a hiring mistake now would jeopardize the CTO’s own position.
For over two days, dozens of people sat idle. Only when management finally decided to investigate the permission logs did they discover a large number of abnormal data export records—over the past month, the seven new employees had, under the guise of “code review,” downloaded nearly all of the core business logic code.
During the first two days of the incident, the company tried normal communication channels to negotiate, hoping the situation would be resolved and development could resume. But the group refused to budge, holding firm to their demands—clearly using the core code as leverage.
The company had a critical commercial project nearing delivery. One day of downtime meant real financial loss. Reports indicate that due to the halt, dozens of developers couldn’t work, forcing the project timeline to be reset to zero. Hundreds of local programmers sat idle for two days, unable to do anything.
Seeing that negotiations failed and further delay would result in client breach of contract, the company’s operations and maintenance team activated the emergency response plan. Bypassing the front-end account permission system, the O&M team accessed the server’s backend from the ground level, spent the night resetting the global master keys, and overnight unlocked all encrypted source code. They forcibly reclaimed control from the bottom up.
It is reported that the company has now fully regained control over all core technologies. Previously marginalized local technical experts have officially taken over core R&D responsibilities. Following this, personnel actions were carried out: all eight individuals involved in the malicious code lockout and coordinated coercion—including the foreign team leader and his seven alumni—were terminated from employment.
As of now, mainstream media has not covered this event. The author is currently verifying the facts. If true, this incident represents a profoundly painful lesson.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1869656023871500/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.