It appears that they have really good toolings so they can focus on hiring really smart new grads and giving them a lot of leeway on choosing what to work on without worrying about how productive they will be. One particular memorable response when the CEO Liang was asked about not using KPI goes roughly like this: since we all reviewd and worked with the candidate, if he is not productive it must be our fault to not have given him the right support to make him productive.

Hillarous that Liang seem to claim they do some classic give engineers freedom and agency. Kinda like Google did initially?

KPIs and metrics in general are trashing productivity and moral when used even in the most slightly evaluating manner of personal performance.

It's probably more about the size of the firm. Once a company is large enough with middle layers and silos it seems some form of KPI is inevitable. This could also explain why Deepseek doesn't mind open sourcing as they have not raised outside capital for expansion so they can't really scale rapidly on their own.