Five Years After Graduation: Memories

This weekend I went to Anji for barbecue.
The tenderloin needs to be repeatedly brushed with oil,
only then will it give off an enchanting aroma.
Human memory is the same.

(Prelude)

Two years ago I wrote a long ten-thousand-word piece 《Three Years After Graduation》.
I look at the words I wrote two years ago,
as if Ziyue from two years ago is in front of me, telling me his state of mind back then.
At the end, he also told me:
when you reach your fifth grade,
remember to write a 《Five Years After Graduation》.

This article records some unreliable memories of mine,
purely personal feelings, no reference value.

(I) Lifelong Learning

At QAD, I didn’t know much Web knowledge.
Concepts like RESTful I wasn’t very clear on.
Back then the system needed to integrate with Jira RESTful API,
this task was given to teammate Raymond.
Later he went to the US to study, and the task was handed over to me.
I thought with a headache: “Taking this and I need to specifically learn RESTful,
not sure if this will be useful in the future.
Better to seriously study sudo permission group splitting,
that might be useful for the business.”
So during handover I didn’t seriously read raymond’s code,
turned out his code ran unusually stably,
until I graduated from QAD I never had any excuse forced upon me to learn RESTful.
Only later
did I learn how fundamental and important RESTful is.

Later at work I encountered many such things:
sometimes I had to learn things I thought were “very temporary,”
these things weren’t necessarily technical:
like WeChat migrating public accounts can also migrate openid;
like payment channel A’s refund takes 24 hours, but payment channel B’s takes 7 days;
like the order-taking machine has special operations for temporary table opening and merging.

Now looking back to confirm, I really endorse the attitude of “treating every piece of knowledge seriously.”
For universal technologies like Vim,
I’d very confidently recommend it to everyone around me:
this is a technology you benefit from for life once you learn.
For specific knowledge like some Jira interface,
I store it in my heart, weaving a big knowledge graph.

The mark this string of memories left on me:
abandon pragmatism,
maintain lifelong learning.

(II) SpongeBob

November 28, 2016 was the first day Zaihui hired me.
The previous day, November 27, Mia and I moved to Tangqiao together.
Because we hand-carried more than thirty boxes up and down six floors for two people,
I got a glorious cold during my first week at work.
By the weekend I still hadn’t recovered,
and went with the company to a resort for an all-hands annual meeting,
and chatted about all sorts of things with roommate @huangzilong.

The me back then was like what I wrote in 《Three-Year Report》adult-life:

Every day on the way home that period I’d tell my girlfriend:
“I’m so bad, my teammates are so strong,
but I’m really so happy, feel like I can learn anything,
and they also write code after work,
feel like I found my kind, but feel like I can never catch up to them.”

I could feel the moment I threw myself into a new environment,
like throwing a sponge into water,
I could absorb a huge amount of information in a short time.
And what made me happier was,
even teammates I saw as already very technically strong,
they were still SpongeBobs,
absorbing external information and knowledge.
I always remember a line Brother Jing said back then:
“We’re actually also full-stack, just not functional full-stack, but business full-stack.”

In a relatively small team (20 people),
we differentiated engineers by roles like frontend, backend.
But every backend engineer would strive to fully understand
from basics like network, database, deployment,
to business knowledge like payment, marketing, WeChat.

As the saying goes “with three people walking, there must be one who can teach me.”
The broader, the more there is to learn.
So together everyone became SpongeBobs who can output, want to learn, can absorb.

The mark this string of memories left on me:
be a broad SpongeBob.

(III) Love and Companionship

Five days a week at work, when early I’d get home by 9 PM.
Every time after sitting on the sofa, I’d ask Mia: “What happened at school today?”
Then we’d discuss work, gossip, life, very relaxing for me.

The company doesn’t clock in, so occasionally I’d speed through the day’s tasks,
and head out at 7 PM to date Mia,
which was basically just finding nice-looking affordable restaurants on Dianping and eating through them.
Sometimes when we ate at a restaurant using our company’s product,
I’d excitedly tell Mia: “Quick, try paying, see if there’s a server error.”

There were also many nights
where I stared at a black screen in the room writing articles/deploying,
Mia next door already deeply asleep;
the next morning when I woke up,
Mia, who started work an hour earlier than me, had already left.
We’d joke that on such workdays we’re roommates with mutual crushes who never see each other.

Later when chatting with @lvxinyan,
he asked me what thoughts I had about his own work.
I thought for a moment, and said:
You should find a girlfriend.

If life is a movie, you’re the protagonist.
If you’re the protagonist, you’ll experience rises and turns and conclusions.
There might be a day when you come home from work,
feeling very dejected, feeling the whole sky is gray.
But at this time a cute, gentle, beautiful, close beautiful girl asks you:
“What happened at school today?”
You wouldn’t be affected by this thin gray sky.
Tomorrow, still sunny.

The mark this string of memories left on me:
spend more time with people you love.

(IV) Hiring Philosophy

I was internally referred in by @ldsink,
later I also recommended several friends to come visit/interview at the company.
Everyone’s unanimous praise was: your company has so many beautiful girls!
Especially the receptionist, designer, and HR got a lot of admiration and praise,
but pretty colleagues didn’t seem to affect the fact that we have trouble hiring.

Back then I wrote a piece 《HR hates technical folks like us, didn’t issue a single offer this year》,
and later I specifically tallied the interview data from back then,
out of 200 resumes, we ultimately hired only 2 engineers.
HR sternly warned: the Python engineer resume pool in Shanghai is about to be exhausted!
So taking advantage of business growth, our company introduced the Java tech stack,
and later with Brother Hua and Haibing taking the helm overall, the recruitment pace finally calmed down.

In my first week at Zaihui I was pulled in as an interviewer,
and relying on my college experience training at NIMO I got through smoothly.
I’ve encountered interviewees who got kicked out at the very beginning,
also ones who became close friends after the interview.

In 2018 when I was independently in charge of forming a team,
I was thinking, how could one do this as well as possible.
Then the classic thought experiment popped into my head:
the Ship of Theseus.

@luyu has said a viewpoint:
for internet product/dev colleagues,
job-hopping around three years is very common.
Although I don’t like this setup,
an organization does face Ship-of-Theseus-style perplexities.

Later in a chat with @hulucc,
I got the answer in my heart:
top talent builds top organizations,
sub-talent builds sub-sub-organizations.
But what if I’m still very weak now?
Simple, if you don’t know it you can learn.

So later my interview methodology shifted from the previous “only hire excellent and matching candidates,”
to “only hire excellent candidates.”
And in the practice that followed,
I confirmed this practice is feasible and makes both myself and the team better.
Later someone privately told me,
he thought the team had a kind of “unique, clean idealistic temperament,”
and he liked it a lot.

The mark this string of memories left on me:
stick to hiring only excellent people,
not knowing you can learn.

(V) Long-Term Value

After Boss Xie stepped back to second-line,
Zaihui once again invited Brother Hua to be CTO.
Before the final confirmation, Boss La and I went together to a dinner gathering with Brother Hua.
This feeling of meeting your potential Leader in advance is quite strangely jittery.

Later in 2018~19, beyond clearing all business needs,
we completed cloud-platform-level migration, architecture-level security upgrade, unified authorization projects overall.
What I most endorse is continuously investing in long-term value.

Because of the service-industry nature of restaurants,
product/dev sits in the mid-back stage providing solutions and tools along the whole chain.
It easily becomes “office problem-solver,”
each problem the business gives, you solve.
Long-term, forget business full-stack,
even technology itself will get slack,
and won’t update, improve, or transform toward higher and better directions.

In such times we often murmur this line at the company:
“Need a brother to think of something.”
Then maybe on some weekend, some late night,
or some time when work is unusually done early,
a PR full of wisdom and research will be submitted.

The mark this string of memories left on me:
launch revolution every day,
continuously invest in long-term value.

(VI) Input and Output

A while ago playing idiom chains with Kabuda,
Kabuda strung together three idioms and stuck this label on the happy me:
shen-shen-dao-dao, dao-dao-bi-bi, bi-bi-lai-lai (yammering, jabbering, mumbling)

And what I thought of was what Qian Zhongshu said in 《Fortress Besieged》:

Like all these people on the boat with us this time, not one we know.
We don’t know where they came from, why they all ended up on this same boat right at this moment,
so we think gathering with them is by chance.
If we got to know their situations and goals, we’d know their boarding isn’t accidental,
and like us, they have unavoidable reasons.
It’s like turning on a radio. Spin the dial across the surface,
you’ll hear half a Peking opera line from one station, half an announcement from another,
then suddenly half a foreign song, half a Kunqu opera, scattered fragments,
piled together, unintelligible.
But each broken fragment, in its broadcasting station’s program, has context, not nonsense.
Just stick to one station and listen, you’ll understand its meaning. Our interactions are like this.

When doing Shen-Fu-Shen-Dian (a project),
for several consecutive months @hulucc and I were the two who left the office latest.
Late into the night we’d write code,
while chatting about games, A-island, or why humans live.
hulucc gave me a lot of inspiration no less than what rick&morty gave me.

These past years I’ve had few opportunities for heart-to-heart talks with various companions,
but whether on Line 4 subway, the fireflies of Moganshan,
or beside the computer in Yushuwan, the night sky of Hainan,
they’re all rare memories from my work in these years.

When I just graduated I read 《Code Complete》,
which said “if you read one technical book a year, you’ve already surpassed 90% of your peers.”
The me back then scoffed: “You’re describing engineers as too ignorant.”
But I often startle awake now — this year (2020) I haven’t read a single technical book.

Every piece of output is because of a piece of input,
so embrace every input as much as possible.

(To be continued)