People value continuity.
Even if their words don’t match up,
I always thought this in my heart.
But when the day comes that I notice my thinking has diverged from the old me,
I’m also a bit emotional.
(I) Hiring Standards
I often share interesting hiring stories with friends.
There’s one I used to really like telling.
At the time the company was interviewing backend engineers,
using multi-round interviews and a one-vote-veto hiring system.
I often served as the first round interviewer.
One day, after I finished talking with a returnee referred by a colleague,
I happily told my teammates: “This candidate is good, might be teammate+1!”
But an hour later, the second-round interviewer came out with a difficult face: “This candidate isn’t great, I passed.”
After sending the candidate away, everyone asked the interviewer why. He recounted this scene:
After discussing topics like computer networking, databases, servers,
the interviewer asked: “Can you tell me the most successful thing you did at your last company?”
The candidate happily took the floor:
“Of course! My last company did clothing wholesale. At the time the company’s logistics costs were high because clothes take up a lot of volume.
Later I discovered we could use vacuum packaging, reducing the clothing volume without compromising clothing quality!
In the end it saved the company over a million dollars!”
Every time I finished telling this interview story,
my listening friends would fall into silence,
then ask: “But what does this have to do with a backend engineer?”
We’d burst into laughter together: “Right, that’s just an inappropriate interview strategy.”
But somewhere along the way,
the scene of laughing along after telling the story often surfaced in my mind,
and the recollection emanating from this scene faintly pricks at me.
Later I never told this story to new friends again.
As an interviewer I also became more patient.
In the past as a pure technical interviewer, I’d first require the candidate to write good code.
But now as an interviewer, I care more about the candidate’s ability to solve things.
If they give an off-topic answer,
I’d ask one more question: “Could you share the impact of this on your career?”
When we talk about hiring standards,
hiring a teammate is really different from hiring a player.
(II) Company Systems
A topic I’ve thought about a lot this year is remote work.
After much thought, I discovered that I am completely double-standard:
“As boss, I’m unwilling to push for flexible remote work policy.
As employee, I hope the company pushes for flexible remote work policy.”
Simple logical thinking is as follows:
- Only people with strong self-discipline don’t lose efficiency from remote work. If self-discipline is poor, remote work loses efficiency.
- Unless specifically tested in the hiring process, employees’ self-discipline follows a normal distribution.
- High self-discipline and high productivity are not strongly correlated attributes.
So this question leads to the conclusion:
To push for remote work, either rely on employee self-discipline, or accept efficiency loss.
And we clearly know, at-work two-choice answers are often all-of-the-above:
To push for remote work, you both rely on employee self-discipline, and accept some efficiency loss.
Issues like these, along with
“to prevent tissues from being taken empty, change the tissue free-take policy to one pack per person per week,”
“unlimited annual leave, but because someone really took a continuous month off, change to the legal five days per year” —
are not only human nature problems, but also profit-maximization problems and temperature-dividing problems.
Company systems may eventually all fall back to the moderate-but-correct common denominator.
(III) Striving Attitude
Sometimes compared to personal ideological shifts,
the group’s discourse shift is even more intriguing.
Public opinion about work itself is constantly shifting.
From “supporting and promoting wolf culture” to “guarding against the bloodsucking 996 capital” is only a few years apart.
But among the masses riding the waves of both sides of public opinion,
how many people have really thought about their own career, stage, perseverance, uniqueness, hardships, and achievements?
Among those people, even fewer can stick to independent thinking and walk a path without regrets.
——《What I Say, What I Know, What I Do》
After lying-flat-ism led the trend,
nowadays I’m seeing more and more different voices on the internet:
“You say lie flat, but did you, the OP, actually lie flat?”
“996 really is a blessing — at least you still have a job.”
The pessimism that leaks through these words
shows the collective ideological current influenced by the larger trend.
This is perhaps a cycle.
Another interesting thing is, now I find it hard to advise others to work hard.
When I just started working, I was happy on one hand, and on the other in my 2018 OKR wrote “the reward of work is work itself.”
By today, I’m seen as “the capable senior,” and I’ve tasted the wonderful flavor of “the reward of work is work itself,”
but I can’t say such words with a red face.
Youth urging onward — that’s vitality.
Middle age urging onward — that’s slime.
(IV) Coding
Even coding gets influenced by perspective.
Among countless website personal signatures,
my favorite is the introduction I left on GitHub:
Lirian Su:
This is a vimer, a pythonista, a gopher
and a business man on the way.
Code for life rather than code for work.
Wubba lubba dub dub.
But as my capability and scope of responsibility expanded,
product, operations, and business were also placed in front of me:
the success of a cause needs domain-specific means; tech is just one of them.
So the thinking of “all is lowly except coding” started to loosen,
gradually moving toward “engineers are people who solve problems.”
Now in the team,
if the bottleneck is tech, I do tech;
if the bottleneck is in product, I optimize product;
if the bottleneck is in compressing clothes for logistics,
I’ll look for a vacuum compression bag.
Writing to here, I can’t help but think of that guy from back then.
I hope he found a position he likes, doing what he loves,
and when talking about his successes, his eyes still shine.
(end)