In March every year, Ali & Ant launches the recruitment of interns for students in their second year of graduation, or spring recruitment for short. At the same time, other large Internet companies will also have started spring recruitment. For most college students, spring recruitment is undoubtedly a crucial step in personal career development. In the context of increasingly fierce competition in the Internet industry, the results and choices of spring recruitment are likely to greatly change my life trajectory. It’s like a high school career where some of the best colleges offer a few free throws, and the opportunity is precious. I have been working in nuggets, Zhihu and other communities for a long time, often answering questions related to the front-end workplace. At the same time, I also served as the front-end school recruitment interviewer in Ant for two years. In the spring recruitment is about to start, I believe there are many younger students still have a greater confusion in mind. Therefore, I decided to write an article to provide some purely personal answers to the school admissions questions that I think are the most critical or that have received frequent feedback later. First attached to the previous zhihu related answers:

  • Is the front end really not as high as the back end? – 279 praise
  • What do interviewers want to see in the end of 2018? – 133 praise
  • Why is it so hard to hire senior front-end developers? – 382 praise
  • What made you want to be a programmer? – 369 praise
  • How is treatment of obtain employment of computer major undergraduate course? Is it better to take postgraduate entrance exams? What does take an examination of grind direction have? – 162 praise

Note: My answers below are mainly for Ali School recruitment, the content may not be adapted to other companies, and only represent my personal views

Employment or graduate school?

It is only the second semester of junior year for students preparing for spring recruitment, and they may be faced with many choices, such as employment, postgraduate entrance examination or public entrance examination. Especially the school better students, entering the school rate was high, read a strong atmosphere. Employment or further study, that is a question. It is not a standard answer whether employment or further study is better. It is not a judgment test, but a short answer for a unique individual situation. One’s school, major, family background and college record may all be key factors influencing one’s decision making. But ONE thing I know is that you are definitely going to graduate school for better employment. If you really want to do research and go into the field of scientific research, I believe you will not struggle with it. So the question is, is graduate school more employable? Which is more advantageous, the degree advantage brought by graduate school or the first-mover advantage brought by employment?

Is graduate school more employable?

Conclusion first, in practical terms, going to graduate school at a better school leads to better Internet companies when recruiting (every word counts). And then read it from the other side:

  • If the graduate school is not very different from the undergraduate school, then the impact is small;
  • The influence of graduate degree on future social recruitment is not big.

The core reason behind this is that there are more and more excellent Internet talents and the competition tends to be fierce. Engineering experience is important in engineering fields like front and back ends, but there is little education in this area in schools. Therefore, when most students do not have much work experience and social experience, enterprises will focus on the growth of candidates, which is actually the degree of intelligence and hard work. Therefore, high-quality students from high-quality schools will definitely have greater advantages. Because the quality of the school is actually a greater degree of proof that the student is smart and hard work. So:

  • If your undergraduate degree has proven that you are awesome, excellent, smart and hardworking, then I believe there is a high probability of being accepted by the company you want.
  • I don’t think it will give you more advantages than when you were an undergraduate.
  • As long as they can accumulate far more engineering experience than others in their spare time, they will also have differentiated advantages, no matter they attend graduate school or undergraduate school.

Of course, this refers to the engineering field like the front and back end. For the professional positions such as algorithm and machine learning, which emphasize scientific research theory but light engineering ability, the professional knowledge accumulated during the postgraduate period is of great help to employment. This article focuses on the front end, and I won’t discuss other positions.

Degree advantage vs. first mover advantage

Again, if you have a bachelor’s degree and work for a good company, you will have a head start in age (every word of this sentence counts). , for example, almost little with small B of good undergraduate course graduation, at the age of 23 to small A P5 (A or B +) rating in ali, small B graduate 2 years later to the school recruit induction, ali found A 25-year-old A big probability has promoted P6, which is extremely difficult to P6 in ali (rating A +), and takes A year to nominate A promotion. What if A and B can’t recruit ali when they graduate from the university? First go to the next level of the company to work for two years to change to Ali, compared with graduate school and then choose to join Ali, who is more promising? From a practical point of view, if you can work in a second-tier Internet company or above and work hard for two years, the former will have a better chance. Because:

  1. As mentioned above, engineering experience is relatively more important for front-end positions, and the current postgraduate education does not significantly improve the front-end field, so working for two years is more advantageous than studying for a two-year postgraduate degree.
  2. After working for 2 years, I was recruited by social recruitment. Compared with school recruitment, social recruitment has more flexible time, competitors are less concentrated, and it is easy to conduct multiple interviews. It can be considered as “social recruitment is easier than school recruitment”.

However, if I am not good enough to work for a company after graduation, my personal growth will be poor in the past two years, which does not meet Ali’s requirements for talent growth ability. It will also be self-fulfilling and even lead to a series of disgusting cycles. For example, little C chose a little-known enterprise when he graduated, with few people around him, low job challenges and poor business prospects. After working for 2 years, there was no obvious growth and precipitation. Want to job-hopping enterprises have failed the interview, can only go to a slightly better company to continue to precipitate 2 years. However, although the new company is better, it still lags far behind the first-tier enterprises in terms of growth. After working for 4 years, I have become more and more capable than the small A/ B in the top company at the beginning. It is still difficult to move to a first-tier company again. Of course, that’s not always the case. It’s possible that a little-known company has someone with expertise who can help it grow quickly. Maybe you’re disciplined, learn like crazy in the open source community, make some progress, and end up working for your dream company. My personal opinion is that for the front-end field, if the undergraduate can join his ideal first-class company, I suggest that he can choose to join, with the advantage of being the first mover. In other cases, use your own judgment, but whether you choose a better college or a job first, you will need to study hard and grow in the future. Otherwise, you’ll only get further and further away from the best people.

Front-end or back-end?

Many students worry about the low ceiling in front and feel that it is easy to limit individual development. I’ll jump to the conclusion: if you love the front end, in the Internet giant, you can safely choose the front end (every word counts). First of all, it is true that in today’s big Internet companies, the back end holds more senior positions, and most Ctos come from the back end, not the front end. There are some “subjective” reasons for this (front-end job restrictions) and some “objective” reasons (not because of the job).

The limitation of the front-end position itself: compared with the front-end, the back-end is indeed more core in most engineering technology fields. It is the most intensive place of business logic to bridge the page and the data to bridge the data. It is more core to master the overall engineering technology architecture. Of course, there are exceptions, some of the pure front-end products, such as language sparrow, VSCode, the core is also in the front end. There’s just not a very successful case of large-scale commercialization. The reason is not the position itself: the university education is less, and the threshold of front-end is low, so the students who choose front-end in the past few years are either relatively weak in technology, or they devote themselves to the front-end field due to reasons such as switching from non-academic courses. In contrast, the students employed at the backend have higher quality and more quantity, so the final high P and CTO must also come from the backend students in large numbers. With the development of the front-end in the past few years, more and more excellent students are engaged in the front-end, so the front-end high P is also increasing. Since the choice of the front end does have some disadvantages, that why I say in the Internet factory, or can be assured of the choice of the front end? Here’s why:

  1. Room for growth in technical ability: Dachang has the resources to invest in deeper exploration in the front end due to its extreme pursuit of performance and willingness to try innovative interactive gameplay. In this process, the front end can have the technical core, the depth of the field, and the space for growth in technology.
  2. In terms of management ability, there is room for growth: Due to the large scale of the factory, there are many front end personnel, like Yubo of ant, who has hundreds of front end personnel under the experience technology department. I also have great room for growth in management ability.
  3. Meet room for growth: Let’s be honest, most people have low ceilings themselves. Some people say that Ali front P9, P10 can be counted on one hand. But how many people can reach this height? The job ceiling of big factory can basically meet the growth space needed by 99% of technical students.
  4. The bottom competencies are the most important competencies: The higher the level, the higher the requirement of comprehensive ability, the lower the requirement of basic ability, and the lower the proportion of professional technical ability (technical sensitivity and judgment are still very important). Therefore, when you really hit the ceiling, it is not the professional ability limitation brought by the job itself that limits you. It is learning ability, communication ability, growth thinking, structure thinking and so on that need to change and break through.

Choose big factory low salary or small factory high salary?

Some students are excellent and may get many offers at the same time. In order to attract more candidates, some smaller companies will offer higher salaries than large companies. How to choose? Conclusion: Salary should not be a key factor in choosing an offer unless it is of a similar size. Why is that? The main thing is growth. The Internet career is a very short growth period, the growth rate will be slower and slower as you get older. Think of your growth rate as a log curve. The early slope is high, high investment and high growth; Late slope is low, no matter how hard they try, it seems difficult to advance. Therefore, it is best to choose a platform that can help you grow when you are at the peak of your growth. The soil, nutrients and growth space provided by big factories are more likely to help young people grow up quickly than small ones. Let me give you a little reality check to make it more relevant:

  1. There are more and more young high P in Ali. There are many people who get 7 in two or three years after graduation and 8 in four or five years. There are many post-90s P8 in ant front alone.
  2. Those who have been working in small companies for a long time can hardly enter big factories through social recruitment.

Some students will think, small companies have greater potential, easier wealth freedom. In fact, many people who are rich and free did not enter a unicorn company during college recruitment, and then the company went public and became rich and free. At best, this situation can only make themselves relatively rich, and it is difficult to achieve wealth freedom. The real free people tend to be: when they are young, they grow fast on a good platform, when they reach a certain height, they choose the next fast growing company, enter the top position, get a lot of options, and then get a huge fortune after they go public. Or it is to pull excellent colleagues together to start a business, the achievement of their own career and wealth. Some students think that they are relatively excellent and can get more business opportunities and management opportunities in small companies, so as to achieve a better self. However, the reality is that many managers of small companies are more likely to get stuck in the mire. It is difficult to break through in small companies and unable to meet with large companies. I take Ali as an example. The front-line developers of Ali are mainly P5-P7, and the managers are mainly P8 and above. For P7 and below candidates, due to front-line development, professional skills are highly required. P8 basically corresponds to the level of technical director of small and medium-sized companies, which is the ceiling of most technical personnel and requires high management ability. The technical managers of small companies are often prone to lack of depth in the technical field and fail to achieve higher achievements in management. It’s harder to go to a better company. In short, technical students should not become pure managers too early.

Finally, the school recruitment poster of our team is attached