It’s been seven years since I started my graduation job. It’s not that long, but looking back at the good, the bad, the funny, the bullshit, there are a lot of things I can sum up. All people will more or less detour, originally growth is such a process, sometimes think of will sigh, sometimes will sigh, sometimes will laugh. The first half of my time was spent at Huawei, which left me with many memories (such as these moments). The latter half of the time in Amazon also gave me many opportunities to sigh with emotion. The following stories are real things that happened to me, some of them long ago, but I don’t want to bury them forever. Maybe you and I have something in common.
Now, before I tell you that story, before I tell you that story, I want to make three points.
First, work for yourself. Not for parents, not for colleagues, not for the company, not for projects, not for performance. After a few years, you leave, the achievement belongs to the company, the performance is gone, you get the revenue, the company gets the benefit. You walk away with nothing but your savings, your experience, your attitude, your body, and your skills. No one is going to pay for your decisions. Not your parents. Not your family and friends. No one will care anymore if you got an A or A B on your last company appraisal, or how much you contributed and earned for your company’s projects. Relationships can have an infinite number of outcomes, but in reality there is only one. It’s a simple truth, but it took me a long time to understand it.
Every company has its corporate culture, and when people are trying to establish their own correct view of their career, they will always be more or less affected by such corporate culture, or seriously can be said to be brainwashed. But the only way that one can mitigate the impact of a radical and single value is to walk around and see more. Different values, different cultures, living in different systems and forming one’s own main opinions.
Secondly, I have a lot of respect for engineers, or programmers, most of my former colleagues. When we were together, we got along well and I was taken good care of. However, I am very disgusted with some systems, cultures and the practices of individuals, and this aversion has become one of my motivations to guide my study and work in the future — “Don’t become that person”.
Finally, give yourself the opportunity to broaden your horizons. There are many problems or feelings that you may not feel in the context of the situation, but you may look back weeks, months or years later and have a different perspective. The so-called right and wrong, only in the coffin when the most notary.
What have these years of work taught you? These opinions are only part of the above, read the following five short stories, the heart will have a better answer.
1, working overtime
In the previous years, I worked overtime all the time. The average time I went home from Monday to Friday was 8:30 p.m. There was no Saturday. The company pays double on Saturdays for the hours worked and has Sundays off. Most of the overtime is for projects, but sometimes it is for technical learning. Project plans are inverted, which is what this article calls “progress driven development.” The work pressure is not insignificant. In the most difficult year of the project, my model colleague Rong Ge lived in the company for two or three days, seven days a week. He got up in the morning and went to sleep at night, continuously engaged in the inhuman project work. This is true of grassroots leaders. Project managers may do less coding, but they are no less stressed than programmers.
There was no coercion. The whole environment was there.
If you think this is normal, or make comments about “struggling when you’re young is good for you,” I usually don’t say yes or no, but I’ll spit in the face of anyone who uses this as a positive example to seriously lecture me about it.
Some colleagues tired to vomit a ground, some colleagues tired to have a fever body collapsed, my neighbor xiaojun work for a few days, one day suddenly found that all black, eyes suddenly can not see, although recovered later, but this thing can be really enough scary. Some abnormal plot and dog blood plot, repeated in the side staged, if not experienced at that time that kind of environment, I would never believe that tired dead how many people’s rumors.
The most tiring time is between project release and performance tuning.
Project release is an important event in the project team. In fact, this release is not really a “release”, but a “test”, that is, in a team with a strict distinction between development and testing, the development team has to hand over the product to the test hand, and this “hand over”, there are strict quality requirements. We do all kinds of tests, we do checklists, and the whole team stays, and we usually stay up late, sometimes all night.
Performance tuning is a lot of hard work, and it’s not always easy to do, especially after tuning the obvious things in one session (after a while, I’ve summarized some performance tuning lessons here). Leaders put pressure on metrics, which is really annoying.
During the busiest months, everything seemed crazy, but no one mentioned leaving the company. I don’t know if I was paralyzed by my busyness or just stupid.
As the months passed, the project team got a break, and the exodus began.
Nanjing is not a very big city, most of my colleagues are not ambitious, work hard, and do not want to move, and there are few job opportunities (people say that half of the software companies in Nanjing are Huawei, and the other half are dealing with Huawei). But he was forced to do so, and over the next six months, two-thirds of the team lost its staff. Considering the small cities, corporate brainwashing and so on, this is a huge number compared with previous years.
After this experience, I listened carefully to anyone who spoke to me about the hardships of working overtime and projects, and in most cases, I uttered the famous two words:
Ha ha.
2, leaving
I woke up one morning and realized that my daily routine was f * * king boring and I wanted to quit.
Think of three days, I and the project group boss rong Elder brother said. Rongge and I have a good personal relationship. I look up to him and he takes care of me. At that time, Brother Rong retained me, said some good words, asked me, have you started to look for a job? To be honest, no.
So a few days later, the boss of Rongge talked to me and drew pie for me. Roughly speaking, if you stay, salary and promotion will be greatly increased. I hehe first, then, I said no, I want to go.
Then I started looking for a job. I left in January. I thought I had worked all the year before, so I should get a year-end bonus.
Six months after I left, I still felt that all the previous stories were life experiences, which were quite interesting. During this period, some friends even asked me about job opportunities. I said that if you can bear hardships and want to settle down, I can recommend you to Huawei. After a few years, as far as I know, the income you can earn is not low.
I found that the truth was out there, depending on how you put it, and it had very different effects. Helpless pain can be said to be struggle, work pressure can be said to be exercise, we do not know to look up at the road, can be said to be simple interpersonal relationship.
The previous year’s stock bonus is the company’s unified points, as expected, a penny is not bad for me, but the previous year’s year-end bonus is the grass-roots leadership decision, the result I was actually zero. Call employees who leave around the same time, there are cases, but most of them are zero.
I was annoyed that Torongge asked the floor leader and was told that this was a long-term incentive for “long-term employees”. It means, dude, you’re done, you’re gone, it’s over, no debt to you, and you want to get paid after the fact?
After that, several people asked me for advice on working in Huawei. I strictly followed the facts and gave not positive answers. And for the young people to bear hardships and struggle, I have given more discussion in this article.
After this incident, I said on my Weibo:
Huawei is a good company, the company directly issued stock is still N+1, not a penny less me; However, the employees who quit at the beginning of this year got 0 bonus last year, which I really don’t understand. I don’t like the reason given. So many people left last year that I’m willing to put it off until this year. I shouldn’t be the one to reflect: why are so many people leaving? Just tired? I’m not a nice guy and I don’t like to take it easy, but I don’t lash out about it like a former colleague did. Don’t tell me the truth, I once wanted to fight for their own interests, but it is not worth it, worry about words, and finally give up. My former colleagues have treated me well, and I am still grateful. A team should be open-minded and tolerant, just like a student who left Ali will still receive blessing messages on his birthday. This is a good reunion and good parting.
3. Code quality “improvements”
It’s not hard to do stupid things by yourself, it’s hard to do stupid things by the whole team.
And the saddest part is, I’m the one leading the pack.
In short, the issue is that companies impose metrics on project teams, including Tools like FindBugs, CheckStyle, PMD, Simian, and many others, that impose strict limits on the number of defects. The code inspection rules of these tools are completed by the quality improvement team in the company, and any code “quality problems” that are detected in violation of the rules of these tools should be recorded.
Tools are innocent, well used is indeed a positive help, badly used, people playing tools become people being played by tools.
If you don’t understand this, you can read this article. I documented the process here.
I was the unfortunate one to do “tools of tools” — to build a tool that aggregates and displays these tool inspection results reports, to check “code quality” every time a project builds, every time code is submitted, to reject problematic referrals, or to report or email notifications.
While these tools and metrics are not intended to improve “code quality,” they simply become a stumbling block for programmers.
God, it seems now, I became the type of person I hated the most during that time:
Assist in the act of torture.
This is one of those stories I regret to this day, and being “involuntarily” is never a good excuse.
Even today, because of this, I still say to myself:
I’m a programmer. Don’t be anti-programmer.
Talk about office politics
Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes.
In fact, there is the second half of the sentence, there are rivers and lakes, there are scum.
But again, I think most programmers don’t like office politics. Because he does not accord with the programmer to solve the software problem thinking and concept, also does not accord with the traditional education that we have received since childhood. But it exists. I thought this would be more serious in China than in the US, but I was wrong.
Some countries’ programmers are tolerant and adaptable, and easily accept this culture, while Chinese programmers are generally high minded, “can’t afford to hide if they can’t fight”, and most of them quit when they can’t stand it. This is one reason why relatively few Chinese programmers stay very long with a software company or team in the United States.
I’ve experienced this with both companies, some big and some small. One of the best examples of this is “midnight emailing”, where you send emails in the middle of the night rather than actually working until midnight. And the big one is that whenever a big leader is changed, there will always be a personnel reorganization, and a large number of managers and engineers will leave or change groups. The turmoil here is palpable, though none of the engineers who deal directly with them are anywhere near big leaders. But it still affects their departure. The reasons may vary, and there are “personal and family reasons” in the majority, but the common cause is statistically clear to everyone when analyzed. Something about the project, something that makes the engineer uncomfortable, can be a trigger. It was my turn to become one of them, but there were so many people leaving recently that I was forced to stay for more than a month. Sometimes I heard some engineers talk about leaving to show their anger, but in fact, our influence is not that big, there will not be so many people care about your mood and mine. Only to improve themselves, for their own future is king. These other things, mostly just leave it alone.
In a relatively comfortable environment, engineers can create the most value. Otherwise, the same is work, “he has been working”, but the output can be very different, dawdling or hard work, outsiders can not tell. There are so few companies and teams that can do that, or come close to it.
But anyway, I will also thank the original choice, thanks to the choice of this industry, so many can change the job and environment, can choose the opportunity.
5, a career change
In fact, where is the real “change” ah, I just from the traditional software industry to the Internet software industry.
But just this once. Let me deeply feel, Internet software in technology has been dumped a few streets of traditional software; It’s time for me to leave the small city of Nanjing. I’ve been here too long. If I don’t come out, it will be even more difficult for me to come out. I began to interview in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, various IT companies, state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, foreign enterprises, until I did not know what to prepare for the interview, all kinds of ways, too different.
Change is always hard. For our “career change”, the city of life has changed, the job has changed, everything seems to have changed, but at the same time, the horizon has been broadened.
My colleague, Xiaojun, decided to return to the company he had dreamed of working for, Thought Works, and to his hometown, Xi ‘an. I said, you and ME, go to big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, we are only in a small circle, not seize the opportunity now, so as not to regret it in the future. Are you content to stay in Xi ‘an? I’m sure you’ll want to see more of the world again. He said he wouldn’t. He wanted to go home.
He left before ME, so I advised him; When I left and joined the new company, I tried to persuade him.
About two years ago, he went to Beijing to attend the QCon conference, we ate bullfrog together, five fragrant pot, he said, he also want to leave Xi ‘an, go to Australia. I said yes, but I didn’t really take it seriously, because I think it’s easier to have ideas than to do them. When I left, I said, we don’t really know when to see you again, your hometown in Shaanxi, my hometown in Zhejiang.
Half a year ago, he told me that he was going to speed up when he chatted with me on micro blog. I still don’t take it too seriously.
A few days ago, he suddenly said that he would leave Xi ‘an for Australia at the end of the month. He was unwilling and decided to accept the challenge. For several years, he learned English and looked for a job. I was happy, but I didn’t say anything, just hehe.
I finally got it right. Wish him all the best and live the life he wants. But I know how hard it is to be in a new environment, with a family. I’ve been there before.
As I experience more, I admire and respect those who dare to take the step of change in the face of all kinds of difficulties.
Today, my van to work every day is full of PHDS (except me). It’s probably the happiest time of the day when we go to and from work and laugh about all the weird things that are going on in our lives. We all have some sad and awesome history. For example, someone with a PhD in radar and two small children decides to change careers to computer science is a real career change. For half a year, I stayed at home, tried my best to brush questions and lay a solid foundation, and successfully got the job offer of programmer that I was satisfied with, which made all of us from computer and related majors admire me very much. Another is looking for a job recently. He has a child at home, has to take care of the child every day, and has no time to spare. He says he can only work at night and study at night. In recent months, I have been interviewing and I have received several offers. The package is excellent.
I remember my wife saying that the great thing about this business is, you don’t have to pull strings, you don’t have to give gifts, you just have to be yourself. I’m not worried about losing my job. I’m clean.
What do you say?
Original author: four fire, the original link: http://www.raychase.net/3196, successively for huawei, amazon, Oracle, who now lives in Seattle
