How did I get the internship offer from Ant Financial

Article/figure source introduction

I am a fresh front-end engineer who joined Ant in March 2018. I am from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Two years ago at this time, I was part of the internship job-hunting bandwagon. Here, I share my experience from preparing for the interview, to the internship, and finally to the official employment.

Select the ants

Ali’s front-end level is highly appraised in the industry, so much so that it is often described in Zhihu as “The domestic front end is not in Ali, but on the way to Ali”. I believe that for every technical partner, working in the top technical team must be their biggest dream. I was no exception, and my dream of becoming an ant was gradually formed along with my front-end learning process: When I was in school, I used the KOA framework and its supporting tools. Later, I found that dead-horse and Fengmk2, two core members of the KOA team, were all Chinese and both worked in Alipay. Later, when I used Antd and DVA, I found that tens of thousands of open source works of these two Github Star also came from ant front end, so I began to realize that Ant Financial has quite strong front end strength.

At the beginning of 2017, Uncle Xu Fei, a migrant worker whom I had been following for a long time and who had learned so much from his blog, also jumped into ant, suddenly making himself yearning for ant front end. Soon after, through a recruitment post posted by Su Qian in CNode community, I learned that all these big shots were in the same department: Ant Financial experience Technology Department, there are Antd author Biyouyou, DVA author Yun Qian, Echarts author Lin Feng, famous blogger Ruan Yifeng, egg.js, AntV and other well-known works in the industry, and the head of the department is famous Yuboda. I am deeply impressed by the powerful strength of this department, but I also sincerely desire to work in this department in the future.

I experienced a long preparation period before I actually started the interview. Like many junior and junior students, I did not have front-end related content in school courses. By chance, I was in charge of web-related parts in some projects of my tutor’s lab. While writing PHP, I also needed to complete a lot of front-end code. Therefore, I began to like the front end and decided to take the former end as the direction of my future job search. Therefore, during the period of graduate study, ON the one hand, I began to read all kinds of front-end books, such as Rhino book, Little Red Book, Butterfly book, CSS authoritative guide and so on. On the other hand, I tried cutting-edge front-end technology in some projects in the laboratory, such as Vue, which was still in version 0.12 at that time, such as Node.

Later, several graduates of the lab resigned and started their own business, and invited me to practice in the summer vacation. During the internship, I had a certain understanding of the whole process of front-end development in the industry, and also mastered Webpack, ES6, Vue 1.0 family barrel and other technology stacks, and put KOA into a background management business of the company.

In the second year of my postgraduate study in 2016, I already had certain front-end ability, but the projects in the laboratory were quite trivial and it was difficult to get personal growth. I started to complete some open source projects by myself, and raised my own requirements. I learned from the projects and mined in-depth points in practice. I completed AMD module loader, blog based on KOA, MongoDB and Vue, Vue source code parsing, Node crawler and other small projects. And in the process of writing code through the blog summary and output. During this process, I gained rapid growth. Meanwhile, I gained more than 1,000 Github stars and became more confident and began to devote myself to in-depth research on front-end technology.

While deepening into the front-end field, I began to prepare for the internship interview from the second year of graduate school in 2016. After reviewing the interview experience of previous classmates, I began to prepare for the front-end interview purposefully: Front-end foundation, front-end framework, network, security, front-end performance, browser principle, engineering, Node related, database, operating system and other parts of the content, and review and summarize one by one in the dimension of week. At the same time, I began to learn algorithm and data structure, and then brushed more than 200 questions on Leetcode. Algorithm is also very important for the front end students, so I spent about 3 months to improve algorithm ability alone.

Before I introduced myself to Ant, I first interviewed some Internet companies, so I accumulated a lot of experience. However, when Ant started the interview, I was still nervous. After all, it was the job I valued most.

It was the moment when the surprise really came after I joined the company. This internship was a joint training of two departments. The senior from experience Technology department instructed me in front-end work, while the senior from Data Platform Department instructed me in back-end Java work, participating in the full-stack development of an important business. My practical experience in Java is not much, so my brother developed a number of small tasks such as Mybatis plug-in development and ReentrantLock source code reading to gradually improve my skills in my spare time. Meanwhile, in the Experience Technology Department, we launched the “Huaguduo” program for interns: For six weeks in a row, each intern was assigned a front-end related topic (EsNext, React, Node, etc.), and each intern shared the topic and invited experts in the field to comment on it (for example, brother Ruan Yifeng commented on the topic of EsNext). Finally, everyone voted on the best sharing. The content shared by everyone is wonderful and complicated, and the judges’ comments can directly bring everyone deeper thinking and practical experience. After sharing each time, everyone can learn a lot of knowledge. At the same time, we also carried out a group code review activity, in which several experienced seniors reviewed the codes written by us and provided optimization suggestions.

The months of internship were very fulfilling. There were not only complex business challenges, but also a lot of technical content to learn, and more often, I had to reflect and summarize and share the output. However, such an environment makes everyone grow up very quickly, and the senior students have been giving meticulous guidance. If you have any questions, the senior students will patiently answer and communicate with you, or directly consult the top students in the department. Speaking of which, I have to say a big benefit to experience the internship in the technology Department: In the past, when I used a variety of open source frameworks and class libraries, I would definitely choose to issue on Github and read the source code. Now, the author is at his side, just a few meters away at his workstation, just go to ask with the code!

Recently the spring recruitment practice began, the younger students should also be preparing for the interview, the front-end students review preparation can refer to the internship preparation process described in my previous article. For interns, during the interview, I pay more attention to the mastery of programming languages and related tools, as well as the solid understanding of data structures, algorithms and other key points of computer science.

The interview experience of previous students is a very important source of information, students must consult more before the interview, and refer to the improvement of personal knowledge. At the same time, students should also pay attention to the completeness of their knowledge coverage, try to avoid the emergence of knowledge gaps, such as some front-end students in the network (such as HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2 / TCP/UDP, etc.) and the lack of knowledge in security and other fields will affect their interview performance. At the same time, after each interview must immediately do a serious record, write down their own think did not answer the point, and then do a comprehensive review, understanding, to ensure that when asked similar questions later, can give the interviewer the most comprehensive and accurate answer.

In addition, the interview must adjust good state of mind, even if the quilt cover to the problem of not, also want to keep myself calm, quick thinking, try to decompose step by step, step by step, and set up their own logic thinking, give vent to their every thought, a posture of an effort to solve the problem, rather than simply “I won’t give up, This way, even if you come up with a bad idea or even a wrong one, the interviewer will be able to understand your process and boundaries.

It has been almost two years since I started my internship in 2017, and I have been working in Ant for one year since I joined in March last year. After induction of ants in a data product development work, from the front end buried point, data cleaning, calculation to the front-end data visualization are required to participate in all process, a lot of no similar scheme in the industry scene, we are using their innovative mechanism of algorithm, to try and break through, some predecessors did not gather data, in-depth few in-depth field. We also discuss solutions at dinner and on the way home. This strong technical atmosphere is very useful for new graduates to improve their skills and broaden their horizons. Half a year after joining the company, the leader began to put himself in charge of an independent business, including scheme design, project scheduling and work assignment. When stepping into difficulties, he also reflected and summarized quickly, and improved various soft skills at the same time.

Nervous internship spring recruitment season has arrived, I believe that many younger students are busy review, interview. Wish the junior are able to grasp the opportunity, drove to show yourself, get the right offer, at the same time is also very welcome the junior a junior to join the ant gold, joining technology experience, for hundreds of millions of paying treasure to users to create a good user experience, also the same as other students in the ant, in a challenging environment, improving, rapid growth.

Intelligence, sincerity, optimism and introspection are ali’s talent values, which are very obvious in Gensuke. The graduate students from BUPT have good grades and practical ability and are undoubtedly smart. Although each new student has a mentor, each new student has to do something independently. Ants complex business challenges and battle-hardened hold by a senior, confident output can be all sorts of challenges, scrappy into project review meeting, crestfallen out is not what strange things, this requires our classmates have YueZhanYueYong drive, where where he’d stand up Mr Abhisit. Gensuke is involved in a very challenging and innovative project, and it is inevitable to be frustrated, but you can see that each time Gensuke bounces back against vulnerability, it takes him to a higher level, and that is Picosh. There is also an optimistic attitude that is fearless of difficulties and good at finding the positive side, as well as the habit of self-disciplined study and careful summary of introspection. From Gensuke, we can see the talent standard of Ali, which is also our requirement for new students. I hope this can give you some reference.

Ali gathered a large number of such excellent talents, there is no shortage of teachers, regardless of grade, every student has a place worth learning; There is no shortage of challenges. Every day we face the technical challenges of a billion users. Here is open and equal, regardless of the high and low grade we also call its (flower) name, equal dialogue and cooperation; I think this is probably the biggest attraction for new students to experience the technology department.

Because time is gone forever, the present self with this most precious time to exchange for what? I think a rapid growth experience is especially important for students who just enter the workplace. Judging by the people I’ve met over the years, a start in the fast lane may determine the future’s reach. I wish the students find their own satisfactory job ~

If you are interested, please send your resume to [email protected]

CV and email please mark :(year of graduation) name – full name of school – education background – full name of major – position applied

Want to get to know the gods up close and personal? Then go to the ant gold quickly take experience technical team blog: https://www.yuque.com/afx/blog