Next week, I will leave Hangzhou, where I have lived for 13 years, and leave for Silicon Valley to become a member of Facebook.
I have imagined every possible scenario of moving to a new city in order to change my job. Would it be Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou? I thought about all the changes brought by adapting to the new environment, but I never thought that I would go so far across the ocean and go to such a strange place, and sometimes the fate of life is really unpredictable.
It took me one year to officially join the new company after receiving the interview invitation email from HR in October last year, which is probably the longest offer in my lifetime. I have to lament the many procedures and complicated steps to work in the United States. Learn a lot this year ago never contact information, know that there are a lot of the original foreign Internet companies regularly in domestic recruiting, and local tyrants of domestic companies like ali will from time to time from silicon valley to dig some come over, the world is becoming smaller and smaller, people field of vision is more and more broad, people can also have more value.
The further down the career path, the easier it is to falter at the point of change and the harder it is to separate work from life. When you’re looking for a job right out of college, you dive into a company you think looks good, try the good and the bad, and never think about what’s going to happen five years from now. Now it’s tempting to think about the pros and cons — whether the salary increase is significant, how the hours you work will affect your quality of life, future value added, what looks good on your resume, whether the new environment is conducive to skill development — but the more you think about it, the harder it becomes. This time, I hesitated between FB and another offer in China. To be honest, I have not made a comparison between the good and the bad up to now. Finally, there is only one factor that drives me to make a final decision: unknown experience.
I am looking forward to the unknown experience and life experience implied in going to strange countries and cities, meeting strange people, making new friends and communicating with engineers from different cultural backgrounds to discuss technologies. I believe that the stranger the environment, the richer the possibilities.
In the early years of uncle Zhao’s “Animal World”, I was often fascinated by the images of animal migration on the African savannah, with hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebras running together, their hard and full muscles shining black in the sun, and every frame exuding vitality. I have always believed that the instinct to migrate in search of new food and water is hidden in every living thing, to keep on the road, to keep running, to go far away, even if the road ahead is unknown.
In addition, if you are interested, I will spare some time to write an interview to introduce the interview experience in detail 🙂