The terms “programmer”, “engineer” and “technical person” in this article refer to the same group of people
Programmers, no matter what they do in the future, always hope to constantly upgrade their skills on the technical road. In every programmer’s heart, there should be a place for the architect. In the interview process, when asked about their future plans, quite a number of students will say that they want to study technology more deeply and strive to be an architect or technical director in the future.
Indeed, whether it is technical manager, or technical director, technical VP, or chief architect, CTO, each position is a technical affirmation for programmers.
In an Internet enterprise, the number of architects or technical directors is always only one or two, and most programmers are below these levels. Of course, in addition to the architect and cTO skill levels, every company has other engineer levels that match their technical skills. For example, Alibaba is represented by P, Baidu and Tencent are represented by T, baidu’s T and Tencent’s T are obviously different. Each factory has its own explanation of the hierarchy. For example, ALI’s P5 stands for intermediate engineer, while P9 stands for senior expert. In addition to technology, Ali also uses M to represent management level. Baidu Tx represents a level, and Tencent will be subdivided under each T level.
Faced with so many levels, you may be more confused. Take, for example, Ali’s level:
P5 Intermediate Engineer
P6 Senior Engineer
P7 experts
P8 Senior expert
P9 Senior experts
Facing these titles, I seem to have no idea what the difference is between the two levels. I saw wu Jiaming, a former employee of Ali, sharing another definition of Ali level, which I think is quite good. Because the company itself is reference ali to determine the level of technology, so here is also the definition of each major programmer level to make a description, I hope you can have a more graphic understanding after reading.
P5 and below
For programmers less than P5, learn from the master.
The P5 is reassuring
Do the same thing, there are usually three results:
Reach the completion time, but give no result;
When it’s time to finish, the result is given, but the result is not what you want;
When it’s time to finish, you get the result you want.
The first two cases do not fall into the category of “doing things safely”. What do you mean by “doing things safely”? The demand side presents a demand to the implementation side. The implementer gives a time when it can be completed. During this period of time, the demander can deal with other tasks without paying too much attention to the demand, and just get the result directly from the implementer within the specified time, and the result is what the demander wants. This is “doing things safely”.
In reality, the product manager proposes a requirement, the development understands it and starts doing it. By the set point in time, the developer has delivered functionality that satisfies the requirements without any obvious bugs (there are definitely bugs, no bugs are possible), and has even worked out the details. This kind of development is sure to please the product manager. Because he is a person who “does things safely”. This is also a requirement for P5 engineers to meet.
On the contrary, although some development functions are implemented, but a lot of problems are tested, and crash. The result is that you did the feature, but didn’t do it well. The grade also did not meet the P5 requirements.
P6 is on its own
If what the P5 engineers do is called points, then what the P6 does is work from points to surfaces. To achieve this level, we should consider the result of several things being handled together. Creating a new product, for example, involves several modules of varying complexity and technical points. You need to take into account both the fact that each module is completed independently on time and the interdependence of each module. P6 level engineers need to think and solve the problem of reasonable scheduling of these different modules so that the whole development process can run smoothly.
For example, a product development team leader might be in this role. He needs to know the technology stack used throughout the product. Each time a product requirement is initiated, the requirement is decomposed from the product and assigned to the relevant development engineers. Communicate with engineers about development time and function priorities, and coordinate development progress during the development process to ensure that product requirements of this stage can be fulfilled at a given point in time.
P7 An expert in a field, a problem-solver
In the process of product development, most requirements can be smoothly advanced. If the product features and development costs are calculated at 100 cents each, it is generally necessary to achieve 80 cents of product features, often only 20 cents of development costs. And the remaining 20 points often require 80 points of energy to do. The P7 engineers were there to fix the remaining 20 points of functionality. He is an expert in this area, where other people cost 80 cents to develop, he can do it for 20 cents or less. He is good at things that other people are bad at, or he is better at things that other people are good at.
We often hear the phrase, “The problem ends with me. The end of the problem is not easy, and it requires a certain amount of accumulation in both the depth and breadth of the technology. One of the requirements of a P7 engineer is to be able to solve problems and not let them flow. The complexity of the problem determines the height of the technology. On the one hand, the P7 engineer needs to be able to solve the problem on his own, and on the other hand, if he can’t solve the problem on his own, he can quickly find someone who can.
If you’re good at interfaces, all the interface related issues, layout, lag, animation, memory, interaction, you know them all. Or a problem comes to you and you either solve it directly or you can find someone to solve it. So, you have reached a P7 level.
P8 System thinking, planning the development direction of technology
This level requires the overall thinking of the technical line. Understand technology transition and product commercialization. To make a product, the early function is only a part of it, which belongs to the basic requirements. Later need to think about how to monitor the product’s performance, how to optimize the architecture how to design, how to better the user’s behavior data collection, statistics, analysis, digging, server, how to optimize the deployment, online, how to load balance, data request how to accelerate, product commercialization after how some sensitive data security transmission, How to prevent wool being collected in the process of promotion and so on.
On top of that, you need to think about the technology ahead. You need to be highly sensitive to new technologies and trends. You can’t just be developing products for feature phones when everyone is using smartphones.
The qualitative change of P9 from 0 to 1 or 1 to N
Engineers at this level bring qualitative changes to products or companies. For example, a picture editing company successfully transitioned to the video field under the leadership of P9. Or a social-oriented Internet company that starts to dabbled in blockchain-related technology and has made some achievements. These are all going from zero to one. Another scenario is a product that hovers around tens of thousands of DAUs for a few years, and then, under the guidance of an engineer, grows to thousands of DAUs, an order of magnitude change. A technologist who either breaks new ground or changes the order of magnitude by hundreds or thousands of times might be called P9.
P10 and above
Daniel, do not understand, the existence of god.
Finally, to sum up, to re-explain ali’s level:
The P5 is reassuring
P6 is on its own
P7 An expert in a field, a problem-solver
P8 System thinking, planning the development direction of technology
The qualitative change of P9 from 0 to 1 or 1 to N
Rome is not built in a day, each P promotion, is the need to continue to accumulate experience value. There’s a lot of judgment, choice, and a lot of luck involved. Man proposes, god disposes. I hope you find your own position and work towards the next level.