preface

I was worried about what to write this week, but suddenly I saw the push, the second season of “Google Methodology” started. I suddenly thought that I had subscribed to “Letter from Silicon Valley” for more than a year, so I just took this opportunity to review the harvest of this year. Teacher Wu Jun is the person I appreciate and admire very much, no matter from the achievement, knowledge and behavior are praiseworthy, is one of my guiders. This article will briefly introduce my thoughts and harvest on “Letter from Silicon Valley”. Ps: Much of this article is taken from Silicon Valley Letters.

Introduction to Silicon Valley Letters

Who is wu jun

To put it simply, I first graduated from Qinghua in China, and then went to the United States to study. After graduation, I took charge of the development of Chinese/Japanese/Korean search in Google, and then returned to China to work as the vice president of Tencent. After gaining financial freedom, I mainly engaged in investment and writing books.

He wrote “Top of the Wave”, “The Beauty of Mathematics”, “Intelligent Age” several books have read, is also a fan of his. I appreciate and admire Teacher Wu Jun very much, not only because he is very good at technology, but also because he has a high perspective and an unusually broad knowledge field. He not only achieves financial freedom by himself, but also can balance the relationship between work and life, and can enjoy the scenery around him in his spare time.

What is “Silicon Valley Letter” mainly about

The introduction of silicon Valley letter (I will not code the words, directly see the picture)

The main harvest

Here are three that impressed me most.

Pseudo workers

What is a pseudo-worker

First of all, fake workers are those who seem to work very hard and are busy every day, but do not produce any actual work.

How to avoid becoming a fake worker

Work is never done, in doing work should be focused, active thinking and judgment, rather than passive waiting for instructions. The judgment is based on the degree of help to the company’s business and the degree of improvement of personal ability. In fact, this article also puts forward an idea for managers, that is, how to carry out employee performance evaluation? Wu jun’s answer is what to do to maximize profits for the company. A person’s goal should not be to accomplish a few percent, or a few percent of his work, but to accomplish a few important things. A smart employee should be good at finding the most important tasks and finishing them first.

I feel

I’ve seen too many fake workers who are busy every day and think that’s enough. But I have always been confused about how to evaluate team members to guide fake workers. This article gives a reference, applaud hard work and pay for credit.

10,000 hours theory

The 10,000-hour theory is not new. It comes from Gladwell’s Outliers. Wu Jun here mainly said several misunderstandings and suggestions about 10000 hours theory.

myth

Myth # 1: Do simple work for 10,000 hours. There are people whose 10,000 hours are low-level repetitions, and the pseudo-workers I mentioned in my last letter are such people. To take a specific example, if you study math in high school and do the easy problems over and over again, you will never do better on the test. Of course, no high school student does that. However, many people make this mistake at work. For example, now the Internet is more popular, some people learn a little programming skills can also earn a good salary, so keep this skill every day at a low level of repetition. In my book The Smart Age, I argued that in the future of the smart Age, no more than 2 percent of the population may actually benefit from technological advances. Frankly, people who can only write a few lines of JavaScript are not in the 2% I’m talking about, and they are the ones who will be obsolete by computers in the future. Myth 2: Habitual failure. This kind of people are the opposite of what we said before. They aim beyond their reach. They don’t pay attention to study and are too lazy to sum up lessons. At the same time the face is very thin, also do not consult modestly. They believe that failure is the mother of success, but simply repeat failure will never get you out of the cycle of failure. As a result, these people often put in a lot of time, even more than 10,000 hours, with no results. IT is common to see such a person in IT companies, a person down there tinkering with things, just can’t find a solution to the problem. Misunderstanding 3: Lin Daiyu’s predicament. The higher Lin Daiyu’s talent, the more advanced she is in her own world, the more she repels the outside world (and of course the outside world repels her). We know that the wider a concept gets, the narrower its extension gets. If you say “table” in general terms, it includes a lot of furniture, but if you say “rococo court table with walnut veneer,” there are probably very few pieces in the world. Lin Daiyu is like this, the more she advanced, to later jia Fu only Jia Baoyu can understand her. For many of us, the more we work on our own soil, the less we know about the outside world and the less adaptable we become. Myth 4: A bear breaks a stick. 10,000 hours of effort requires a cumulative effect, with the second effort maximizing the reuse of the previous effort rather than starting from scratch each time. The Greek scientific system was very different from the eastern artisan system of knowledge. In the former, there is a whole system. Any invention can be added up. You add a new theorem to geometry, and geometry expands. And the latter is not systematic, is fragmentary knowledge points (even just experience points), each new improvement is isolated, so many later lost, the future people have to start from scratch.

advice

The first plate axe, vision – goal – road. Since we practice 10,000 hours to improve, to improve, not simply to repeat, we need to have a direction, and that direction is vision. For example, some people want to be good software engineers, which is a very good vision. On the other hand, if someone is content to write JavaScript for five years (about 10,000 hours of normal work), it’s bad because it’s low-level repetition, and even after five years of practicing it, JavaScript is probably obsolete or written by a computer. The second plate axe, even if the encounter does not listen to the words, also want to try to find out the reasonable place. This is what Wan Bangru, the headmaster of my middle school, said to me before my graduation. The background of this remark will be discussed later. He roughly means three levels: The first level is equivalent to what we say today, but of course there was no such word at that time. Second, get used to looking over your shoulder. Third, even if the other person is talking nonsense, think about why he or she is saying it and make sense of it. The third plate axe is more simple, is to do everything to record, so that you can avoid the bear breaking stick. People in any profession, such as engineers, accountants, lawyers, will encounter some difficult problems, solve these problems, we make progress.

I harvest

Here I see my shadow, whether it is Lin Daiyu type of predicament or bear breaking stick let me shame. 1. Since the company is not a technology-driven company, there are not many technical talents, especially managers. When communicating with them, I often feel different frequency and there are communication barriers, so I have to face the reality and cannot feel sorry for myself. 2. We must not slacken our efforts in keeping records. We must keep records and accumulate records at all levels.

The growth of technology

Hierarchical theory

Landau proposed the theory of five levels of engineers, which are classified as follows: Level 5: able to solve problems independently and complete engineering work; Level 4: Can guide and lead others to accomplish more influential work; Level 3: Able to design and implement products independently and achieve success in the market; Level 2: Can design and realize others can not make products, that is to say, his role is difficult to replace; Level one: Start an industry. See the following figure for details:

parsing

In this article, Wu Jun focuses on specific examples of engineers at different levels, which are very vivid. Here’s his example: Level 5 engineer, let’s say this guy works for JD.com, and his boss asks him to make a tool to find readers who are constantly helping their female (male) friends buy books. He knows himself who to ask for data from within the company, how to confirm that two people might be boyfriend and girlfriend, and buys books regularly. I also know what kind of development tools I should use in the environment of JD.com. And what basic functions the tool should have for the convenience of the customer. Level 4 engineers need leadership skills and the ability to reduce big problems to small ones in engineering. When building a Bay Bridge, for example, engineers would design a bridge with a 200-year life span based on traffic requirements, given the money available, but in order to get troops across the river quickly, the goal became to build a pontoon bridge large enough to get troops across safely in the shortest time possible. Different goals lead to different solutions, which is often not a problem for civil engineers and bridge engineers. But a lot of IT people, often build the Bay Bridge into a floating bridge, will also be floating bridge according to the Bay Bridge to slowly build. Level 3 engineers should be able to lead people to create a profitable product for the company. He has to be a very good product manager. A person with good engineering literacy, who is open-minded and open to all kinds of opinions and suggestions, can do this with effort. You may wonder why I stress open-mindedness, for a man can do much with a big heart. Some people complain about their low income and social status as an engineer. I think if you reach the third level, you are not low. Beyond that, of course, not many people can do that. The second level is people who can make things that weren’t there before, and the world is somewhat different because of them. Several examples, such as the aurora borealis Deng Feng, founder of the venture capital before he (and Xie Qing, four major), there is no real network firewall equipment in the world, they make the equipment, and successfully created at the time of the world’s largest company firewall (Netscreen), the company before the takeover market value of about $2 billion. He is a second-level engineer, as is Jeff Dean, the inventor of Google’s cloud computing. It’s great if you can become a second engineer, but if you can’t, don’t be too hard on yourself. The first level is the people who started an industry, including Edison, Ford, Bell, etc. This might be a little far away from us.

I feel

At present, I should be at level 4. With this grading model as a guide, I understand that there are only some technical bottlenecks, so I need to add some other things to complete the upgrade.

conclusion

Although SOME theories and ideas I still can not agree with Teacher Wu Jun, but this does not affect my admiration and appreciation of Wu Jun’s insight and thinking height, I have absorbed a lot of nutrients from this subscription column, thinking height and vision have been improved, absolutely value for money.

PS

Wu Jun teacher’s “Google methodology” immediately also want to start, interested can come together to become that 2% of the people. Subscription method, by getting app subscriptions.