Everybody is good!
You’re all so young, I came in here under a lot of pressure. It has been nearly 11 years since I graduated from college. When I see you, I really feel that the waves behind the Yangtze River are driving on the waves before.
I participated in the school recruitment in Wuhan last year, and I feel that the quality of the new generation of young people is really very good. I was thinking yesterday about what I should share with you today. After thinking about it, I drew up the topic and changed Jobs’ “Stay hungry, Stay Foolish” into “Stay hungry, Stay young”.
I would like to share with you my own work experience and experience after graduation. Also, as an interviewer, I’ve probably interviewed as many as 2,000 young people in the last 10 years. Some are in the same company with me, and some are in other companies, and their development is actually very different. Algorithmically, we call these positive and negative cases. I would like to share with you: why are “positive cases” and “negative cases” so different in development?
What is “Stay hungry, Stay Young”? “Stay hungry”, as we all know, refers to curiosity, thirst for knowledge and ambition. But why “Stay young”?
I think young people have a lot of good qualities: they don’t set rules, they don’t have a lot of ego to defend, they often break the rules, they work very hard, they don’t compromise, they don’t have a lot of sophistication.
Ten years later, some young people still keep these good traits. I think it’s “Stay young”.
People who “Stay young” do not reach the ceiling and keep growing. Instead, many graduate with improved skills, only to reach a ceiling and stop growing.
I would like to share with you my personal experience after graduation.
In 2005, I graduated from Nankai University and joined a company called Kuxun. I was one of the earliest people to join. I started out as a general engineer, but in my second year, I managed a team of 40 or 50 people at the company, responsible for all the back-end technology, as well as a lot of product related work. People ask me: Why did you grow so quickly in your first job? Are you particularly good at that company?
Not really. Hiring standards were also high. At the same time as me, I remember there were two PHDS from tsinghua Computer Science Department.
Am I the best? Are you the most experienced? I found none. Then I thought about what I had in mind.
First, I work without knowing what I should do and what I should not do. After I finished my own work, I did everything I could to help solve most of my colleagues’ problems. At the time, I had seen most of the Code in Code Base. When a new guy comes on board, WHENEVER I have time, I explain it to him. I can grow myself by explaining.
Another thing is, for the first two years of my career, I went home at 12 o ‘clock every day, and when I got home, I worked very late programming. It’s really out of interest, not because the company wants it. So I quickly went from being in charge of a crawler extraction module to being in charge of the entire back-end system, first leading a team, then a small department, then a large department.
Another thing: do things without boundaries. At that time, I was in charge of technology, but when faced with product problems, I would actively participate in discussions and think of product solutions. A lot of people say it’s not my thing to do. But I will say this: your sense of responsibility, your drive to get things done, will drive you to do more and give you a great workout.
I was an engineer at the time, but the experience of working on products helped me make the transition. My involvement in business has also helped me a lot in my current work. I remember at the end of 2007, I went with our sales director to meet with clients. This experience taught me: what makes a good sale? When I set up the headline recruitment, these cases for reference, so that I will not be ignorant in this field.
These are my characteristics when I first graduated.
Later, I successively joined various start-up teams. In the process, I spent time with many of the graduates, and I still keep in touch with many of them. Let me share with you some of the good and bad things I’ve seen. In summary, what are the characteristics of these outstanding young people?
1. Have curiosity and initiative to learn new things and new knowledge
I’m not very modest today. I’ll take myself as a positive example, and then I’ll give you a negative example. I had a former colleague who had a good theoretical background, but he always finished his work and left the office. He stayed at the company for more than a year, but he didn’t understand the new technologies and tools online. So he is very dependent on others. When he wants to implement a feature, he needs someone to help him do the second half, because he can only do the first half – if the curious person, front-end, back-end, algorithm to master, at least understand, then a lot of debugging analysis, oneself can do.
Be optimistic about uncertainty and more willing to try
For example, at the very beginning of Toutiao, I told you that we would do 100 million startup times per day. (Of course, it’s more than 100 million now, and we’re close to 500 million a day.) A lot of people think, how could you possibly do that as a small company? Big companies do well. So he didn’t try very hard. Only optimistic people will believe, will be willing to try. In fact, I joined the cool news is also so. The company wanted to build the next generation of search engines (it never did, just vertical search for travel). I don’t know about other people, but I’m excited. I really wasn’t sure and I didn’t know how to do it, but I just learned it and I just looked at all these things. I don’t think it’s going to work out, I don’t think it’s going to work out, but it’s going to help — as long as you’re optimistic about the uncertainty, you’re more willing to try.
Not willing to mediocrity set higher standards for themselves
All of us here are already outstanding among our classmates. But I want to say that when you go out into the world, you should set higher standards. I met a lot of my college classmates and colleagues, and there were a lot of very good people with better skills and better grades than me. But 10 years on, a lot of people don’t live up to my expectations: I think he should do a good job, but he doesn’t.
Many people don’t set high goals after graduation. I looked back and saw that some of my colleagues had joined the bank’s IT department: some after graduation, some after working for a while. Why do I associate this with “not settling for mediocrity”? Because many of them joined in order to quickly solve the Beijing hukou, or at that time some institutions had housing subsidies, can buy affordable housing.
Later, I was thinking about a problem. If I don’t want to be mediocre and hope to do very well, I won’t worry about these things: whether I have a Beijing hukou, whether I can buy an affordable apartment? If a person sets his goal here as soon as he graduates: to buy a small two-room apartment or a small three-room apartment within the fifth ring Road of Beijing and spend all his energy on it, his work will be greatly affected.
His behavior changes and he’s not willing to take risks. For example, I saw a former friend who did some part-time jobs to earn some income. Those part-time jobs are actually unskilled and have an impact on his job, both on his career development and on his mental state. I asked him why, and he said, hey, come on, put money down. I think he looks like he made a profit, but he actually lost.
It’s important not to settle for mediocrity. When I say not mediocre, I don’t mean that you have to be well paid or have good skills, but that you have to hold yourself to a high standard. You may be slow in the first two years, but look at it in 10 years and it will be very different.
4. Not being arrogant can delay gratification
Here I will give you a counter-example: two young people who impressed me quite deeply have good qualities, good skills and characteristics. I was their supervisor at the time and found that they were not delivering well at work. He thought other colleagues were doing worse than he was, which they weren’t: they were in the TOP 20% of the people they hired, but they thought they were in the TOP 1%. Therefore, he is not willing to do some basic work, such as making a debugging tool, or needs to cooperate with colleagues, he does not cooperate well.
They were all very talented people, very smart and capable, but they didn’t control their pride. I think this is consistent with “not willing to settle for mediocrity”. “Not content with mediocrity” means you have to set your goals high. “Not arrogant” means you have to be realistic about the status quo.
Out of these 2,000 samples, I saw a lot of things that I thought were good, but they didn’t do as well as I expected, and things that I thought were bad actually exceeded my expectations. I’ll give you an example here. At that time, we had a colleague in the product business who was also a fresh graduate. At that time, we all thought that he was not particularly smart, so we asked him to do some auxiliary work, such as collecting data and doing user rebound. But now, he’s the vice president of a billion dollar company.
As I later thought, his characteristic was that he was willing to do, responsible, never evasive, and whenever he had the opportunity to undertake something, he always did it as well as he could. It wasn’t always great, but we always gave him feedback. He went there and took charge of a marginal channel with less than 100,000 users and made it better and better. Since it was a fringe channel and didn’t have a full team, he took on a lot of responsibility and got a lot of exercise.
Be judicious about important matters and not swayed by short-term choices
Choose what major, choose what company, choose what profession, choose what development path, oneself should have judgment, do not be short-term choice and left and right sides. Some of the examples above also cover this point. For example, many people were willing to work for a foreign company rather than a new company. In 2006 and 2007, many junior and junior students asked me about my career choice, and I advised them to go to Baidu instead of IBM and Microsoft. But in reality, many are motivated by short-term considerations: foreign companies can be more prestigious and pay better. Although you’ve all heard that a lot. When I graduated, there was a $3,000 or $5,000 difference, which was really negligible. Short-term pay differentials don’t matter. But in fact, there are not many people who can get rid of this and have good judgment.
That’s what I want to share with you.
Thank you very much!
The original post was published on November 30, 2018
Author: The Full stack Developer community
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