Original title: The iterative career of “code farmers” in Xi ‘er Banner: High income and anxiety remain
Freezing Point Feature No. 1102
Xi Erqi iteration
Wang Mengying, reporter of China Youth Daily
China’s Internet tides ebb and flow at Xi ‘er Banner.
The nearly rectangular area on Beijing’s northwest fifth ring Road is seen as one of several strong candidates for “China’s Silicon Valley”. Built in 2000, the walls of glass inside and outside the Zhongguancun Science Park break through the soil, and brighter signs are always put up. Once-dominant companies like Microsoft, Huawei, and Lenovo are building towers, Baidu, netease, and Tencent have their turf, and today’s up-and-coming startups like Didi are planning campuses modeled after Silicon Valley, with greenery.
It keeps growing. It has seen one of the biggest increases in rental transactions in Beijing over the past two years. House prices remain around 80,000 yuan per square meter. The Ming Dynasty here is a horse farm, before the reform and opening to the suburbs.
Countless programmers work here day after day. They live in the story of “code farmers” who earn 50,000 yuan a month but live like they earn 5,000 yuan a month. They are also hidden in the myth of engineers in the Internet economy. The zeros and ones under their fingers are weaving a whole new world.
Traces of a bygone era linger on street signs: “Houchang Village”, “Tangjialing”… Traffic is as bad as road names. During the peak hours, cars of all sizes have been jammed under the Bridge of Xi Erqi for years. In the sound of sirens one after another, the line of people waiting for the company bus on the roadside can be winding for more than ten meters, steaming corn and steamed buns in plastic bags in their hands. Xi ‘er Qi subway station is one of the most visited in Beijing, with 220,000 people passing through it every day. Passengers were packed in like cement.
At Xi ‘er Banner, iteration is the dominant theme in the technology world. This is one of the Internet’s survival logics: the new replaces the old, the faster the better, versions change, products change, companies die.
Day and night
The Western flag has its own rhythm.
Engineer Lin Yi works for a start-up company in West Erqi, just over a year. After 10 o ‘clock in the morning, the cubicles become busy. Like many Internet companies in the region, the company offers “flexitime” to its programmers, which ensures that arriving before lunch is not late, and means that working late into the night is not compensated overtime.
Noon is a rare time for rest. The small gardens of various software parks were filled with people, in groups of five or six, holding up their mobile phones and playing games. Sunlight is very strong, mobile phone brightness to the maximum also common green light spot, ass under the stone stool faint hot. Some people have strands of light in their hair. Alopecia is a stubborn disease that troubles many programmers because of pressure. Choosing to burn the hair root can create a fluffy and rich effect, which will be exposed in the big sun.
Afternoons are busy and fleeting. Sun empty street, the building size of meeting under the fluorescent lamp, fall pop-up keyboard keys, the news of the internal communication drops, other departments to coordinate delivery personnel speaking quietly, the colorful headset cover is torn out auricle – almost all wearing type, all the sound isolation from the outside.
After nightfall, when the building is lit up, some people have productive periods of inspiration, while others are so tired of producing bugs that they take on transactional tasks. Some of the company’s single young male colleagues prefer to stick around, even if they don’t have a rush to work — returning home to a single bed in a rented house.
Lin yi used to arrive at the office at 8 a.m., the lights were on and nobody was there. His concern was “ETA”, or “estimated time of arrival”. His work affects how many minutes it takes to open a ride-hailing app to place an order.
The simplest and crude calculation is to divide the distance by the historical average speed of vehicles, but the actual road conditions can be much more complicated, with congestion and traffic lights affecting the speed of arrival. Behind the final numbers on the phone’s screen is a huge database of model training and calculations that are at the cutting edge of machine learning.
He didn’t see the point of a programmer motivator. The concept has gone viral on the Internet, often accompanied by images of young, well-made-up girls leaning behind male programmers who tap keyboards, smiling and rubbing their shoulders.
“Will you stay away and let me work?” If someone had tried to “encourage” him in this way, he would probably have begged for mercy. You’re so engrossed in writing code that you can’t tolerate any interruptions in your logic.
Lin yi is not only involved in the implementation of the project, but also responsible for technical research. The research part of the work is no different from the pace of his school days, reading papers, doing experiments and writing reports.
Engineers like him are not in the majority. Behind countless office Windows, countless programmers are battling deadlines for new versions to come online. Iteration is an important part of the job, getting there first, and then refining and getting better.
“A hundred in a few months is not as good as an 80 in a few weeks.” “Program yuan” Chen Jiajia once worked in an Internet giant in Xi Erqi for a long time, has been familiar with this truth.
Most of the newcomers to the company undertake basic work, but also include a lot of repetitive labor; As they grow, they can see the outline of the iterative process from a higher position. After working for four years, Chen jiajia has grown from a petty soldier worried about time shortage to a middle-level planner who can strive for time at a higher level.
Launch day is usually calm, everything is right, few changes. The most nerve-wracking are the first few tests, when the ready release is carefully weighed for bugs. One test that Chen remembers vividly happened shortly after she joined the company. She was sitting in her cubicle trying to concentrate on her work, but an inside message kept telling her the results of the test. “I found a problem later.” Copying test results to everyone involved by default was a “public slap in the face,” and she almost doubted that she was capable of anything.
There are exceptions to the calm on line. On the eve of the launch of a new version, at 9 o ‘clock, Chen Jiajia suddenly received a mass message from the product manager of the upstream link in the internal news: Don’t panic!
Naturally, everyone panicked. The new version was due to be released to users at 8am the next morning, and a huge undetected bug suddenly appeared, affecting all downstream links. Half a floor burn the midnight oil, one link after another modification. Because there are so many links, some of the people who are near the back of the link go home and sleep in advance, and the upstream link is woken up after midnight to finish their work.
She was already in charge of the whole thing all by herself, sorting out her other work with a strange calm, waiting to appear. Clockwise rotation, the keyboard between the grid of the sound of this a that a sudden up, every minute is for the downstream link of the comrades in arms to save.
She left the building at 5 a.m., the summer day already bright and bluish. All the remedial work was done before the new version went live, and the subway received its first crowds as if nothing had happened at night.
whether
Zhang Xing, a 28-year-old engineer, is not a big fan of iterations. He pursued the beauty of code, clearly defined, easy to copy and extend, mathematically simple and beautiful. Like a tree, leaves crisscrossed do not block each other’s sunlight, the branches stretch out countless possibilities.
The rapid pace of iteration did not allow him to devote much energy to the construction of beauty. He is currently working on driverless technology for an Internet company, and his team’s recent task was the equivalent of doubling the algorithm’s “house” in a month: rebuilding the foundation, rebuilding the architecture, and laying the tiles again.
The last company he worked for was a foreign company in the communications field. The company code is “standard pretty”, the pace of work is slow, the office dress is serious, no shorts allowed. He was the youngest in the department, surrounded by colleagues in their early 30s who stayed late to pick up their children.
On New Year’s Eve 2018, his entire department was cut. For months before that, the news had been kept a secret by the company only from them. Colleagues in the department are frequently sent overseas for business trips and are no longer required to work deeply, only to make hand-offs. On the day of the announcement, a foreigner in a suit and tie walked into the cubicle with a beefy Chinese bodyguard, and everyone woke up.
The company provided more than 100,000 yuan of compensation, and colleagues joked to each other that “more cuts will make a fortune”. The morning after the layoff, he woke up and realized, in one of his customary moments of getting up, that he was missing his shift.
Across the telecom industry, the disadvantage of foreign companies is becoming increasingly apparent. Chinese companies that “iterate aggressively and evolve desperately” are taking the lead.
The industry has lost ground to the Internet. Ten years ago, when one of Zhang’s colleagues graduated from an engineering college in northeast China, students rushed to the recruitment booths of ZTE and Huawei to submit their resumes. Only those with mediocre grades had to choose Tencent, a “small private company” in Shenzhen.
At xi Erqi, a Chinese telecoms firm that beat back Zhang’s company, Wang Zhao, zhang’s classmate, often wondered if he was “looking too far ahead”.
Wang Zhao likes his job very much, but unfortunately, his entry time is stuck between the company’s two collective salary increases, and his predecessors and juniors all earn higher than him. He could feel the difference in atmosphere between the company and an Internet company. It was more like a serious state-owned enterprise, with a clear hierarchy and no room for jokes in the team atmosphere. He switched teams several times, trying to get closer to the cutting edge — “people who do technology have that kind of obsession.” But the industry is limited and there is a limit to how much cutting edge companies can offer.
He began to think about job-hopping. Experience has proved that job-hopping is a shortcut for programmers to solve all problems.
For outsiders, job-hopping often happens without warning. A forest around, every other period of time someone will suddenly put forward to treat – to leave. Job-hopping that is publicized in advance is often difficult to follow through and is more often a threat to hint at a pay rise.
According to friends, the head of the hr department at the next company, who is responsible for interviews, lacks in-depth knowledge of technical expertise. They tend to stick to a crude formula: a person’s worth is determined by what he or she earned at the previous company, with a percentage increase on top of that.
Within the same company, the rate of salary increase and promotion is strictly controlled. Therefore, more frequent job changes tend to bring more benefits. However, if you overdo it, employers will think you have too little loyalty. A more reasonable rhythm was worked out: once every 18 months.
In a circle of the same field, sometimes the same faces change, overlapping under different signboards. Lin yi felt this was unreasonable. “Foreign monks don’t always chant sutras.”
Chen jiajia accepts the moderating role of job hopping. “The experience and perspective of other companies are valuable.” She just jumped out of the west second flag and doubled her salary. She felt lucky that every time she jumped between the group and the company, she landed in the field with the most room for growth at that time, grew faster and gained more.
In her world, grade C is a scary word. Similar words are also rated D or 3.25 out of 4, depending on the company.
The word stands for elimination. Programmers who fail on KPIs (key performance indicators) may receive such evaluations. This means they are not eligible for salary increases or year-end bonuses in the coming year. With such a verdict, they have only one choice: they choose to leave.
In order to stimulate the maximum efficiency of employees, Internet companies tend to set a certain percentage of elimination. At Ms. Chen’s companies, one in 10 people was labeled a GRADE C.
The battle to stay or leave is also being fought among the same team. Some Internet companies have two teams with the same research and development goals in mature areas, called Team A and Team B. The two teams, under competitive pressure to beat the clock, were relentless in pointing out each other’s mistakes. Only one team will be selected.
Lin yi’s team is young and on an untrodden road. His peers trust each other and have a sense of belonging. An industry veteran who worked with them briefly was very protective of his code, demanding that his work be clearly marked. The young man thought him strange. “He probably thinks us strange, too. He’s never been hurt.” Linyi said.
Before Mr Lin joined, the start-up was in the middle of a battle against an international rival seeking to enter China. Nervous air enveloped in the company, money and people are ammunition, the first time to be moved to the line of defense may be attacked. Lin a secretly worried for a while, afraid not to graduate employer did not.
The company held on, bought the other’s Chinese arm, and the other pulled out of the market. At the beginning of this year to fight another domestic start-up company, the atmosphere of the company is obviously calm a lot — before so big rivals are fighting to win.
“War is good for us.” Lin yi said, “there is a war just need us.”
money
Thanks to the Internet, Ms. Chen feels that only in this rapidly expanding industry can young people write a future line by line on their own, without having to fight for their fathers, and get the rewards of crossing classes.
She earns more than four times as much as she did when she started her career, with an annual salary approaching one million yuan. She doesn’t wear makeup, combs her hair when she’s busy, wears a pair of plastic slippers in summer, and changes to sandals when she meets her friends. She lost interest in handbags and carried a small plastic bag with door keys, mobile phone and work cards. The plastic bag comes with the fruit, so it’s not a pity to lose it.
She blends seamlessly into xi Erqi’s sprawling “yard farmers,” a sea of plaid shirts and T-shirts in summer and hoodies and down jackets in autumn and winter. Many of them carry company-issued backpacks to protect their laptops, ready to be whipped out to write a line of code.
“You couldn’t tell any of them were holding millions of dollars worth of equity.” Chen jiajia said. In her view, as incomes change, there is no need to pursue “efficient and simple” lifestyles.
Instead of plants and dolls in her new office cubicles, she splashed out on mechanical keyboards, replacing “unusable” company furniture and even buying her own mouse — “600!” The next step is to replace the display and add a sleeping bag, and a standard programmer upgrade is complete.
Some programmers are careful to maintain a world of their own. Some collect pens, while others buy toy guns for online games – “for my son”, who is just four months old.
Ms. Chen didn’t like the atmosphere at her new company. The first week of work to open a general meeting, the leadership voice fell, the audience clap clap, in chorus, “like a pyramid selling organization.” She had heard that the couple’s “ice-breaking” activities had gone too far and planned to apply for a business trip to avoid being killed.
Despite the discomfort, she still couldn’t resist “giving more money.”
Money is an affirmation for her. The higher the offer, the higher the evaluation of her work, and she’s “not useless.”
Being single, she sometimes feels as if she is traveling between two parallel worlds: awkward blind dates and constant rejections; On the other hand, I had a triumphant job interview and was constantly receiving positive feedback.
“Work saved me.” Chen jiajia said. She clung to the world of logic and numbers, writing code, reading papers and memorizing a few machine-learn-related English words a day. No time for tears, here she is needed.
“In fact, high wages are also a means to extract value. We are all screws.” “But at least it acknowledges my worth, doesn’t it?”
She rarely complains or protests, but always feels the market is free and “if I don’t like it, I can choose to leave”.
Lin admires one of his predecessors at another Internet company. His algorithm improved advertising accuracy by 1%, adding more than $1 billion to the company’s revenue. These values naturally cannot be translated into salary proportionately, the senior became a legend in the industry, “already worth it.”
Xi erqi’s money-value conversion method does not necessarily conform to technical thinking. Lin yi is doing the exact opposite of what his lab colleagues are doing. In pursuit of faster, more accurate and stronger scientific research in universities, he tried to reduce the accuracy of calculation and at the same time change the number of servers required from three to one, greatly reducing the cost.
For Zhang, money is the fuel that keeps his family running smoothly. He got married last year and is saddled with a mortgage of nearly 20,000 yuan and a car payment of 3,000 yuan a month.
In the torrent of life, he struggles to swim to the waters where money shines, from state-owned enterprises, to foreign companies, and now the company. The slow years did not waste his time, he spent 5000 yuan to buy an online course of unmanned driving technology abroad, learned half of it, and won a job opportunity later. He soon became busy and did not finish the other half.
His current division burns huge amounts of the company’s investment every day, and no one knows for sure what the future holds. Zhang xing, who was dizzy when he looked at his phone in a car before, can now calmly change codes on his computer in a speeding car without a driver, while the wind whistles through the car’s Windows.
No one knows how much money is enough.
Chen Jiajia once worked in xi Erqi Internet giant team. There was a boy who was excellent and diligent. In his first year in the company, he won the rookie award. Variables to sudden, his father was diagnosed cancer, Beijing to see a doctor. He gave up his house to treat his father and had to pay a penalty. The treatment was long and painful, the deterioration was rapid, he was not at work, and he received a C grade for months on end. His girlfriend left him and he eventually left the company.
The last time Ms. Chen saw him was earlier this year, when he worked at a small Internet company that wasn’t doing well. His father died a year ago, his life turned upside down.
“There is no bottom line in this business.” “There’s no limit up there, and there’s no limit down there,” Ms. Chen said.
love
At a dinner party, male colleagues talked about single women, saying, “They must be strong.” Holding the cup, Chen Jiajia said to herself, “We are all working on algorithms. We cannot tell the samples and logical relations clearly. How can we reach such a conclusion?” She said nothing, swallowed her drink and smiled.
She had a dream before she jumped ship, to meet a new man. Look in the group, all married, except two kids in ’94.
Chen jiajia has given up trying to impress the opposite sex with her looks, and no one will notice if she dresses up. She changed her glasses, hinted at everything, and the male programmers she spent time with on the project finally figured it out: Did you change your hair?
In the same group, there is a girl born after 90, with light makeup and different skirts. There is no shortage of male seniors around girls who volunteer to do all kinds of guidance. The girl is some resistance, eat together always pull Chen Jiajia, buffer too high enthusiasm.
Chen Jiajia looked at her, as if to see when they just entered their own. Sometimes A little envy, but also understand that the weight of the project is not round that girl to carry. She felt that “program yuan” in front of it seems that there have been two ways: do a good to accept help “mascot”, or lose their gender, to compete for career success. She and her female colleagues almost all ended up taking the latter route.
She occasionally misses being protected. In the world of online games, the senior engineer, who graduated from Tsinghua University, claimed to be a sophomore female student at a second-year college and was escorted by an ID of the opposite sex to fight monsters all the way up the ladder. She soon put the game behind her when work got busy.
She now prefers to play a shoot-out game dubbed “Eat Chicken.” Pressed for time, she switched to the 8-minute fast version of her phone, grabbed the gun and fired. On weekends, she was able to play the full version on the computer for longer with her roommate. Roommate is a calm and capable Internet operation and maintenance, under the management of dozens of people, in the game as timid as a mouse, often hidden in the pit silently facing death, dare not move. The two have never won together, but they are addicted.
She felt that her own absence of a boyfriend was probably like a statistic in the eyes of her parents. Her mother strongly opposed her job-hopping. After living in a small place all her life, the mother couldn’t figure out why her daughter didn’t get the point of life — to stop making more money and find a man to marry. Many times under the attack, Chen Jiajia now requires very “pragmatic”, undergraduate, appearance income does not care, than her height on the line.
“I want my parents to approve of me.” This small outstanding girl said.
In West Erqi, Zhang’s colleague zhou Qing, a programmer born in the 1990s, is also struggling to find love.
He judged himself trapped in a loop. Those girls who want to find a boyfriend already have a partner when they meet him. Others should be “not looking for a boyfriend at all and have seen nothing from her for the past year and a half.” In his eyes, the large number of single men and women in the company, do not meet each other.
He hopes to find a partner who is also a programmer. Zhou Qing thinks that liking can be quantified, and professional level is one of the quantified standards. “In today’s society, finding a partner requires a strong alliance.”
It is not that I have never met a girl whose quantified achievements made him move, but a few wechat messages in the past, the other party no longer have news. He had written thousands of lines of code and didn’t know how to start a new topic. He’s a little discouraged recently and is looking to his parents for a blind date.
In the future
No one is irreplaceable. This was the first lesson Zhou Qing learned when she joined the company.
At that time took his direct leadership to give him a lesson. Later he was transferred to another department, the leader did not retain him, he was a little frustrated. Over the next two years, he maintained good relations with other tech-savvy seniors in the department, but never contacted the leader again.
He felt that the functions of the two people in the larger system were similar and naturally mutually exclusive. Over the past two years, he has worked hard to become the leader, a somewhat special programmer who, in addition to writing code, pushes for resources and controls progress.
“Everyone has to find their role.” Zhou Qing said.
The industry is always young, post-90s programmers have become one of the backbone of xi Erqi. Meanwhile, in 2017, a famous technology company in Xi Erqi was revealed to have laid off a group of employees over the age of 45, and “cleaned up” the delivery engineering maintenance staff over the age of 34, and transferred them to other posts. At the end of the same year, a 42-year-old technician committed suicide after being told to leave.
In Xi Erqi, on almost every floor there is a legendary programmer with a dazzling sideline. There are “stock god”, “futures god”, and the latest trend is to speculate on bitcoin. There is a programmer who is good at repairing high-end watches of foreign brands. He has a set of ingenious little tools that grind broken pieces into treasures. The highest position the company could offer him was director, but the path to promotion was narrow and almost impossible.
Zhang Xing, 28, is already anxious about the future. He can’t forget his mixed feelings when he was made redundant. Some of the old colleagues are older and have been slow to land new jobs. The world of programming was demanding, and he felt he was likely to become more overwhelmed as his energy waned with age. There are, but not many, predecessors who have risen through the ranks with their technical abilities. “Technology has to move to management,” he reckons.
Lin yi does not think that writing code is “youth meal”, “experience has its own value”. Programmers in their 40s and 50s abound in the foreign technology companies he has contacted. Their accumulation creates great intuitions that steer the younger generation away from many detours in their work.
Chen jiajia does not see the future. “Maybe 10 years from now, the Internet situation will be similar to today’s communication industry.” “Maybe new areas will be opened up.” She doesn’t worry about herself, just works hard and doesn’t get left behind too early.
“Isn’t it enough to be financially independent by age 40?” The 29-year-old waved her hand.
Xi Erqi is in a new change. Only the administrative backbone of the company remains beneath many of its shiny signboards. Big companies are branching out farther from the cities, opening up cheaper land and building their own mega-campuses.
New buildings are being erected further east, south and north of the city. Every morning, the crowds wake up from the beehive of beiyuan, Huilongguan and Tongzhou and flow down thousands of roads to the busy world of glass walls. After nightfall, the numerous Windows in the aerial shot presented a brilliant star, the individual faces can not be seen.
(At the request of the interviewees, the characters in the article are pseudonyms)
