That year, I joined a certain well-known company’s well-known department, in the office, I saw the hanging everywhere – “hard will succeed” banner, most of the department staff email signature will be “hard will succeed”, I feel excited atmosphere, this is my work in the years to feel, I was so happy to be working with such a group of people that I didn’t think much of it. Until one day, I saw these senior software engineers locked themselves in the crowded and noisy conference room, desperately working overtime, really desperately, Monday to Sunday, every morning from 10 o ‘clock to 3 o ‘clock in the morning or even 5 o ‘clock in the morning, even the National Day to go to work, in such an environment and state, for more than three months…… QA found 1000 + bugs before launch (1000 + if you read that correctly), and the project ended up taking over a year to rework, a 6-8 month project that the team was so excited to finish in 3 months ended up taking almost two years to rework… (You know, I used to work for a foreign company, and foreign bosses would get anxious when they saw their team working long hours, because overtime was usually a sign that something bad was going on…)
So, I am a little confused about this. What I don’t understand is why such a group of smart people, with bright and spacious desks, are forced to work in a narrow, small, noisy and hot space, and write such important and critical system-level code so overdraft… It’s like a plane that has been worked overtime in a small workshop. Who dares to fly? ! To be honest, these engineers are really good engineers, they could do a lot better… But made such a crappy and bad system… They say they can communicate quickly by sitting together like this, but I think it’s just disorganized.
Is also in the company, in the abandoned the project a year ago, the company felt the crisis, the CEO called on all 996, under the lift force of the company from the chairman to grassroots employees against external threat, some departments to show, or even 997, a year later, however, made a lousy couldn’t be bad software, finally ended in failure, A lot of people were fired, including the CEO…
This is the one thing that baffles me the most, how the senior management of such a successful company could do such a thing and have such a policy… To have talented employees and companies pouring billions of dollars into this wrong route while working overtime… What’s going on in their heads? Do they really think that with enough money and enough people working overtime, they can beat their opponents? …
Do you like this sentence?
If you work hard, you will succeed. If you work overtime, you will succeed. If you work hard, you will get rich. Is that so? If you think about it, there are serious logical problems with these words. We learned about “sufficient conditions”, “necessary conditions” and “necessary and sufficient conditions” in high school! “Efforts will be successful” this sentence, “efforts” said as “success” sufficient and necessary conditions, isn’t it wrong? Hard work is only one of the necessary conditions for success. Does it work if you work in the wrong direction or in a small pattern? You work hard to beg, you work hard to be a porter, you work hard to make harassing phone calls to sell insurance… Do you still think it’s useful to work hard on mistakes and small patterns?
However, many people like the saying “hard work will lead to success”. These people also like to see many inspirational stories about little people becoming successful people through their own efforts. Why this story will be liked and even moved by many people. Because this is in the public’s psychological demands, this kind of appeal is a kind of just that as long as the hard successful psychological demands, because such people are basically ability is limited, don’t know how to improve their own people, when they saw the force can be as long as hard to succeed, they will have resonance, will feel, Don’t have to learn those obscure advanced knowledge, don’t have to master and practice what advanced skills, they just need to go all out in low-level things and work hard, add more classes and do more work, they will be like those little people in the movie, one day will be successful…
“Hard work leads to success, diligence leads to wealth”, not only meets the interests of those low-level managers, but also meets the needs of those who are not capable enough to learn and grow. Because they confuse action with progress, busyness with productivity, they think that brute force can make up for mental inertia, and hard work can make up for lack of ability…
People who like or agree with this sentence are basically people with ability problems, which are suitable for doing labor-intensive things. Try it. When the difficulty of a task is beyond a certain point, the smart people will find a way to save effort, while the ability problem is to use brute force.
How I grew up
Recall my past, I was in 2001 had been outsourced to a bank to do development, standard 9/10/6, closed development, is to use C language in AIX system of some Banks’ trading logic, to be honest, this does not let me learn something, no growth, I think every day is I want to leave this place, so, I began to read books after 10 o ‘clock at night to learn 11:30, and use the work environment to practice the code on the book, a year later, I read “TCP/IP in detail” “Windows Core programming” “Java programming ideas” and other books. Then I got a job in a foreign company that tripled my monthly salary.
Do not work overtime in a foreign company, but the foreign pressure is big, the quality of the code requirements are very high, for a second month, because bad written code, open nearly wiped out, so, in order to be able to achieve a higher standard, I naturally is also very hard, even at the weekend “golden week” holidays I where all don’t go, I will go to the company, but I’m not go to work in the company, Since I don’t have my own computer, I can only use the company’s computer, which leads to the management of the office building often calling me to help him manage the property on weekends… However, it is not because of my efforts, but because there are many people better than me who give me a lot of help in Code Review and help me in the project. Although my hard work is also helpful, it is mostly due to the help from the experts.
If you think back to a lot of the key points in my career, it wasn’t because I stayed late, it was because I jumped in and solved some key problem that no one else could solve. I solved a problem where network traffic was dropping for no reason. I solved an unrepeatable problem that had been plaguing the team for 3 weeks (essentially, people didn’t read the document), and I solved a legacy problem for a company on my first day on the job… In Platform, I solved more bugs per week than all the other people in the whole company combined (I never worked overtime). In Reuters, the performance of the system optimized by my team was the highest among all the R&D centers in the world. In Amazon, I got through the order and commodity list systems in America and Germany in two weeks… I fail too, and when I fail, it’s always because I can’t get things done, even if I work overtime and work hard! Yes, the growth of my career, the most fundamental is not how hard you work, how diligent, but you can do things that many people can’t do!
If you don’t believe it, you can look at those technicians in your company who don’t have to work overtime, even if they don’t do anything, the company has to spend money to support them. Their success is definitely not the result of hard work and overtime work. You will find that what these people fight for is not who does more, but who solves more difficult problems.
I’ve never grown the most when I’ve worked 996 overtime, but I’ve grown the most when I’ve worked with a bunch of great people to solve problems.
Work Smart
In 2015, my father was critically ill and had to undergo surgery, so I could not work at home to take care of him. So I became a freelancer, helping many companies solve some technical problems, many of which are high concurrency and system stability problems, some of which are operation and maintenance problems of distributed architecture, and some of which are engineering management and corporate culture problems… There are some small companies whose single architecture breaks down as soon as they promote their business, so they called me to them. I re-arch directly on the production line, and saved the performance in 1-2 days with some unconventional means… Besides, I also solve some technical problems and do some design/code review for users… 70% of the jobs were really paid according to their work, that is to say, how much money would be charged after solving the problem first. During that time, I was not selling my labor force, but my skills, so I actually earned much more than part-time jobs, and it was relatively relaxed…
Sometimes, I even joke that you can write thousands of lines of code a day in a large company and work overtime. Would you believe that I can make more money by writing only a few hundred lines of code? For the same simple for-loop, someone will write a line worth $10,000 and you will write nothing. It’s not about who writes more code, it’s about what problems we solve. You must not think that if you are paid enough money, you can do whatever you want, but when you think of yourself as labor, you are just an animal!
It’s like an algorithm, your O(n^2) recursive algorithm, is no better than my O(n) dynamic programming algorithm.
Now I get the investment at the start of business, to help companies to build high concurrency highly available cloud architecture company, now back to enterprises with financial and marketing ability, when I talk to customer business, basic not because I have much to work overtime work to do, but I can hit the nail on the head is pointed out that the problems of users, to help users solve the problem. I see Ali, Ant, Huawei, HP in many places… , a small start-up companies compete with them really difficult, but I know that need to be able to compete these big companies, it is not able to work overtime 996 or hard efforts can be done, I must use a better way, so, in addition to better stand in the position of the user, to give users make more accord with technical solution, I have to make sure that my technical solutions are as good as those of these big companies, and this is not by working overtime, hard work or diligence, but by my own experience, learning ability, inductive thinking, and communicating with more talented people… When I gave a bank CIO after introducing my distributed system scheme, CIO gave me a slight bow and said: “in the past one or two years, I have heard almost all the domestic and foreign manufacturers tell me about the distributed scheme, yours is the best scheme I have heard! Thank you!” When I told a telecom company in a province about DevOps, the boss said to me, “You really are doers!” When users come to me and ask me, “How do you write your API gateway? Why is it so stable?” … These are the words that make my heart very warm… Sure, THERE were times when I was scolded and times when I failed, but basically, I couldn’t work hard to improve my lack of thinking…
The greatest blessing that we learn to be a computer programmer is not that we can work overtime and 996 in a big company, but that we live in the information age of the third industrial Revolution, which is the greatest blessing. Therefore, we should strive to improve ourselves, rather than sell ourselves as labor force! In an era where you don’t earn money by working overtime and working hard on your knees, you earn money by lying down on your skills…