preface
Some time ago, there was a popular article in programmer friend circle titled “Is Tencent in a state of technological construction lagging behind companies of the same size?” “A lot of my friends sent me the link and asked me if IT was true. I told them most of it was true and my friends were surprised. In fact, I have read other highly praised answers under this question for a long time. As far as my department of Tencent is concerned, most of the answers are not fiction, fabrication or smearing. It has been almost eight months since I jumped from Tencent to Ali. Eight months is not a long time, but it is enough to experience the differences between Tencent and Ali. Although there is no shortage of online articles describing the differences between Tencent and Alibaba (including culture, compensation, company atmosphere and technology construction), I wanted to write my own feelings. So the following are my personal views, inevitably has a certain one-sidedness, do not like spray.
About tencent
Tencent as a whole is a company, but many of its divisions operate independently of each other. The cooperation between departments is more like the cooperation between one company and another company. If the person in charge is not responsible for the communication, he or she cannot disclose any details and progress related to the work to the other party. When I worked in a department of Tencent, I suffered several losses due to this, so that AFTER I came to Ali, I was always afraid of making mistakes in inter-department cooperation. As it turns out, ali doesn’t need to think about that in most cases. The cooperation between departments is the cooperation within the company, so I slowly came to mind.
Wechat we all know, in fact, Tencent do wechat this product when not only guangzhou wechat team doing. Chengdu also has a team to do, at that time, the first to do well, the first to promote can survive. Finally, of course, guangzhou’s wechat made, another similar “wechat” products can only die.
And back when chicken was hot. Tencent immediately launched two mobile games to eat chicken: Photon studio’s exciting battlefield and Tianmei studio’s full attack to share the market. There are many other such examples. A core security product of a certain department of Tencent where I work has competitors within the company. Maybe this is the culture of Tencent, a good product is so competitive, polished out. Baidu’s technology, Alibaba’s operations and Tencent’s products are not unreasonable.
About ali.
But Ali is completely different, come to Ali BU in the first month. My brother led me to make a new product, and the function of the product needs to be explored by myself. The director only specified the general direction, the only requirement for us is not to do what others/other groups/BU have done, must be good at using the company’s existing platform to empower their products. It can be seen that Ali pays more attention to cooperation and innovation, and never does the same thing twice.
In Tencent, just because of isolation and competition, there is little communication, cooperation and sharing between various departments, especially in technology. Each department works in isolation, with little or no accumulation, which is also the main reason for Tencent’s backward technology construction. From what I’ve seen over the past few months, Alibaba’s technology is much better than Tencent’s. Therefore, after I came to Ali, I often told those colleagues who complained that I was happy enough to work in Ali. I only needed to concentrate on writing business codes and didn’t need to care about some miscellaneous things.
Both comparisons
Tencent is more like a startup company. All processes involved in an application from the beginning to the end need to be developed and participated in, including server application, environment building, DB installation, deployment, operation and maintenance, etc. This means that development often involves development, testing, and operations. Often let people complain, give me the biggest feeling is very busy, but do not know what is busy. Of course, alibaba also has these processes, but a lot of times you just need to click on the page. This greatly saves development time, operation and maintenance costs and error probability. This is mainly due to the improvement of Alibaba’s technology construction. Let me give two simple examples to illustrate the differences between Tencent and Alibaba in technology construction, so that the differences between the two can be more intuitive.
1. Unified DB management platform
When I was in a department of Tencent, the application needed to use DB. In most cases, I had to build the mysql environment on the Linux server and use the local DB. Then a lot of the operations are CRUD operations in the Linux shell, very raw. The most painful thing is the operation and maintenance of DB. If anything goes wrong, we have to take the blame. In a BU of Ali, you can directly apply for a new application on the company’s internal platform, and you will be automatically assigned two sets (test and formal). All operations are in the page, DB does not need to operate and maintain. Read and write have done a good permission control, not afraid of misoperation.
2. Unified configuration center
Variables in many applications need to be configured in configuration files. In a certain department of Tencent, they were all deployed together with applications in the form of files. Configuration file reading and writing are implemented by the application itself, of course, this has a packaged library. But what if you want to modify the configuration file? You have to manually modify and restart the application, and the operation and maintenance costs can be imagined. In Alibaba, the entire company has a unified configuration center middleware called Diamond, which is easy to use. When using the page to modify, click publish will automatically hot update to the application, no need to restart, not prone to error.
It can be said that Ali has a very mature program and platform in the development, testing, operation and deployment processes, while Tencent is still using a relatively primitive way. The above two cases are only a glimpse of the gap between Tencent and Ali in technology construction, and many other aspects do not want to repeat. As for the specific reasons, the answers on Zhihu have been well explained. That’s why it’s so important to be platformable, streamlined and standardized. Each department of Tencent has its own set, which is rarely shared between departments, so many things are limited to have but not master. Ali shares one set throughout the company, so it slowly precipitates corporate-level products. Tencent may also have recognized its shortcomings in this area, having recently made an organizational change.
conclusion
The biggest beneficiary of perfect technology construction is, of course, programmers, who work in Tencent and Ali every day. But it was much easier at Alibaba, where you just had to focus on business code; A lot of time at Tencent is worried about the environment, operations and deployment. There is very little time to write code and it is often squeezed.
However, everything has pros and cons. In Tencent, employees know a lot of things because they need to do everything by themselves. In particular, some basic knowledge, algorithms and optimization of the bottom, but fine or not fine do not know. For historical reasons Tencent’s primary programming language is C++, while alibaba’s is Java. Therefore, Tencent is destined to the bottom of the application development, and Ali partial upper business development. Personally, I think Tencent staff may be better than Alibaba staff in the underlying technology, while Alibaba staff are better than Tencent staff in object orientation, design mode and business communication.
Of course, for a company, maybe none of this matters. What matters is making money. But as a shareholder, Tencent’s share price has been plummeting lately. How can I put it? I hope my old employer is getting better and better, and I hope my new employer is getting better and better too! Remember to pay attention to the public account oh, recording a C++ programmer to Java learning road.
