Zhang Yiming: After interviewing 2,000 people in 10 years, I found that people who do well all have the same characteristics

##01

##Why, many years after graduation, the gap between classmates who were originally about the same level has widened?

Hello everyone! You are all very young and I was quite stressed when I came here today. Because it has been almost 11 years since I graduated. When I see you, I really feel that "the waves behind you in the Yangtze River push the waves ahead."

I participated in the school recruitment in Wuhan last year and felt that the quality of the new generation of young people is indeed very good. I was thinking yesterday about what I should share with you today. After thinking about it, I first drafted the title and changed Steve Jobs’ “Stay hungry, Stay foolish” to “Stay hungry, Stay young”.

I would like to share with you my own work experience and experience after graduation. In addition, as an interviewer, I may have interviewed as many as 2,000 young people in the past 10 years. Some are in the same company as me, and some have gone to other companies. Their development differences are actually very different. Algorithmically speaking, we call this "positive examples" and "negative examples". I want to share something

: Why is there such a big difference in the development of "positive examples" and "negative examples"?

What is "Stay hungry, Stay young"? "Stay hungry", as we all know, means curiosity, thirst for knowledge, and ambition. But why say "Stay young"?

I think young people have many advantages: they don’t set any rules for doing things, they don’t have too many egos to maintain, and they can often break Routine, very hardworking, uncompromising, unsophisticated.

10 years have passed, and some young people still maintain these good qualities. I think this counts as "Stay young".

"Stay young" people have basically never reached the ceiling and have always maintained their own growth. On the contrary, many people improve their skills after graduation, but after reaching a ceiling, they stop growing.

#02

I will share my personal experience first

How did I become

in my second year of graduation as a supervisor managing a team of 40 or 50 people?

In 2005, I graduated from Nankai University and joined a company called Kuxun. I was one of the earliest employees to join. I was just an ordinary engineer at the beginning, but in my second year of work, I managed a team of forty or fifty people in the company, responsible for all back-end technologies and many product-related tasks. .

Someone asked me: Why did you grow so fast in your first job? Did you perform particularly well in that company?

Actually not. At that time, the company's recruitment standards were also very high. I remember that there were two Ph.D.s from Tsinghua Computer Science Department who joined the company at the same time as me.

Am I the best in technology? Are you the most experienced? I found it was neither. Later I thought about what qualities I had at that time.

#1. When I work, I don’t distinguish between what I should do and what I shouldn’t do. After I finish my work, I will do whatever I can to help solve most of my colleagues’ problems. At that time, I had read most of the codes in Code Base. When a new employee joins the company, I explain it to him whenever I have time. Through explanation, I can also grow.

There is another characteristic. In the first two years of work, I basically went home at twelve o'clock every day. I will also program very late in the future. It's really because of interest, not the company's requirements. So I quickly went from being responsible for a module for extracting crawlers to being responsible for the entire back-end system. I started leading a team, then a small department, and then a large department.

#2. I never set boundaries when doing things. I was in charge of technology at the time, but when I encountered product problems, I would actively participate in discussions and think of product solutions. Many people say this is not what I should do. But I want to say: Your sense of responsibility and your motivation to do things well will drive you to do more things and give you a lot of exercise.

I was an engineer at the time, but the experience of participating in products was of great help to my later transformation into products. My involvement in business also helps me a lot in my current job. I remember that at the end of 2007, I went to meet customers with the company's sales director. This experience taught me: what kind of sales is good sales. When I set up Toutiao to recruit people, these cases for reference kept me from knowing nothing in this field.

The above are my characteristics when I first graduated.

##03

10 years of observation, The outstanding young people I met all have these five characteristics!

Later, I joined various entrepreneurial teams one after another. During this process, I spent time with many graduates, and I still keep in touch with many of them. Let me share with you some of the good and bad situations I have seen. To sum up, what are the characteristics of these outstanding young people?

First, be curious and be able to take the initiative to learn new things, new knowledge and new skills. Today I am not too modest. I will regard myself as a positive example and then give a negative example. I have a former colleague who had a good theoretical foundation, but he always finished his work and then got off work. He has been in this company for more than a year, but he doesn't understand the new technologies and tools on the Internet. So he is very dependent on others. When he wants to implement a function, he needs someone to help him do the second half, because he can only do the first half - if he is a curious person, he must master the front-end, back-end, and algorithm, and at least have some knowledge. If you understand it, you can do a lot of debugging analysis by yourself.

Second, stay optimistic about uncertainty. For example, at the beginning of Toutiao, I told everyone: We want to have 100 million daily activations. (Of course, it’s now more than 100 million, and our current daily startup count is almost 500 million.) Many people think, how can a small company like yours do it? Only big companies can do well. So he didn't dare to try hard. Only optimistic people believe it and are willing to try it. In fact, it was the same when I joined Kuxun. That company wanted to build a next-generation search engine (it didn’t succeed in the end and only made vertical search for travel). I don't know what other people think, but I'm excited. I really wasn’t sure and didn’t know how to do it, but I just went to learn and look at all these related things. I think it may not necessarily be done in the end, or it may not be completely achieved, but this process will also be very helpful - As long as you remain optimistic about the uncertainty of things, you will be more willing to try.

Third, don’t settle for mediocrity. All of us here are already very outstanding among our classmates. But I want to say that after entering the society, we should set higher standards. I have seen many of my classmates and colleagues who worked together in college. There are many very good talents with better skills and grades than me. But 10 years later, many people have not met my expectations: I think he should be able to do a good job, but he has not done it.

After graduation, many people do not set high goals. I looked back and found that some colleagues joined the bank IT department: some joined after graduation, and some joined after working for a period of time. Why do I associate this with "not settling for mediocrity"? Because many of them joined in order to quickly get their Beijing household registration, or some organizations at that time provided housing allocation subsidies to purchase affordable housing.

Then I was thinking about a question. If I am not willing to be mediocre and hope to do very well, I will not bother with these things. Worry about things: Do you have a Beijing household registration? Can you buy an affordable house?

As soon as a person graduates, he will set his goal here: buy a small two-bedroom or three-bedroom apartment within the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. If all your energy is spent on this, your work will be greatly affected. His behavior will change and he will be unwilling to take risks.

#For example, I met a former friend who did some part-time jobs in his spare time to earn some income. Those part-time jobs actually have no technical content and have an impact on his job, affecting both his career development and his mental state. I asked him why, and he said, Hey, hurry up and pay for the down payment. I think he seems to be making a profit, but in fact he is losing money.

It is important not to settle for mediocrity. When I say not mediocre, I don’t mean that the salary must be very high or the skills must be very good, but that your standards for yourself must be high. Maybe you changed slowly in the first two years, but if you look at it 10 years later, it will definitely be very different.

Fourth, don’t be arrogant and be able to delay gratification. Let me give you a counterexample here: two young people who impressed me deeply, both have pretty good qualities and skills, and they both have their own characteristics. I was their supervisor at the time and found that their delivery situation at work was always not good. They think other colleagues are doing worse than them, but this is not true: they can indeed be counted among the top 20% of colleagues recruited at that time, but they mistakenly think that they are the top 1%. Therefore, he is unwilling to do many basic tasks, such as making a debugging tool, or does not cooperate well with colleagues.

They were originally very qualified people. They were very smart and capable, but they did not control their arrogance. mood. I don’t think this is inconsistent with “not settling for mediocrity”. "Not settling for mediocrity" means that you should set your goals very high, and "not being arrogant" means that you should be practical about the current situation.

Among these 2,000 samples, I saw many that I originally thought were very good, but in fact they were not as good as I imagined. I originally thought Not good, actually exceeded my expectations. Here I will also give an example:

At that time, we had a product colleague who was also a fresh graduate. At that time, everyone felt that he was not particularly smart, so they asked him to do some auxiliary work, such as statistics and statistics. Users bounce back and so on. But now, he's the vice president of a billion-dollar company.

Later I thought about it, his characteristic is that he is willing to do it, responsible, and never shirks. As long as he has the opportunity to take on something, he will always try his best to do it. We don’t always do a particularly good job, but we always give him feedback. After he went to that company, he took charge of a fringe channel with less than 100,000 users and made the channel better and better. Since this is a fringe channel and is not equipped with a complete team, he takes on a lot of responsibilities alone and gets a lot of exercise.

Fifth, have the ability to judge important things. You must have your own judgment when choosing a major, a company, a career, and a development path, and don’t be swayed by short-term choices. Some of the examples above also cover this point. For example, many people at that time were willing to work for foreign companies but not for emerging companies. In 2006 and 2007, many juniors and juniors asked me about their career choices, and I advised them to go to Baidu instead of IBM or Microsoft. But in fact, many people do it out of short-term considerations: foreign companies may be more famous and have higher salaries.

Although everyone has heard this truth many times. When I first graduated, the salary difference was between three and five thousand yuan, which was really negligible. Short-term pay differences don't matter. But in fact, there are not many people who can get rid of this and have judgment.

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