Path to Success

Everyone has his own definition of success. No matter it is driven by external forces, or by internal desires, an engineer will face a question: which path is he going. One way is to go deep in the world of engineering, while the other is to deal with endless people problems. The answer to one's own question is not a simple A or B, but mostly what he has to do, probably.

Career policies are not unfamiliar to anyone who worked for years. The industry composed of numberless companies is like a big farm, farmers been there for long is inevitably carrying some smell of farms, more or less. Once one finished his school study, he will have to face the reality that he has to adjust himself to fit the society, where truth is most of the time not the most important, but what can help himself achieve his career goal is always the top priority.

Somehow this makes sense. No matter how one defines success, it is hardly possible to get there without working as a team. As long as one needs teamwork, he will have to deal with people problems, where "communication skills" can either be the secret sauce, or an evil excuse. In fact, there is one thing that is important to a manager: whether you are a helper to their success, or not. You might be a great helper for his company, but not a great helper to help him shine among the other peer managers. If you belong to this case, then do not feel surprised when they find whatever corner cases and say you are not good enough for his position, for very persuading reasons.

Personally, I do not like dealing with a lot of people problems, and again, just personally, I feel the ones dedicated in dealing with people problems are pathetic. But given the expected high salary one may totally disagree with my opinion, which I totally respect. I am still passionate on engineering technologies, rather than scratching my own hair and sighing behind the noisy crowd. I will need teamwork for sure, but if the team is not good enough for this purpose, find another one where there will be a good enough manager who takes care of all those shit for you. If you are good enough at technologies, and you can get along well enough with your teammates, in general, then you should not worry about missing one opportunity; trust yourself that better opportunities are always to come.

Nearest or Farthest

For a while I believed that, giving a working environment with a population of senior engineers surrounding me, I could gain the experiences that I would not be able to ask for elsewhere.

For the simplicity of this statement it seems plausible. The nearest distance sometimes can imply the shortest path. However, notice the "sometimes" in the above assumption.

Human societies are complicated. The nearest physical distance means differently to you and your surroundings, most of the time. Seniors are busy with their own business, and will treat all that block on their way as real threats to remove. If we say seniors are successful, then their success is believed to be due to their way of working things out always. A new employee getting into an organization is treated differently; in this regard, his distance between other seniors is farthest among the all. One cannot expect he gets exactly the same as other seniors are experiencing everyday with their other counterparts.

I would say that is the natural gap resulting in the unexpected disappointment.

Human Complications

One can never imagine the impact human factors can make in business world. For engineers, it is obviously the case, too.

Engineers are all ordinary human being. They have the incentive to prove themselves, get promoted, make more money, and more. For elder engineers, younger peers can either be their helpers, or road blockers - sometimes, huge ones. For younger engineers, the case is more or less the same.

The situation is usually easier for elder ones, because they have been into the same or similar situations before and trained that way. They know how to deal with it. Younger ones have to try all their best to overcome the hardship when they encounter it. From what I can tell, there are three ways. First, learn. Learn the technologies and be the best of yourselves, and use the ground truth to prove yourselves that you can do it. Second, learn. Learn the technique to communicate with your colleagues, especially those who are the upper stream of your blockers. It is usually not easy to go this way, as these guys tend to work well with elder engineers for a longer term. Third, learn. Usually, elder ones blame younger ones for reasons A, B, C, than you  learn from them. You do not make the same mistakes again, and you will be (or will not be) surprised that they are making the same mistakes for the reasons A, B, C. It is up to you on how to deal with A, B, C. Be wise. Which one is the best for you?

Ownership and Faster Movement

In a start-up, time is so precious that engineers have to move fast. The market is quickly changing, and the only way to survive is to get one's cut in market share, as early as possible. Uber headed to China. Not only does it have to occupy a high-end car sharing market, but also it has to compete with two strongest local competitors, who have just merged into one.

The pressure eventually lays all down all the way to the bottom engineers. My mentor does not really take out much time with me to help me get started, but is expecting me to move faster nearly on my own. My team leader expects me to learn faster though we both know it is lack of huge amount of necessary documents for one to bootstrap oneself fast. There is not even a good enough software development process, but engineers have to survive from such fact so they can succeed. In some sense there is a good reason to justify this: an engineer in a start-up should claim and value his ownership on a project, as much as he can. People need hands constantly, but interns are not always given enough time to learn what they need to learn before anything can be done. The only strategy so far as I can tell is to lean as you go.

There can be a lot to learn. It is a 3-month long interview, and the success is mostly on your own.

A Mixture of Passion and Despair

The Market street is a sign of SF for passion - lots of successful startups (Uber, Twitter, Square, etc.) and their young engineers. Tall buildings stand aside each other, forming a prosperous scene that contrast deeply with the homeless men scattered around the street. The smell of the street is complicated - a blended one with perfume and evaporated urine.

Today is the end day of Uberversity, Uber's training for new hands. Usually, one's passion for technology will die out if s/he does not immediate progress, and that is the dangerous point. Lucky is that I did learn GO, a new and interesting language; however, there are still some part of my work that is not quite organized and appears randomly changing.

Before exciting progress is made, stay passionate.

Uberversity

Today is my first day at Uber. Regularly, it is training sessions after training sessions. Now I learnt that Uber is not a Cab company, not (only) a rider/driver company, but it targets something much larger. It is a tech-company for sure, with its current focus on scaling its software applications.

I was a bit tired today because I was fully loaded with all the new information. I tried to find something unrelated to do, so after work hours I went to shop at Safeway and Ross. They are not too far away. It looks like SF is composed by a lot of smaller blocks. Cherries are cheap this time. I also bought two pairs of slippers at Ross. With shoes on my feet I felt much more comfortable in my room.

SF is also a city with steep difference between the rich and the poor. Homeless men are nearly everywhere, as a huge contrast to the prosperous city. When I was adding gas a man offered to clean my window, just for some change. I feel bad to reject him. But when I came back for him, he already found his clients, which made me feel somewhat better.

A busy night with a lot to do. Life is never easy when you want to learn more stuff, yet that is also the happiest thing on the world. The most pathetic thing is one cannot learn anything but waste time.

The Zeroth Day

June 21st, 2015, I am finally at San Francisco, sunny and windy. Settled down at a SF-ish sharing room with several roommates, I feel half home. It is close to Uber, the company I will work for in the next 3 months.

SF is a crowded city, and it is hard to find parking anywhere. I rent out a parking lot and start to walk. My first dinner here is Waruku, a Japanese Ramen restaurant, which is tasty. After a quick tour around, I wrote down my first post at this city.

Good night, the Bay.