Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

At certain important or special times, people always expect geniuses or heroes to appear. Those individuals selected in various names are given high hopes of rewriting the fate of the organization.

Whether it is DC and Marvel universe superheroes,"three-body" in the wall, or the current factory name of a variety of "genius youth","future star", behind it seems to imply some kind of group expectations, or anxiety.

For example, in the last decade, when code has been identified as a fulcrum for the digital world, the technology industry can only increase competition for young talented programmers and algorithm engineers if it wants to maintain the era dividend brought by leverage effect.

Big factories need to find that fulcrum. In order to rob people at the school recruitment stage, Huawei "Genius Youth," Ali "Alixing LAB," Tencent "Big Coffee," Meituan "Beidou," Fast Hand "STAR," Xiaomi "Future Star," Baidu "AIDU" and other projects do not hesitate to pay upside down, competing to open attractive conditions to occupy hot search, such as Huawei to give a maximum annual salary of 2.01 million yuan.

On one side is the anxiety of a 35-year-old ordinary programmer, and on the other side is the big factory throwing a lot of money at a newly graduated "genius boy." "Noise Reduction Noise" focuses on the special group of "talented teenagers" to see why big factories compete to pinch the top and whether the sky-high salary is worth it?

01. Dachang starts a new round of "pinch" Dachang "pinch" campaign, the most famous is Huawei's "genius youth" program. But if you look at the start-up time, Ali was the first to act.

Back in 2011, Ali launched the AliStar program, which aims to recruit the youngest and most advanced technical talents. That time was the initial period of Alibaba Cloud, which was the experimental period of "genius" and "madman" appearing, rewriting Ali gene with code in hand and creating domestic cloud computing market.

Two years ago, a group of programmers typed the first line of code for Alibaba Cloud's operating system, Feitian, in a run-down office in Beijing's Shangdi Huizhong Building. By 2011, Alibaba Cloud launched Cloud Virtual Machine, TeamCola and others became the first batch of cloud enterprises.

The arrival of the cloud computing era means that Ali needs to reserve more top technical talents, and the "Alixing" plan is one of them. From the public information, selected "Ali Star" school enrollment, early can get P6 rank, later there are also rumors of P7 "Ali Star" in Jianghu.

Some of these graduates, wearing the aura of mystery, have gone through up to 13 rounds of interviews. After entering the job, some of them became Alibaba Cloud senior security engineers, some directly joined the Dharma Institute, and some became rookie senior algorithm engineers.

Baidu, another big company, started its "AIDU" program in 2017 with the goal of cultivating AI technology leaders. At the Baidu AI Developers Conference in 2017, Lu Qi, then Baidu's chief operating officer, first proposed that "AI is Baidu's opportunity, Baidu will all be in AI."

Baidu in the mobile Internet era has engaged in a bunch of projects in catch-up, such as O2O. Lu Qi shouted the slogan of "all in AI", which was misunderstood by the outside world as Baidu will shift its focus to the next era of automatic driving or intelligent voice, but its original intention is more like emphasizing Baidu to refocus its core competitiveness and seize the AI outbreak dividend, which also means that it will not hesitate to cut off the "branches".

Huawei's "genius youth" program began in 2019, when Huawei was attacked by the United States, chip outages led to a sharp reduction in the market share of high-end mobile phones, and cutting-edge innovation was at risk of being "locked".

Huawei needs to break the technological monopoly of the United States and cannot do without the gathering of talents. Ren Zhengfei once said that Huawei will drag the world forward in the future and become the standard itself. In a speech to the EMT of the company's management team, he first explained his high hopes for "talented teenagers"-hoping that they would drill into living tissues and activate teams like "loach."

Ren Zhengfei himself has a say in how important key talents can be to a company. In the early years, Huawei recruited a young Russian doctor. The young man could not fall in love, but only did mathematics. In his more than a decade of joining Huawei, even the executive leader couldn't tell what he was doing. But suddenly one day, he announced that he had achieved a technical breakthrough in which a base station was compatible with 2G and 3G networks through algorithms, which made Huawei lead Ericsson at once and occupy the European market on a large scale.

"We're very strong now. It's related to this young man's breakthrough." Ren Zhengfei once summed it up in a TV interview.

Among the big factories, Huawei's "genius youth" plan is also the most high-profile. This kind of high-profile, there is a salary on the top grid. For example, there are three grades of annual salary for talented teenagers, all of which are very clear, ranging from 896,000 yuan to 1,008,000 yuan, 1.405 million yuan to 1.565 million yuan and 1.82 million yuan to 2.01 million yuan respectively. Perhaps this stems from Ren Chengfei's understanding of human nature, a talent concept: "If you give too much money, even if it's not talent, it will become talent."

In comparison, the budgets of other big factories in the same period were relatively low, but the gap between them was not large. Through part of the public information, P6-level "Ali Star" corresponds to a salary of more than 600,000 yuan; Meituan Beidou starts at about 500,000 yuan.

A graduate student from Beihang University revealed to Noise Reduction that one of his classmates received an offer from Xiaomi Future Star last year, with a total package of about 600,000 yuan. This student's research direction is related to automatic driving, and his ability in all aspects is outstanding.

On the whole, the threshold for "talented youth" in each big factory is basically similar: doctors from famous schools are the main ones, rarely masters, super students, competition gods, academic achievements of internationally famous conferences and top journals.

Such technical talents are only a few hundred out of millions of engineering graduates every year. Among them, AI algorithm talents are the most in demand. This is also one of the reasons why big factories want to compete for the next stage, even at the expense of salary inversion.

There have been Internet manufacturers HR revealed that in the first two years in order to "pinch the tip" in autumn, everyone even pre-empted to lock in "early approval" in July and August, and issued a letter of intent in September. The top graduates that everyone is eyeing are basically "offer harvesters". If they are a little late, they will be pried away.

02, find the fulcrum on the surface to see between the big factory is to rob people, in fact is afraid to miss the new "fulcrum."

Jiang Yang, a former technology executive at an Internet factory, explained that all kinds of "stars" recruited by the school actually belong to a special offer. Top graduates were rare, and big factories were not short of money, so they were bound to compete for talents. If one of them offers a high price, everyone is likely to follow suit. The result of follow-up is to disrupt the original salary structure, so a special "project" is needed.

As for whether the high salary is worth it or not, each family has its own calculation. "First, businesses can afford to pay. After all, to give a few employees hundreds of thousands of wages, for large companies is not much expenditure; second, emotional fear of missing. What if one of the students made a great achievement?" Jiang Yang believes that pinch tip and venture capital have similarities.

Just like you can hardly say, Sequoia Capital's "track is king" concept, is it really optimistic about every company under the same track, or under the emotion of not wanting to miss, all the "seeds" that can be radiated are loosened with checks.

However, Jiang Yang did realize that the difference between the best and ordinary students was still very large, sometimes ten or a hundred times the difference.

In the process of the global information revolution in Silicon Valley, the legend of changing a company's business model and destiny because of the emergence of a "genius" programmer and engineer has never stopped. Fairchild Semiconductor's "eight traitors" shaped the original Silicon Valley, and Android's father Andy Rubin helped Google get the ticket to become a mobile Internet platform.

Domestic big factories naturally hope to continue more similar technology legends. Among the "genius" cases they promoted to the outside world, Zhong Zhao, Huawei's "genius boy" in 2019, led the team to achieve large-scale commercialization of AutoML in less than one year. Their AutoML algorithm was applied to Huawei Mate series and P series mobile phones, and Huawei mobile phones have occupied consumers 'minds with the label of "powerful photos."

Cao Xuezhi, who won 8 gold medals in ACM (International College Programming Competition) and became a member of Meituan Beidou after graduation in 2018, soon became one of the builders of Meituan Brain Knowledge Atlas after joining the job, responsible for the construction of commodity map from 0 to 1. Three years later, the young man became head of the Meituan Brain Knowledge Mining Group.

"Alixing" Chen Qian independently developed man-machine dialogue system at the age of 27, defeated IBM, MIT and other institutions in international competitions, and won two world firsts.

To say what is special about this group of "talented teenagers", in addition to papers and competition medals, Jesse, a knowledgeable netizen, shared his unique observations. One of Jesse's classmates belongs to the top offer harvester of Dachang. That classmate has many ordinary aspects: often crazy continuous play games, get up late every day, deal with things a little lazy, but he also has many characteristics that ordinary classmates do not have: such as self-drive ability.

"When other students were having fun, I saw this student more than once flipping through relevant books. Once the whole class took a bus to a farmhouse to play, in the car when the classmate holding iPad head down. At first I thought he was playing a game, but a closer look revealed he was reading a programming book on a rickety bus. In fact, if you look at those big names, I find that they all exist. They have a lot of common aspects, but they have a good self-drive ability for technology, even if it has nothing to do with their current work, they will learn to try to develop something by themselves."

Of course, top talents do not follow a high path. Earlier, a large factory in Wangjing revealed that the company has a new student recruited by the school, a few years to do the situation of director. As for Huawei's "talented youth," whether everyone's output is higher than that of ordinary school enrollment and the subsequent development is better, there is no final conclusion at present.

However, judging from the screening conditions over the years, the main direction of "genius" in the eyes of Internet manufacturers is mostly closely integrated with the core business, which provides a more convenient space for the outbreak of "genius". For example, Xiaomi and Meituan have opened a lot of high-level posts of automatic driving algorithm in the past two years, which is related to Xiaomi's car production, Meituan's focus on unmanned distribution and automation of logistics storage.

In contrast, Huawei is more inclined to basic research, hoping to find "geniuses" who have made special achievements and aspire to become technology leaders in mathematics, computers, physics, materials, chips, intelligent manufacturing, chemistry and other related fields.

"Over the past 20 years, where we have invested heavily in mathematics and algorithms and have dedicated teams working on them, our products in this field have gradually moved to the forefront of the world; those that do not pay attention to investing in mathematics and algorithms are currently lagging behind." Ren Zhengfei himself has always attached importance to basic research and breakthrough at the bottom.

After positioning 2021 - 2022 as Huawei's important strategic breakthrough year, he proposed to increase billions of dollars in additional research spending, one of which is to increase talent spending. Once the recruit has made important achievements,"Bo Le" will be commended together.

Ren Zhengfei's thirst for talent is reflected in many details. For example, he proposed to innovate the talent recruitment and assessment model. The interview is to "discover the strengths of the interviewee and understand him along the strengths... Don't deviate, examine him or scare him."

He also pointed out how HR could recruit talents, such as communicating with industry leaders, excellent school principals, world competition presidents, etc., so as to expand the sources of outstanding talents.

03 How long has the programmer been on fire? A number of Internet HR have a similar feeling, these two years "genius youth" more and more difficult to dig, because more and more competitors.

The above-mentioned Beiyou graduate student revealed that he had two classmates, one got the fast hand STAR, the other got the millet future star, but both gave up the opportunity to "rise to the star."

The former is because the fast-handed position is client-oriented, and he wants to find back-end research and development, so he went to Intel_a chip factory that is declining; the latter joined Momenta, an autonomous driving technology development company."The post is in Suzhou, and the research direction and treatment are matched." It is said that the classmate once practiced in Baidu, holding several top-level conference papers, is a number of big factories to fight for the object.

Liu Jiang, vice president of Zhiyuan Research Institute, told "Noise Reduction," excellent students in AI direction, now in addition to large factories and star start-ups, there are other options: such as continuing further study in colleges and universities, and employment in academia in the future. In recent years, many new research and development institutions have been established in various places, including several national laboratories, as well as research institutes such as Zhiyuan and Zhijiang, which are increasingly attractive to top talents. This is because new R & D institutions are characterized by more relaxed conditions for doing research than universities, while enterprises are more focused on solving specific business problems.

In the past two years, similar to Huawei's inability to retain doctors (the cumulative average turnover rate of doctoral employees in 5 years is 21.8%), the departure of many scientists from Ali Dharma Institute, and the return of Tencent AI Lab Daniel to academic circles, news of brain drain from large factories has often come out. Clearly, big factories are not necessarily for every technical genius, even if they are eager for talent.

At present, there is a new variable_when the big factory business tends to focus, the competition for algorithm talents, will there be a certain degree of demand saturation on a certain day? In other words, how long can the programmer industry be hot?

Wang Yonggang, executive director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Engineering of Innovation Workshop, shared his views in a recent interview. He believes that the reason why programmers can become a very profitable industry is not because they are super compared to other industries, but mainly because they have eaten the dividends of global informatization over the past 30 years.

The demand for programmers essentially depends on how long this technology trend can last. He believes that the technology trend related to programmers has probably gone through three stages: the earliest informatization/digitalization is to process all non-digital things with computers. The second step is mobile/Internet of Things, that is, all data is distributed in terminals such as mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, refrigerators, etc. This step makes the network become a mobile network and connects the whole world together. With mobile networks, the third step is to put intelligent algorithms everywhere to dramatically improve efficiency. Therefore, intelligence, especially the penetration of artificial intelligence algorithms in various industries, has just begun.

"As long as intelligent algorithms improve efficiency and maintain the speed of the previous 30 years, I believe that this industry will continue to flourish, but the way of prosperity, the quality of programmers or the requirements of experience will be different from before."

Along the common starting point of "Hello, Word," a new generation of programmers is destined to blend into a new era and create world-changing legends dedicated to their generation of technology.

Who will be the "genius"?

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Noise Reduction (ID: forjingyijing), by Dai Jing Zhang Yaqi

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