From: DataFunTalk
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The guide of this issue is shared by Zhao Yu , a Ph.D. from Peking University and a visiting scholar at UCLA. Worked in Jingdong Retail-Sou Tue Algorithm Department, responsible for the search ecological direction, designed and developed Jingdong's big promotion traffic control system (moon landing plan), new product incentive system, marketing linkage incentive system, participated in the design of Jingdong's tens of billions of subsidies, Chunxiao plan and other core Algorithm modules bring significant business value. Worked in Alimama's precise targeting team, responsible for conversion rate estimation calibration and click contract work. Published 3 high-level papers and declared 14 invention patents. Based on his own technical practice and application experience in multiple businesses in Internet companies, Zhao Yu shared with you the career development of business application engineers, and gave you the first-time job response, the focus of each career stage, and development suggestions . I hope I can give you Some revelations.
Full-text catalog:
New to the workplace
Key points in each stage of career
Development proposals
Q&A
Sharing guest｜Zhao Yu JD Retail Algorithm Expert
Editing｜Wang Shuai Jinshan Cloud
Content proofreading｜Li Yao
Production Community｜DataFun
01
New to the workplace
1. Facing problems when entering the workplace
When you first enter the workplace, everyone recruits graduates from school to become a social person, and confusion is inevitable. If you have done many scientific research projects or enterprise projects with your supervisor at the master's or doctoral stage, you will get started relatively quickly. If it is only a teaching type, and the relationship with the instructor is loose, it is easy to appear unsuitable.
When you first enter the workplace, you are faced with the difficulty of choosing which company to work for and which technical direction to choose. At the same time, you need to be familiar with the company's business, handle relationships with superiors and colleagues, and plan for future career development. There are many factors to consider. That is the purpose of this exchange.
How can I get started quickly?
How to judge which direction is more suitable for me?
Which direction is more promising? (CV, NLP, search promotion, supply chain, etc.)
How to choose the future career direction and how to grow faster? (follow the trend or stick to one direction)
The business is always changing, what should I do if I am at a loss? (Leaders and colleagues change all the time)
Industry and company turbulence, how to deal with it? (layoffs, business adjustments)
How to maintain a good relationship with leaders and colleagues?
How to maintain a state of continuous learning while working intensively? (enhancing technical ability or soft power)
2. Determine the appropriate development direction
According to the technical direction, type and industry, the following directions can be classified:
By technical direction: NLP, CV, speech, mechanism strategy, AIGC,...
By type: search/recommendation/advertising, algorithm engineering, architecture, data research and development, products, operations...
By industry: short video, e-commerce, social networking, local life, entertainment, travel, cloud computing...
The above classifications may overlap, such as choosing a certain type in different industries, or choosing different technologies in a certain type.
Specifically, how to judge which direction is more suitable for you so-called judgment criteria, there are two main points as follows:
(1) Do you have a stronger passion and attachment to this matter than ordinary people? Material incentives are one aspect of stimulating enthusiasm, but being interested in the matter itself is an important factor that supports you to continue moving forward in your long career.
If you don't like partial engineering (code), you can do strategy design, data development or product operation;
If you don't like dealing with people, you can do algorithm engineering and architecture;
If you are interested in technology and want to combine it with business, you can try to be an algorithm engineer for search and promotion.
(2) Are you significantly better at doing it than others? (judge your own strengths)
If some students are very good at writing code, but not good at communicating with people, they are suitable for technical positions, not product and operation positions;
If some students have strong skills and good business perception, compared with the work in the pure algorithm field, the partial strategy work can better exert its value.
The barrel effect usually says that your own development is affected by the weakest sector, but in the workplace, your own development is affected by your best sector. Any job cannot be done independently, and requires teamwork, so one's own shortcomings can be completed through cooperation with colleagues. Therefore, in the workplace, it is the right way to learn to maximize strengths and avoid weaknesses, and to maximize strengths .
3. Stay current
When you first enter the workplace, after students enter a company, a department, or a project team, regardless of whether they are interested in the work they do, they must first do the job at hand well. This reflects the basic attitude in the workplace, is responsible for the salary you get , and can also accumulate a good reputation .
In particular, when you are not interested in work tasks, you must actively adjust your mentality and first be competent for the job. Jobs with a lot of money, few things, close to home, and good jobs are very scarce. Forty to fifty percent interest is already a very good job.
Specifically, first try to calm down and try your best to achieve a score of 80 or more for a job, and then make the following evaluation and judgment:
(1) Do you enjoy, like, or dislike the work with a score of 80 or above? Feelings at this time may have more reference value;
(2) Compared with other people around you who can also achieve a score of about 80 in this job, will it be significantly more efficient and easier to complete than them, or will it be more tiring and more strenuous?
In addition, after being based on the current job at hand, there will generally be better performance output, which will bring you positive feedback incentives for bonuses or promotions and salary increases .
4. Judging the development direction and prospects
In the past, we focused on which career to choose.
In today's Internet industry, new and old jobs are changing very quickly, and even the life cycle of a job will be shorter than 5 years. For example, there were Bert models in NLP technology 5 years ago, and with the emergence of large language models, they will be gradually replaced, and the value of the skills of corresponding practitioners will gradually decrease. Now you should focus on how to get your abilities into a higher income/value range.
The development of the workplace is not linear and predictable, and there will be many fluctuations. It is true that personal destiny is positively related to your own struggle, but it is not completely in your own control. Therefore, on the premise that it is impossible to judge accurately, it is necessary to pay attention to whether the work can bring long-term value, such as whether this value makes consumers' lives more convenient, thereby reducing the total cost of society, etc.
Therefore, when judging the future direction of a career , one must have a long-term plan and focus on the core value of the job .
Faced with the instability of "career", acquire and master some core competencies, no matter how the career environment changes, you can be at the top of the value chain and make yourself more valuable. We should focus more on "how to enable ourselves to acquire such abilities".
5. Respond to all changes with the same
Under the general trend of change, what remains unchanged is the core ability of the individual. Which abilities should be focused on to obtain sufficient material rewards and positive spiritual feedback?
(1) The ability to drive business development and growth more efficiently; (technology is a means and requires product and operational thinking)
(2) The ability to control and influence complex systems (comprehensive management ability & communication and coordination ability).
No matter how strong an individual is, the work he can do is very limited. A leader leading a team can create greater value.
The work of a certain business requires the collaboration of colleagues in many chains (such as products, operations, algorithms, architecture, data engineering, etc.), so it is necessary to exercise the soft skills of coordination and communication.
02Key
points in each stage of the workplace
1. Benefit/value analysis
According to the income/value analysis, the workplace is divided into 4 stages, as shown in the figure below.
2. Different stages have different challenges in the workplace
At different stages of your career, or in different value ranges, the core challenges you face are likely to be completely different. Due to different ages, life status will be different. For example, as time goes by, it will involve falling in love and getting married. , childbirth, etc., which will face a natural shift in the focus of life; in addition, with different work experience, expectations for the workplace are also different. Therefore, when making career choices, the focus of consideration may be completely different.
For example, the core issues you currently need to solve in terms of career development:
Is it necessary to learn the ability to survive?
Still need to address your restlessness and anxiety?
Or have been able to do something well, but the bottleneck clearly needs to accelerate growth?
Or do you already have a good base, but need a bigger stage to meet bigger challenges?
The above-mentioned states are different, and the judgment logic when making career choices is likely to be different.
(1) Value range 1: Entering the workplace for the first time (0-2 years)
In the first stage, 0 to 2 years in the workplace for the first time, benchmarking at the Ali level P5-P6 (after this year, most of the master's entry may be P4, and this stage will be extended to P4-P6). Usually the company's strategy is disassembled into specific tasks from top to bottom, and this stage is a partial execution role.
The core challenge at this stage is the survival problem, that is, "how to survive in the professional environment";
Survival capital: For the specific work to be executed, the execution can be efficiently promoted. Through the performance appraisal, from a student to a qualified social person.
Complete the work assigned by the leadership with quality and quantity.
There is feedback on everything, strong execution, and timeliness.
There is no need to spend a lot of time and effort to understand the high-level methodology and concepts.
(2) Value range 2: Business proficiency (2-4 years)
In the second stage, skilled business experts will work for 2-4 years, benchmarking against Ali level P6-P7, and the core challenge is how to continue to grow.
① Don’t be limited to skilled “tool people”, master as many working methods or skills as possible that don’t depend on “environment” or “tools” (product thinking + operational thinking)
Algorithm engineers, architecture, data research and development, etc. can intentionally cultivate product and operational thinking, and know why they work.
For example, data research and development can consider the characteristics of development and the reasons for the selected samples.
The architecture can think about why the company filters the recalled materials, products or videos and other logical processing.
② Become an expert in a certain field of work
Proficient in a certain field, let professional ability become the pay item for rank jump and job-hopping salary increase.
③Cultivate a strong sense of "responsibility for business goals", and be able to drive a change in a core business indicator through a series of work in your hands (responsible for business results, not just considering technology)
Look at the problem at a higher level to understand the internal logic of technical planning, model selection, project scheduling, and personnel division.
It is not possible to have the idea that technology is completely supremacy, but to have the awareness of "technology serving business".
Helping achieve business results from different perspectives is a key to breaking through the bottleneck at this stage, which is also a common problem when Ali P7 is promoted.
(3) Value range 3: experts in subdivided fields (4-7 years)
①Core challenge: breaking through the bottleneck (P7-P8)
Value interval 3 typically appears at the age of 4-7 in the career, corresponding to Ali's P7-P8. P8 may be an expert in a certain subdivision field, such as a recall algorithm expert, an expert in the field of short video sorting algorithm, or an expert in local life LBS services. P8 needs to be very proficient in the technology and business of this segment, so as to realize the implementation of the strategic direction after formulation.
The core challenge from value range 2 to value range 3 is to break through the bottleneck. Because many people cannot break through the bottleneck, they can only become middle-level leaders of small teams, and cannot become business leaders who can manage and affect the life and death of a business. Among them, there are two points that are most difficult to break through:
Can you really change your front-line business ability from "excellent" to "super-specialized" , so that you can become the leader in this field and gain the greatest potential energy;
Whether it is possible to learn and master some "underlying logic" when the execution ability and front-line business ability are already good, so as to greatly increase their growth rate.
② The difference between "excellent" and "super-specialized"
The difference between "excellent" and "super-specialized", that is, the difference between "better than 70% of the same kind of people" and the extremely rare 5% of the industry.
The "head rule" is always in effect. Once you become the top 5% in a field, you will get the most bonuses in that field, and a lot of resources will automatically tilt to you.
The Matthew Effect exists in many fields. For example, the wealth of human society is concentrated to a few people, the traffic of e-commerce is concentrated to a small number of top commodities, and the traffic in short videos is concentrated to popular videos in the top, etc.;
The existence of the Matthew effect means that when you increase by 1%, you can get more than 1% return; so it is super valuable for us to do this, so we must be super-specialized in the field.
③The underlying logic
In a field, instead of focusing on methodological skills, it is more necessary to: find those few key rules that can evolve many innovations based on them, and deeply understand these rules. The following examples illustrate the underlying logic through examples of CTR estimation, recommended novelty, and operating rules.
CTR estimation , such as in the e-commerce scenario, aims to put the product with the highest click-through rate and purchase rate at the top, so as to increase the overall expected purchase amount or expected number of transactions on the product list page displayed in this exposure.
Recommended novelty . When making a recommendation algorithm, not only do you need to estimate the click-through rate, but you also need to consider how to use the recommended material (product category or video, short video category) and its novelty, so as to improve the user's stay time and complete user experience. Broadcast rate, page turning rate, like rate, attention rate, etc.
operating rules . Students who are technical students may think that work that is partial to operations and products lacks technical content, but I think this concept is biased. In fact, operations are closer to the essence of business. To truly be at the top of a company, there are more colleagues with backgrounds in operations, products, and finance. Students who are technical students understand the operating rules and the underlying logic of formulating a style of play, which will help expand their career development space.
(4) Value range 4: Big names in the field (7 years+)
After seven years of work, the field leader, corresponding to P8-P9, usually leads a business line. At this stage of the workplace, you usually want to establish business influence . Technical students will consider academic influence (paper awards, patents) and product influence (such as making a product with 100 million DMUs and tens of millions of DAUs). In my career development, I was fortunate to meet some excellent seniors and colleagues, and their shining points are also inspiring those around me.
According to my superficial observation, this level requires more complex and comprehensive management experience than technology . It may also be necessary to learn some psychological knowledge to deal with some incidents in team management, such as:
For example, how to arrange work for students who have resistance when assigning work?
When you encounter difficulties, how to appease everyone's emotions?
How to maintain the combat effectiveness of the team, etc.?
03
Development Suggestions
1. Factors to consider when making a choice
The specific development suggestions are as follows:
Follow the right people: Follow a boss with excellent vision, structure, vision, and ability, and continue to learn from his precepts and deeds; at the same time, build trust through work and leadership, and help him share greater responsibilities through his own growth, and grow up with him .
Do the right thing: Choice is always more important than hard work.
Choose the right field: enter the core business department of a large company, so as to systematically learn a set of working methods and business processes that are the core and most valuable in a large company.
2. Pursue to be a T-shaped talent
① Vertical (depth of professionalism):
Improve your professional skills;
Deepen the depth of understanding of the segmented field;
② Horizontal (cross-domain knowledge and thinking):
Complement the algorithm, architecture, product, and operational thinking ability;
Soft skills: management, psychology...
3. Development direction
① Students who want to be technical:
One direction focuses on "broad", focuses on the integrity of technology, architecture and business solutions, and benchmarks "architects".
One direction focuses on "specialization", focusing on the depth, professionalism and fineness of a certain specialized technology, and benchmarking against "technical experts in a certain field" or "scientists".
② Students who want to do management:
Technical manager , the person in charge of a large technical system or the entire technical department.
Usually from an engineer to a first-line manager of the technical team, and then slowly to the head of the department.
If you manage all "product delivery" teams such as product and design at the same time, you become a CTO in the conventional sense .
Business managers are often responsible for a complete business and are not limited to managing technical teams. Similar to the CEO or GM of this business, they need to care about all aspects of business operations.
Many business managers come from technical managers, which is equivalent to a point-to-point career advancement;
4. Define and explore areas of expertise
Don't pick and choose jobs , take the initiative to take on more jobs (whether junior or senior), and continue to think while continuously accumulating work experience and abilities;
Benchmarking excellent people : see the best and think like them. Learning the ways of doing things and knowledge systems of outstanding people in various fields will help you improve your understanding and cognition of the industry. ;
Regular 1 on 1 with superiors : one-to-one communication with leaders to establish a good communication mechanism.
Express understanding of the work at the current stage, and try to give ideas that can make the work better;
Strive for face-to-face communication with superiors, mentors or trusted colleagues, seek their comments, and gradually make your thinking more reliable and effective.
Fully trust the leadership. From the leadership level, because you are a helper in their work, you can understand your work status and expectations through communication, and will fight for resources for you, so that the performance of the entire team will be better.
5. Learn to summarize
When receiving a task, get used to thinking about 'why am I doing this', so as to avoid mindless acceptance and execution of tasks similar to when you first entered the workplace.
Goal-oriented, such as keeping a weekly diary and reviewing it regularly.
For example, in the process of thinking about the work I have done in the past period of time, has it closely revolved around the goal? Is it just doing one thing formally and deviating from the essence? Which actions are right and which are wrong?
Strive to do what you are good at, discover your own advantages and qualities, and constantly verify, "make up for your shortcomings", and more importantly, develop your strengths and avoid weaknesses.
04
Q&A session
1. What should I do if technology develops too fast and cannot keep up with the pace?
The development of technology is really fast, and recently large models are subverting many industries;
But no matter how fast technology develops, it still depends on business . By deepening business understanding and enhancing competitiveness, we can offset the risk of too fast technological progress;
At the same time, you need to understand some of the latest technology and keep up with it.
2. Have big models made NLP engineers obsolete?
not in the short term;
Unlike OpenAI, which can capture a large amount of data in the English-speaking world in the open source field; the data required for the development of large-scale models in China is not much, and it has not yet been opened up, so it needs a process.
3. How do I ask my superiors to communicate one-on-one?
The form can be very casual, such as asking him for lunch, dinner or coffee;
Don't be afraid of the superior, you are his assistant in work, and he is your assistant in work.
4. Future development of large models
Big models will significantly change many industries in the future;
For example, it will change some paradigms of search and recommendation. Currently searching for products requires precise input of what you want, but based on the large model, you can input the intention (booking a trip to a certain place), and then you can give a complete set of plans (transportation, hotels, catering).
5. How to face workplace test, group test, company internal test and field test
In the current environment, volume is the norm. In the past, the entire industry was developing rapidly, and there were many internal and external opportunities. At present, you will be relatively more anxious, and the phenomenon of volume will be more prominent.
Take care of your body while rolling, the body is the capital of revolution;
Roll meaningfully, and roll with the purpose of improving your own skills, not just doing repetitive work.
6. The latest technical direction and employment direction of algorithms
There are not many changes in the technical direction, such as search promotion, algorithm engineering, voice, NLP, CV, etc.
7. Will it be easier to convert algorithms into products? Specific path?
Algorithm-to-product conversion is a good way. Product managers who have worked on algorithms can communicate more smoothly with programmers because of their understanding of related technologies; algorithm engineers have strong logical thinking skills, and have an advantage in product transfer;
The specific path generally has an internal organizational mechanism for job transfer.
8. When the business of the department undergoes major changes, how should one consider one's own career planning?
When major changes occur in the department, it is necessary to consider whether to change jobs.
If you want to change jobs, you need to prepare your resume;
If you do not want to change jobs (restricted by account, etc.), you need to look for opportunities to transfer jobs internally.
9. What are some examples of specific scenarios for goal orientation?
Goal orientation is to determine the key factors, nodes and dependencies needed to complete the task. For example, determine the input-output ratio, the time spent, the departments involved in the task, the resource dependent party, which roles need to be promoted, etc. For example, students who promote data produce data, students who promote architecture develop online marking functions, etc.
10. How to cultivate product operation thinking?
The cultivation of product operation thinking requires more communication with product operation colleagues. In addition, think about problems from the perspective of products and operations, that is, empathy. Specifically, consider if you are a product or operation, what needs to be done and how to do it to achieve business goals? For Weili, an e-commerce company, the product considers more user experience, the operation is more macroscopic, and the industry and B-end are considered more.
11. How to improve from the top 30% of the industry to the top 10%?
The important experience is to pay more than others.
Simply spending a lot of time is not enough, and it is not enough to rely on time to achieve a leap.
It takes a lot of mental effort. Think more, communicate more (with leaders, peers or professionals from different industries), and imitate more (way of thinking, behavior).
That's all for today's sharing, thank you all.
share guests
INTRODUCTION
Zhao Yu
JD Retail
algorithm expert
Ph.D. from Peking University, visiting scholar at UCLA. Worked in Jingdong Retail Search Algorithm Department-Search Sorting Department, responsible for traffic control and traffic detection direction, designed and developed Jingdong search traffic control system (moon landing system), commodity detection system (moon exploration system), tens of billions of subsidy boosting system, responsible for The design and development of traffic distribution for new search products and traffic distribution for millions of merchants has brought significant business value. Worked in Alimama Precision Orientation Team. Published 3 high-level papers and declared 14 invention patents.
Enter the NLP group —> join the NLP exchange group