A year ago, I made a confident-sounding case for leaving Alibaba. This is the follow-up.
One of the main perks of working for a company with a bird in its name is that I can tell people I work at a bird company, staffed entirely by birdbrains. The joke has not worn out yet.
In the early days, few people understood Docker. The problems we hit had probably never been hit before, so we had to solve them ourselves. That is how the skill level went up. The fastest growth comes from falling into pits nobody has fallen into and then climbing out. I used to evangelize Docker while not really understanding it. Now that I have used it enough and climbed out of the pits, I spend my time complaining that it keeps chasing big announcements instead of doing practical things. Watching younger engineers still lying in those pits, I think: young people, too simple, sometimes naive. As an elder, I will just quietly make money. Over the past year, Docker and its surrounding products have been one pit after another. Things have finally stabilized for a while. I can even show them to people now. But an amateur is an amateur forever; it takes professionals to reach the next level.
The work was new enough that the company needed someone to go out and show it off, so I got to speak. Before, I spoke to a handful of people; now I have spoken to rooms of three to five hundred. The good thing about a small company is that company-level opportunities land on your head, and company-level resources help you pull them off. At a BAT company, picking one person to talk about the same thing would take a lot longer. Speaking in public lets me meet people and market myself. Almost every time I finish, someone has an offer waiting with double the salary, so if the company goes under I will be fine. Most importantly, I finally get to tell jokes to hundreds of people in person. Even a comedy troupe could not have scaled that fast.
When I first joined, the company seemed to have raised a lot of money, but the product was not great. I thought I could save them, so I prepared to do everything. I had already done development, testing, and operations, which felt messy. After a year, I realize I was pretty pure back then: now I have also done marketing, pre-sales, and post-sales. Only at a startup do you experience this kind of role freedom. If you are willing and there is a suitable opening, you say a word and the next day you are doing something else. At a big company, transfers are not that easy, and the jump is not that wide. For people who cannot sit still and want to solve every problem personally, there are more things you can operate directly. As long as you run faster than everyone else, those things become yours.
With more opportunities, I came into direct contact with a lot of users and companies. Every tiny bit of work on a feature or bug gets feedback right away. When the product was unstable, many users warned us, made suggestions, and even offered solutions. Our users are the best users. Through work I also visited many companies: three-to-five-person workshops squeezed into residential flats, startup campuses, and big companies with their own standalone buildings. I got a tour of companies at every stage. O2O, P2P, gaming, online education, SaaS, hardware—apart from VR, I got close to most of the popular startup concepts. In the future, when it comes to food, clothing, housing, transportation, buying a house, seeing a doctor, or getting kids into school, I will know someone. I also got to look at traditional enterprises like banks and ISVs. The year gave me a look at all kinds of companies and widened my view considerably. I can go out and brag that I have visited every Chinese internet company: so-and-so is far above you; I have had a laugh with him.
The process was not always smooth. Usually the customer ignores us at first; we pester them; they reluctantly give it a try; we keep chasing; and in the end they actually accept us. That whole arc feels like a real accomplishment. Some cases were absurdly easy. A customer came to us and said they had already compared the market and only we would do; they planned to deploy and started pushing the project. We were so startled that we said we needed to think about it first.
Because I joined early, many interviews landed on me. Earlier candidates I could interview casually. Now the people coming in can beat me. Several times I looked at a resume and did not dare interview. It made me wonder whether we were actually going to make it. I see the company leaders every day; before, I could only see them on TV and in magazines—now I cannot even find them there. The people in the company are not fluent in eight languages or skilled at multiple instruments, but each is battle-tested and can hold their own. Every newcomer changes the company. Every arrival and departure genuinely matters.
For a while I had to collaborate with US colleagues. I had never exchanged more than two words with a foreigner. Now, if I concentrate, I can understand authentic Indian English for a stretch—provided I concentrate, and only for a stretch. As more impressive people joined, I began to feel the company might not need me to save it. I saw the author of a GitHub project I watch sitting nearby. Experts I admired in chat groups arrived with their bags. Our agent was written by the person who had written an agent for Azure. A CTO from another company came to write code. HR always finds Game of Thrones subtitle resources first. I think we might be on to something.
As for all the talk of winter, I suggest going out and experiencing it yourself. Do not hear a little wind and announce a storm. If future reporting turns out wrong, someone will have to answer for it.