Reprinted from an old article by Pinduoduo Huang Zheng.
This article wrote about his three years of working at Google.
Take a look at what Google looks like in the eyes of the big guys.
The corporate culture is unlikely to change: The first company that paid me a salary was Microsoft, but as an intern.
I interned at both Microsoft Beijing Research Institute and Microsoft Redmond Research Institute in the United States (the salary difference between the two is huge :)).
When I graduated, I did not choose to stay at Microsoft.
Firstly, I felt that Microsoft would be able to see where I would be in ten years.
Secondly, I asked my "life coach" at that time and he said, "Google seems to be a very good company, worth checking out.
It will also be good for you if you want to start a business in the future." If you go, stay for at least three years, because one or two years will not allow you to truly enter important positions and truly understand the company.
"So, after graduating from graduate school in 2004, I went to Silicon Valley, and Google became a formal job for me, working as a coder and product manager.
Later, it happened that Google entered China, and I was fortunate to participate in the start-up stage of Google China as one of the first employees to return to China.
I stayed at Google for three years (but I left my job to start a business before all the four-year stocks were cashed out).
These three years have been very worthwhile for me.
Google has given me far more than I have contributed to Google.
First, realistically, Google basically gave me financial freedom in a very short period of time.
I joined Google about half a year before it went public.
I just graduated and entered the company to develop advertising backend systems.
There were not many people at that time, only a few hundred engineers.
However, the company soon went public, and the company's sales, profits, and personnel grew rapidly.
I remember that when I first joined Google, the company's hourly revenue was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later it became millions of dollars.
The number of employees quickly increased from a thousand to ten thousand.
There was a lot more money in my bank account instantly.
To be honest, this feeling of pie-in-the-sky was not strong at the time because it was my first job and there was no emotional comparison in experience.
It was only three or four years after I left Google that I became more and more aware of how rare a company like Google is, and how rare it is to have the opportunity to join such a company at such a time.
In terms of probability, a person is lucky to encounter it once in his life.
At least it's an opportunity that comes only once in ten or twenty years.
Secondly, Google allowed me to see the side effects of people becoming rich overnight.
It seems like it is said in Buddhism that no matter how much wealth you get, there must be corresponding blessings.
If you don't have enough blessings, getting unexpected wealth may not necessarily be a good thing.
This was partially verified in the journey of Google's early employees.
Because they have too much money in an instant, many people lose the motivation to work and start looking for new fun and careers, but often those new things are not what they are good at and they may not like them (flying a plane may not be good, making a telescope is not possible, starting a business is not suitable for being a boss, but you are in the position of a boss).
In this way, Lin Zong was delayed for several years, delaying the time when he was most likely to make more outstanding achievements.
Third, Google gave me the opportunity to experience and understand the difficulties of foreign Internet companies in China up close, as well as the competition with domestic Internet companies.
On the one hand, it is very difficult to overcome the barriers of space and culture and obtain 100% trust and authorization from the company headquarters; without sufficient trust and authorization, it is even more difficult to face the rapid iteration of the market and deal with various commercial, non-commercial, and hidden rules of competition.
An extreme situation is that with the appeal of Google at that time, a job fair could fill a football field with people, but the actual recruitment situation was a bit less popular.
It is still extremely difficult to find a hard-working, experienced, potential and good value person.
Contrary to what you may see from the outside, it is often much more difficult to form a combative team than a local Internet company.
In addition to the above, because of Google's success, the outside world's attention and discussion on Google have also increased my thinking about Google and enterprises.
Of course, there are already too many books about Google in bookstores and online.
It's unlikely that I could write more thoroughly or better than they did.
There are a few personal observations that I still want to record so that I can come back to them later.
Google is actually quite similar to China in the past in some aspects.
For example, the “working class” has a high status and attaches great importance to ideology.
So when ideologies conflict, Google's response goes beyond that of ordinary commercial companies.
Google’s management is somewhat similar to that of China after reform and opening up.
Local governments encourage innovation at the grassroots level and dare to venture and try.
At the same time, they are highly centralized in core power and have the institutional advantage of concentrating their efforts on big things.
I think Google’s “Do No Evil” is deeply embedded in Google’s DNA and is not just a casual comment.
Google really puts mission and values before profits.
Just like the excellent companies described in "Built to Last", Google's profits are a by-product of doing the right things.
At the same time, “Do No Evil” is actually a reminder of Google’s ability to do evil.
The deeper you go inside Google, the more you realize that Google has a strong ability to make profits by doing evil, so it is wise to declare to everyone that it will not do evil and let everyone work together to supervise it.
Most of Google's acquisitions were successful during my years at Google.
Most of these successful cases are the acquisition of a small company with a good team.
This small company can be integrated into Google's culture and then grow into a big tree on Google's soil.
This is very different from a merger and acquisition to eliminate a competitor.
There are also many things that Google hasn’t quite figured out or wants to change but is unable to change.
For example, Google wants to use the bidding model that has been successful in advertising to conduct its own IPO, thereby changing to a certain extent the old method of stock issuance that has not seen high efficiency.
Industry, but the results are mediocre.
Google's founders have been trying to prevent Google from entering a management model of layers of professional managers, but there seems to be no escape.
In addition, Google has made many attempts in social networking and made huge investments, but its fate in this regard seems to be the same as Microsoft's search.
Some objective laws and current situations are beyond a simple wish and often require much more energy than you imagine.
This is a fact that has to be faced, just like people are always going to die.