A Developer from Vietnam 聊了聊他的经历 Lazada -> China Alibaba -> Singapore -> Amsterdam Booking.com
过程中聊了聊从外国人视角下的中国，Alibaba，996。
It’s a massive world out there. Travel more.
Highlights
He went to the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario in Canada as a foreign student. Waterloo was a culture shock.
Sitting next to me is one Asian guy who was born and raised in Canada and he was using Vim and LaTeX to take notes. I was like, “What the hell is LaTeX? What the hell is Vim?” And sitting on the left-hand side of me is an Indian guy who’s taking a double degree program in both science and pure math. The guy end up being a doctor. I remember a conversation on first year. He was like, “Oh, did you buy this stock?” and I was like, “What? You’re just turning 18, dude. How the hell do you know anything about stock?” Turns out his parent taught him all this stuff. I remember on third year, I met a couple who, after the final exam, was going to the library to borrow math books to go back and study after the final exam.
What the hell are you studying for? I was like, man, that entire environment was way too competitive. Coming from Asia, I was not expecting people to be that active. Learning in Asia was something very passive. Whatever you are given to by the teacher, you learn that and that’s it, but in North America and I think in Europe, if you were to learn something, then you must have a passion for it because you have a choice of choosing to learn that topic. So once you have a passion for it, it means that you enjoy learning about it and you would spend a lot of time self-studying about it. I did not have any of that. Even though I love math, I didn’t love it that much. I just love it simply because I was good at it.
When you get into insurance, you start learning the value of reliability, the value of being able to assure something.
But yeah, with the background in insurance, I was immediately able to recognize why business was valuing this, because they want that stability, they want that reliability and yeah, it is just a very interesting way for my previous job to somehow met the criteria of my new job and it was very fun. It was a very fun time.
I learned that this project is actually the biggest project in Alibaba at the time. What they call it at the time was a C-level project and a C-level project, meaning that the CEO of Alibaba was actually quite invested into it and they managed to extract all the talents from all different business unit in Alibaba into a special team to make this happen. Other time I couldn’t understand why the hell would you invest in Southeast Asia? But later on when I start working for Alibaba, I start realizing, oh, this is actually a much, much bigger picture than I ever imagined. Oh, my God. Turns out it related to a long-term planning that pivoting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and yeah, it was way bigger than we ever imagined. It all makes sense after we learned about that, but before that, everybody was like, Java sucks.
The problem with that is that the compaction of these different layer of logs was getting quite slow and consume a lot of CBU. So guess what they did? They offload that computation to an FPGA. These guys were running custom hardware, custom chips so that their database can handle the lot better and that’s just massively impressive. That’s just not something that you can find in any tech company. Your custom chips like, what the hell?
I remember my product manager on the first day I came to work. He sit me down with my team lead. My team lead was actually joining with me. We did the orientation together. My product manager sit both of us down and explain, “Hey, guys. Booking paid a lot of money to relocate you guys here. We want you to success here. That means you need to prioritize your life first. You need to be able to find a house to rent. You need to be able to do all your paperwork. So in the next upcoming month, if you need to take time out, just go and then come back and tell us later,” and that is such a huge opener because that’s just a mental shift, completely 180 compared to Alibaba.
Because Alibaba, everything was work, work, work. Your life is in the company. Your metric is important. Booking was not like that. Booking was like, “No. We respect you as a human. We know that you have a family. We know that you have needs. Take care of them and then come back to us. Work your best,” and that’s just changed everything. In Booking, I have teammates who are blind. I have teammates who are gay, lesbian, disabled. We were all able to hang out together. No problem. There’s no discrimination. It’s just a huge, open, and welcome culture. Very diverse pool of folks over there. I just love it so much. We still have massive traffic. We still have problem at scale that we have to take care of and yeah, it was very fun trying to find work-life balance in midst of all that, in midst of COVID, in midst of relocation, and in midst of new marriage as well.
This is not an advertisement for Booking.com, but travel more and learn more from it and keep an open mind, because yeah, maybe Western media can tell you a lot of shit about China, about how evil things can be, but try to go over there and try to see how people live. Being able to see thousands of people eating lunch all at once surrounding you or looking like you, because I’m Asian, make you humble. It does have a humble feeling entering that cafeteria and see hundred of people lining up for the same dish. It make you feel insignificant. It’s a massive world out there. Travel more.
背景
https://corecursive.com/software-world-tour-with-son-luong-ngoc/
收获
A Developer from Vietnam 聊了聊他的经历 Lazada -> China Alibaba -> Singapore -> Amsterdam Booking.com
过程中聊了聊从外国人视角下的中国，Alibaba，996。 It’s a massive world out there. Travel more.
Highlights
He went to the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario in Canada as a foreign student. Waterloo was a culture shock.
Sitting next to me is one Asian guy who was born and raised in Canada and he was using Vim and LaTeX to take notes. I was like, “What the hell is LaTeX? What the hell is Vim?” And sitting on the left-hand side of me is an Indian guy who’s taking a double degree program in both science and pure math. The guy end up being a doctor. I remember a conversation on first year. He was like, “Oh, did you buy this stock?” and I was like, “What? You’re just turning 18, dude. How the hell do you know anything about stock?” Turns out his parent taught him all this stuff. I remember on third year, I met a couple who, after the final exam, was going to the library to borrow math books to go back and study after the final exam.
What the hell are you studying for? I was like, man, that entire environment was way too competitive. Coming from Asia, I was not expecting people to be that active. Learning in Asia was something very passive. Whatever you are given to by the teacher, you learn that and that’s it, but in North America and I think in Europe, if you were to learn something, then you must have a passion for it because you have a choice of choosing to learn that topic. So once you have a passion for it, it means that you enjoy learning about it and you would spend a lot of time self-studying about it. I did not have any of that. Even though I love math, I didn’t love it that much. I just love it simply because I was good at it.
When you get into insurance, you start learning the value of reliability, the value of being able to assure something.
But yeah, with the background in insurance, I was immediately able to recognize why business was valuing this, because they want that stability, they want that reliability and yeah, it is just a very interesting way for my previous job to somehow met the criteria of my new job and it was very fun. It was a very fun time.
I learned that this project is actually the biggest project in Alibaba at the time. What they call it at the time was a C-level project and a C-level project, meaning that the CEO of Alibaba was actually quite invested into it and they managed to extract all the talents from all different business unit in Alibaba into a special team to make this happen. Other time I couldn’t understand why the hell would you invest in Southeast Asia? But later on when I start working for Alibaba, I start realizing, oh, this is actually a much, much bigger picture than I ever imagined. Oh, my God. Turns out it related to a long-term planning that pivoting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and yeah, it was way bigger than we ever imagined. It all makes sense after we learned about that, but before that, everybody was like, Java sucks.
The problem with that is that the compaction of these different layer of logs was getting quite slow and consume a lot of CBU. So guess what they did? They offload that computation to an FPGA. These guys were running custom hardware, custom chips so that their database can handle the lot better and that’s just massively impressive. That’s just not something that you can find in any tech company. Your custom chips like, what the hell?
I remember my product manager on the first day I came to work. He sit me down with my team lead. My team lead was actually joining with me. We did the orientation together. My product manager sit both of us down and explain, “Hey, guys. Booking paid a lot of money to relocate you guys here. We want you to success here. That means you need to prioritize your life first. You need to be able to find a house to rent. You need to be able to do all your paperwork. So in the next upcoming month, if you need to take time out, just go and then come back and tell us later,” and that is such a huge opener because that’s just a mental shift, completely 180 compared to Alibaba.
Because Alibaba, everything was work, work, work. Your life is in the company. Your metric is important. Booking was not like that. Booking was like, “No. We respect you as a human. We know that you have a family. We know that you have needs. Take care of them and then come back to us. Work your best,” and that’s just changed everything. In Booking, I have teammates who are blind. I have teammates who are gay, lesbian, disabled. We were all able to hang out together. No problem. There’s no discrimination. It’s just a huge, open, and welcome culture. Very diverse pool of folks over there. I just love it so much. We still have massive traffic. We still have problem at scale that we have to take care of and yeah, it was very fun trying to find work-life balance in midst of all that, in midst of COVID, in midst of relocation, and in midst of new marriage as well.
This is not an advertisement for Booking.com, but travel more and learn more from it and keep an open mind, because yeah, maybe Western media can tell you a lot of shit about China, about how evil things can be, but try to go over there and try to see how people live. Being able to see thousands of people eating lunch all at once surrounding you or looking like you, because I’m Asian, make you humble. It does have a humble feeling entering that cafeteria and see hundred of people lining up for the same dish. It make you feel insignificant. It’s a massive world out there. Travel more.