Ren Zhengfei chooses geniuses, while Zhang Yiming uses ordinary people

Huawei's plan to pay young talented people a million dollars a year originated from a big discussion three years ago.

In early 2019, due to the high turnover rate of doctoral employees, Huawei had a heated debate over the question of "Is Huawei's environment suitable for the survival of high-end doctoral students?"

Internal reports show that the average turnover rate of Huawei's PhD employees reached 21.8% in the five years from 2014 to 2018. Some people think that Huawei recruits PhDs to do the work of masters or even undergraduates, which is a waste of talent; some people think that the salary Huawei offers does not meet the standards that PhDs should receive.

In February of that year, Huawei's Advisory Committee, Human Resources Secretariat and Talent Management Department of the Human Resources Department launched a joint research report to explore the reasons for the loss of doctoral employees in the 2012 laboratory and R&D system.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei criticized the human resources department, saying that these specially recruited doctoral employees, who are seen as future "technological leaders", were not better managed at Huawei.

Ren Zhengfei

In simple terms, there is a mismatch between job positions and salaries .

Four months after the big discussion, Huawei's "Genius Plan" of recruiting one million university graduates surfaced. Ren Zhengfei pointed out the research direction for these people with the industry's top salary: to lead Huawei to become the most advanced (company) in the world, and to lead and create new industry standards.

One month before the release of the "Genius Plan", Huawei had just been included in the Entity List by the United States. Therefore, at the end of this plan, Ren Zhengfei also wrote that in the next 3-5 years, he hopes to rely on these talented young people to help Huawei "change its guns and cannons" and win this "war".

According to media statistics , since its implementation in June 2019, Huawei has recruited a total of 17 talented young people, more than 90% of whom have PhDs, and 5 of them have received the highest annual salary of 2.01 million yuan.

TikTok, which was also included in the "blacklist" by the United States last year, was yet to be lifted from the ban when its founder Zhang Yiming gave a speech at ByteDance's 9th anniversary in March this year. In front of 100,000 employees, they were reminded that in the face of an increasingly noisy external environment, they should do extraordinary things with a normal mind: treat themselves, their products and business, and industry competition with a normal mind.

How to understand treating yourself with a normal mind? Zhang Yiming explained: "The most basic thing is to realize that everyone, including yourself, is an ordinary person."

In the nine years since its establishment, ByteDance has never implemented radical measures like Huawei's plan to recruit one million people from universities. " Compared with Huawei's internal training strategy, ByteDance's consistent policy is to recruit people from outside ," said Li Nan, former HR of ByteDance, to the alpha list.

This can be seen from the executive teams of the two companies: Wang Chenglu, Yu Chengdong, Xu Zhijun and other independent generals basically joined Huawei as soon as they graduated; while Zhang Nan, Chen Lin, Yang Luyu and other high-ranking officials were often acquired by ByteDance halfway through.

Huawei and ByteDance, one looks for young geniuses and the other encourages the use of ordinary people, representing two different employment paths of the current technology giants, but they also have the same goal, which is to gather talented people .

At the National Science and Technology Innovation Conference in 2016, Ren Zhengfei mentioned in his speech that Huawei has gradually entered no-man's land, "in a dilemma with no one to lead, no established rules, and no one to follow."

Huawei consultant Wen Tao believes that one of the reasons for hiring "genius teenagers" with a salary of one million is that Huawei has entered a "no man's land", where major innovation and theoretical breakthroughs are the only rules for survival.

Huawei's original "opportunistic" high speed of following others is gradually slowing down, and the window of responsibility for Chinese companies to establish global leadership theory has arrived for the first time . "This high salary is also a natural product of Huawei's establishment of technical standards under the competition of the world pattern." Xing Zhiming, founder and CEO of headhunting company THANK Planet, told Alphabet List.

Taking into account the blockade and suppression from the United States, this group of millions of "genius teenagers" will also shoulder the heavy task of overcoming Huawei's two major difficulties: specialized chips that are relatively difficult to manufacture, and building a world-class application ecosystem comparable to Android and iOS.

In most technology giants, campus recruitment is equivalent to a talent pool for future executives. "They recruit these high-potential personnel in the hope that they can do some basic work and accumulate experience in the short term. In the long run, these people can become industry leaders and lead them to achieve breakthroughs in a certain direction," said Zhao Bo, a human resources expert.

Huawei's more radical industry background is that AI has been popular since 2017. AI talents focusing on algorithms are in great demand in the market.

Therefore, Huawei's "One Million Talented Youth" program mostly recruits talents related to algorithms. "Ordinary people doing R&D can't get such high (salaries)," said Huang Feng, Huawei HR.

For example, the current market price for a PhD is 700,000 to 800,000 yuan per year, which is just enough to meet the bottom line of Huawei's "genius youth" program. (Huawei's genius youth salary is divided into three levels, namely 896,000-1,008,000 yuan, 1,405,000-1,565,000 yuan, and 1,820,000-2,010,000 yuan)

In Zhao Bo's opinion, Huawei's move to recruit talents with the highest salary in the industry is also a form of employer brand promotion. Once the impression of valuing talents spreads throughout the industry, it will increase the attractiveness of Huawei's subsequent social recruitment.

On the other hand, ByteDance has become famous for its staff expansion in recent years. Just comparing the salary of ordinary R&D positions in campus recruitment, ByteDance generally offers more than 400,000 yuan, while Huawei offers more than 300,000 yuan, a difference of 100,000 yuan .

Zhang Yiming

"The 'ordinary people' Zhang Yiming mentioned are only compared with Huawei's million-dollar salary. In the general market, they are all outstanding university graduates," said Li Nan.

In addition, ByteDance itself is younger and recruits more young people, so the internal demand for millions of campus-recruited PhDs is not prominent.

Does ByteDance not need such high-end talents?

Li Nan explained, "It is necessary, but ByteDance's aggressiveness is not in campus recruitment, but in social recruitment, to poach elite talents that have already been trained by various companies." In this regard, ByteDance can be said to be poaching people at any cost.

According to Huang Feng, Huawei focuses on what customers will want tomorrow, rather than training people needed today. "So Huawei will focus on recruiting and training people from excellent colleges and universities."

Since its inception, ByteDance has been winning with To C products. "So ByteDance prefers to use people who have been proven in various companies and have done outstanding work, and they can be employed by us as soon as they come." Li Nan described the difference in the two companies' views on employing people.

For example, when ByteDance needed to build the infrastructure of Volcano Engine, it poached chief architect Tan Dai from Baidu, who is now the general manager of Volcano Engine.

Behind the different views on employment lies the different mechanisms used by company founders to select talent.

Wen Tao said that Huawei adheres to the "selection system" rather than the "competitive system", that is, employees who have never done related work and only have ideas will not get the opportunity to be promoted.

Under the selection system, "If you have not fought a battle worth 100 million, it is impossible to give you a job worth 1 billion. Only if you have accomplished a job worth 1 billion, can you be given a job worth 3 billion," Wen Tao said.

In order to break through the top of the talent pyramid, Huawei began to emphasize the global layout of talents after a major discussion in 2016. In Ren Zhengfei's words, it is to "build a nest where there are phoenixes, rather than building a nest to attract phoenixes."

Huawei Research Institute Building

After finding talents around the world, we build a team around them. A well-known example is Martin Kriener, chief architect of Huawei SPO LAB. As a world-renowned business architect, he was once selected as one of the "25 Most Influential People in Telecommunications Software Industry" by Billing World.

Because Crenna was unwilling to leave Cork, Ireland, where he lived, Huawei established a research institute in Cork with only him.

What is more well-known to the outside world is the story of the Russian guy told by Ren Zhengfei in May 2019. Because Russia is rich in mathematicians, Huawei established a mathematics institute in Russia in 1999.

The young man named by Ren Zhengfei had not had a romantic relationship, was not good at socializing, played computer games almost every day, and even caused a dismissal storm during his more than ten years at Huawei.

Huawei's breakthrough from 2G to 3G, and even its subsequent 4G and 5G leadership, can be attributed to this "nerd"'s technological breakthrough. It was also because of this that Huawei surpassed Sweden's Ericsson in the 3G era and began to gain a firm foothold in Europe.

Unlike Ren Zhengfei who always promotes the technological innovations brought by talented employees, Zhang Yiming is more concerned about stimulating the creativity of ordinary employees .

In his speech at ByteDance's 8th anniversary, Zhang Yiming talked about how he has always been full of expectations for his personal potential, and believed that "the meaning of the company's existence is to realize people's creativity through the company."

He gave an example: One day I saw the JD for PM recruitment written by our HR, and I was very angry. One of the requirements read: More than five years of experience in Internet products, with experience in product planning and product iteration implementation with more than 10 million daily active users.

Zhang Yiming immediately told the HR: According to this requirement, none of ByteDance’s PMs, including Chen Lin and Zhang Nan, can come in, not even himself.

“Forget about products with tens of millions of DAU. Before they joined, they had never made products with millions or even hundreds of thousands of DAU.”

"Maybe some people tend to recruit handsome men and goddesses with glamorous backgrounds, but we prefer simple 'fresh meat'." Zhang Yiming's approach is exactly the opposite of the "selection system" advocated by Ren Zhengfei.

Zhang Nan is a typical representative. He started as a product entrepreneur of a niche social picture bar, developed products such as Qingyan and Jianying on the ByteDance platform, and became the CEO of ByteDance China in 2020, in charge of an APP with over 600 million daily active users.

Zhang Yiming's concept of "ordinary people" is also reflected in grassroots employees. The configuration of Douyin's initial team is basically a product manager who is a product manager for the first time, a designer who is responsible for overall design for the first time, a research and development freshman who is writing a program from scratch for the first time, and even an operations intern who is in contact with the Internet industry for the first time.

"It is unimaginable for Huawei to let a group of people who have never been on the battlefield lead the development of a company's strategic product," said Huang Feng.

The "genius teenagers" who join Huawei will undoubtedly become catfish, as Ren Zhengfei said, "like loaches, they will drill into Huawei's organization and activate Huawei's team."

But this system is not immune to internal and external criticism. In 2020, Zhang, who is certified as the director of mobile software development at Xiaomi on Weibo, questioned, "Who is better, a genius teenager or an old driver who has made outstanding contributions to the company?" and "Aren't the old employees who have made contributions better... Is it to encourage new people to join and the old people to run away?"

This actually reflects a common feature of the technology industry in recent years: the salaries of campus recruits are getting higher and higher, resulting in an inverted salary between campus recruitment and social recruitment, causing psychological imbalance among old employees.

For the company, there is a risk of losing old employees.

Take the campus recruitment that has already started this year as an example. Each company is bidding up the price. Zhao Bo believes that the competition for talent is driving up the salary of campus recruitment year by year, and salary inversion is becoming more and more common. "So now there are a lot of campus recruits who have worked in large companies for more than a year and then quit their jobs."

Granting restricted stock incentives has become one of the means for giants to retain talent. On July 14, Tencent awarded a total of 2.403 million bonus shares to no less than 3,300 rewarded individuals, with an average of 340,000 yuan per person.

The purpose of its issuance clearly states: It aims to recognize and reward individuals for their contributions and to attract and retain the talents needed for the continued operation and development of the Group.

Earlier, Xiaomi awarded bonuses in two batches. First, more than 70 million shares were awarded to 3,904 employees, with an average of HK$470,000 per person; then, 16.042 million shares were awarded to about 700 outstanding young engineers.

In order to get this large incentive, these Xiaomi employees need to work for Xiaomi for ten years, and the sale will not be allowed until April 1, 2030 .

Zhang Yiming, who has always believed that "a CEO should be an excellent HR", once shared his experience: In fact, all the talents in the industry are yours, because talents are mobile.

In terms of poaching, ByteDance has clearly understood its boss’ intentions. “Now ByteDance is basically the Internet company that poaches the most people,” Xing Zhiming concluded.

In terms of personnel size, there are currently only Huawei, Alibaba, JD.com, Meituan, ByteDance, etc., which have more than 100,000 employees, and ByteDance achieved this achievement in just nine years.

In the first eight months of 2020 alone, ByteDance’s employee count grew from 60,000 to 100,000.

Zhang Yiming has always believed in a concept mentioned in Netflix's book "Freedom and Responsibility", "Context, not Control". He believes that as the complexity of the organization increases, excessive chaos should be avoided by increasing talent density and providing sufficient context rather than adding rules and processes.

What is the talent density of ByteDance now? ByteDance, located near Wudaokou, the center of the universe, is known as the "universe bar" by the outside world.

From this perspective, ByteDance, which employs "ordinary people", actually invests as much in talent as Huawei, which pays high salaries to geniuses.

(Li Nan and Huang Feng are pseudonyms in this article)

References:

"Zhang Yiming: Do extraordinary things with a normal mind | Full text of ByteDance's 9th anniversary speech" ByteFan

"Zhang Yiming: How to cope with management challenges after a company grows bigger" ByteFan

"A 10,000-word article that explains Huawei's view on employing people" by Note Xia

"Recruiting 'genius teenagers' with an annual salary of 2 million yuan on campus, how does Huawei identify top talents through interviews?" CEIBS Business Review

The article comes from the official account: Alphabet List (ID: wujicaijing), author: Zhao Jinjie.

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