An intern's counterattack

Profile: Hai Qing, a P9-level employee of Alibaba Group, is a senior expert in the field of artificial intelligence with 8 years of work experience. He participated in the establishment of the Alipay business and led the team to design an intelligent customer service platform for it. He is currently responsible for the construction of the intelligent robot platform for the entire Alibaba Group and has rich experience in NLP, machine learning, and deep learning.

At the visitor center of Alibaba's Xixi Park, we met Hai Qing, who was born in 1986. He had a carefully trimmed beard on his thin face and his long hair was meticulously combed back. This made him look more like an artist living in seclusion in Hangzhou. It is hard to associate him with the head of an artificial intelligence research and development team.

At the beginning of this year, Haiqing was promoted to P9 level employee by the group. This also makes him one of the youngest P9 in the field of artificial intelligence in Alibaba, and in a few months, he will have served Alibaba for more than 9 years. From a college student who just stepped out of the ivory tower, to a R&D staff who successfully transformed into an algorithm through hard self-study, to a technical leader who led the team to join the Alipay project, and now a P9 engineer who can independently take charge of the entire business line of Ali Xiaomi, Haiqing's growth speed in Alibaba in the past 9 years is amazing.

"Opportunities are equal for everyone." Talking about his achievements in Alibaba over the years, Haiqing feels that the halo of a technical expert ultimately depends on leading the team, finding directions, and solving problems. Haiqing said that this happens to be his strength.

When I first entered the workplace, I worked hard to learn transformation algorithms on my own

In 2008, Haiqing, a junior at a university in Hangzhou, faced a test. A few months ago, he joined Alibaba through a campus job fair and became an intern at Alibaba Software, a subsidiary of the group. Even in those days, it was not easy to join Alibaba. Haiqing, who majored in software engineering, stood out from more than 200 applicants, which once made him quite confident in his programming ability.

But when he really started his internship, Haiqing realized that he had underestimated the difficulty of the job. Carrying his schoolbag every day, going in and out of the company, and working with those experienced IT industry experts, Haiqing felt for the first time the gap between campus and the workplace - his programming knowledge was either too superficial or too outdated, and was almost useless.

Haiqing felt embarrassed by this and even had a fear for the future: "I clearly felt the lack of knowledge at that time. The knowledge gap between school and industry was too big."

In order to make up for his shortcomings, Haiqing began to work hard to improve his programming skills. He came to the company early in the morning every weekday and did not leave until late at night. In addition to participating in the development and maintenance of the system with the project team, Haiqing spent the rest of his energy reading the group's code documents and frameworks.

"During the first two years, I went to the company every Saturday to read all the interesting technical source codes. I consciously sorted out the framework system and cultivated my framework capabilities in this field. Only then did the structured system in this area gradually improve."

A large part of Haiqing's early growth was achieved by actively sacrificing countless weekends when he should have been resting to go to the company to read source code and frameworks - this was due to Alibaba's consistent opening of source code reading rights for all its projects to its internal programmers.

For programmers, reading source code is the best way to learn from others' development experience. Haiqing tirelessly absorbed the high-quality code documentation within Alibaba. The feeling of difficulty at the beginning of work was gradually eliminated, and was replaced by improved efficiency.

Originally, the internship at Alibaba was just a practice in the plan of this young man. After finishing the corporate experience, he planned to continue his studies in college as a graduate student. But the few months of internship at Alibaba completely changed him.

"I decided to give up my postgraduate studies right away. After a few months of internship at Alibaba, I felt that I could learn more by working in a company than by studying for a master's degree."

A year passed in a flash. After graduating from university, Haiqing chose to stay at Alibaba without hesitation. In July 2009, Haiqing became a full-time employee of Alibaba, with a job level of P4.

In Alibaba, there were young people full of energy and enthusiasm. Influenced by the environment, Haiqing did not dare to slack off. In the first two years, he rarely left the company before sunset, and it was common for him to spend weekends at the company. Haiqing felt that this rhythm was natural. If those big guys were so hardworking, why shouldn't he work hard?

In April 2010, the technical team originally engaged in the development of the platform system was instructed to carry out a new task - chatbot. This was the team Haiqing was in.

The work of developing chatbots is different from any team task Haiqing has been involved in before. Almost all R&D personnel have no algorithm background, so learning algorithms has become the focus of Haiqing's colleagues. Although Haiqing's job responsibilities do not involve algorithms, he is sensitive to the fact that the powerful functions of algorithms are gradually penetrating and extending into various business fields, and it will soon be a sought-after skill.

"Transformation is a painful and long process. As you can see from my experience, I had no background in algorithms before. How to grow from a complete novice in the field of algorithms to someone who can play a role and solve problems in algorithm projects was what I thought about the most at the time." Haiqing, who had just been promoted to P5, was determined to master the algorithm thoroughly.

Haiqing seemed to have returned to his student days of studying hard for exams. He bought a thick book called "Statistical Natural Language Processing" and used his free time every day to read a lot of knowledge about algorithms. At the same time, Alibaba's complete internal document sharing channels and communities also helped Haiqing a lot.

In these communities, Haiqing searched for all the documents about algorithms. When he encountered content he didn't understand, he would communicate with the authors of these documents online without getting tired of it. As the number of communications increased, Haiqing would also try to meet with the other party offline. Through these channels, Haiqing got to know a group of technical experts within Alibaba, who contributed their algorithm experience to this young man who was obsessed with technology.

At first, Haiqing's main work was in the field of module research and development and architecture, which he was good at. Later, because the algorithm work content was relatively disconnected from research and development, he began to wonder how to properly connect the architecture system he built with the algorithm. As he became more and more involved in algorithm knowledge, Haiqing also began to try to perform some optimization work.

Over time, Haiqing's initial unfamiliarity with algorithms was invisibly resolved through day-to-day research and polishing. Finally, with the joint efforts of Haiqing and the team, the chatbot was successfully developed. At about the same time, Haiqing was promoted to P6.

From 1688 to ICBU to Aliexpress, Haiqing participated in the work of building intelligent customer service for all B-type businesses under Alibaba. Compared with the previous architecture and R&D work, the new business was more attractive to him. Haiqing could vaguely sense that artificial intelligence might be a new field where he could make great achievements.

He is glad that he followed his inner judgment and did not continue to be comfortable with the original technology. "If I had retreated at that time, there would have been a way out, but there would have been no future."

Rising to the challenge, building an intelligent customer service system for Alipay

Everyone has a bottleneck period in their career, and this is also true for Haiqing. The future of artificial intelligence did not come too fast, but Haiqing's career bottleneck period came first.

First of all, the intelligent customer service business has become stable. Although the work of Haiqing and his colleagues has brought new technical support to Alibaba B2B, intelligent customer service has not become a core business. After the customer service system was built, Haiqing was only left with maintenance work. This situation lasted for more than a year since 2011.

As time went by, Haiqing felt that he had lost his initial passion. At the same time, he was worried that his team's business scenarios were always relatively simple. In the long run, would his career development and technical accumulation stagnate? During that time, Haiqing thought most about what potential business scenarios he could use.

Soon, a new opportunity came to Haiqing.

In 2012, Alipay, a well-known third-party payment platform under the group, was looking for a team across the entire group that could build an intelligent customer service system for it.

At this time, Haiqing had accumulated rich experience in intelligent 2B business, but had never tried to implement intelligent solutions in 2C environment. Alipay, with its huge traffic, is a nearly perfect experimental field. More importantly, it will provide a new scenario for the research and development capabilities of the intelligent customer service team. After three months of repeated communication, Haiqing's team finally won the invitation with its solid project experience.

To facilitate the development, Haiqing's smart customer service team moved to the Alipay building. Haiqing stayed in the Alipay building for a year and a half. It was here that he was appointed as the team leader and created the first smart customer service product for consumers, "Smart Xiaobao".

When asked why he was chosen as the technical director, Haiqing answered that it was due to his early R&D background and successful algorithm transformation experience. In the team, there are not many employees who have both skills, and his insights on product business have always been recognized by the team. The new responsibilities have freed Haiqing from pure technical R&D work. How to lead the team has become a new challenge for this 26-year-old boy. In addition to the R&D structure, Haiqing began to consider the overall personnel configuration of the team and the career planning and technical growth of each team member.

The "Double Eleven" in 2012 was regarded as a performance check. That night, Haiqing was a little nervous, but he was confident in the project and team members he was handling. The reality did not disappoint Haiqing's efforts. His team and products withstood the test of the extreme environment that night and successfully completed the task.

At this point, Alibaba’s senior management began to take notice of this AI technology director. Although he was a latecomer, Haiqing had already taken on support tasks ranging from Alipay to almost all Class B business intelligent customer service needs.

In 2013, Haiqing led the entire team to join the newly established Taobao Technology Department. That year, his rank was promoted to P7, which meant that he had achieved some systematic achievements in his field and became one of the core leaders in the group's AI field.

Go deep into the frontier and become one of the youngest P9 in the field of AI

Also in 2013, deep learning and knowledge graphs were announced by authoritative organizations as new technologies that changed the world this year. At this time, Haiqing, who was already an artificial intelligence expert, was no longer satisfied with providing technical support for the business. He began to shift his attention to the field of cutting-edge technology.

In the cutting-edge technology field where PhDs are crowded, Haiqing, who graduated from undergraduate school, still often realizes his academic shortcomings. His way of dealing with it is still to recharge himself through self-study and inviting technical experts to give lectures. From an intern, Haiqing has long been accustomed to dealing with challenges from all aspects of technology.

In fact, Haiqing had already consciously accumulated technology when he took over many previous businesses. He systematically increased the team's technical investment in these scenarios and paid attention to the research directions of leaders in the AI ​​field such as Google and Facebook. What was lacking was a platform that could actually test the technology.

In 2015, the opportunity finally came. Alibaba decided to launch an intelligent assistant and platform product in the summer of that year. It would collect daily data from platforms such as Taobao and Tmall to provide intelligent services to all consumers served by Alibaba. The team led by Haiqing took on this task without hesitation, and the new product was named "Ali Xiaomi".

At the initial stage, the relevant leaders specifically asked Haiqing to talk about his views on the new product. Haiqing put forward his thoughts and outlined the general framework of the product on the spot. After two hours of chatting, the two had a clear idea of ​​the prospects of the new project.

Before taking charge of Ali Xiaomi, Haiqing had completed the design and development of multiple chatbots and application scenarios, but none of them was as complex as Ali Xiaomi. "Many people asked me why I didn't just use the previous technology?" When encountering such questions, Haiqing always patiently explained the technical difficulties of this project to the other party: Ali Xiaomi also included pre-sales service, customer service assistant and other pan-customer service content that traditional customer service did not involve into the service scope, which made its demand for scenarios and corpus more complex than ever before.

In his opinion, only the most cutting-edge technology can support this grand smart product, and conversely, only such a product has the strength to test these cutting-edge technologies. In the product "Ali Xiaomi", Haiqing finally got his wish and added the technology and ideas he had accumulated over the years in the fields of deep learning and knowledge graphs.

In July 2015, Ali Xiaomi was launched and achieved success. The biggest role of this product is to empower all merchants using Ali products with intelligent services, and even companies outside Ali will benefit. Shortly after the Ali Xiaomi project, Haiqing was promoted to P8 within the group.

After that, Haiqing began to try to expand the intelligent customer service technology that had been implemented beyond the Ali Xiaomi platform, empowering merchants using Ali products and external companies. Starting from a demand point, they opened up a space with high growth potential for Ali. Haiqing believes that this may be the greatest value his team has brought to Ali.

In June 2017, Haiqing was nominated as a candidate for P9-level employee and accepted the defense. In Alibaba, the jump from P8 to P9 is considered one of the most difficult promotions. This means that the candidate must not only have presided over major projects within the group, but also have considerable influence in the industry through his accumulated technical experience. After accepting the P9 nomination, employees must pass the relevant defense before the promotion will be approved.

Haiqing knew the difficulty of the defense. "I was still young, so I thought of the defense as a rare experience." The five judges who presided over the defense were all at the P10 level, and one of them happened to be an expert in the field of artificial intelligence. Before entering the venue, Haiqing was sweating.

But once the defense began, the nervousness disappeared. Haiqing regained his composure and sharpness when he was working. Facing the slightly tricky questions from the expert judges, Haiqing carefully sorted out the technical threads and details, and resolved the doubts raised by the experts one by one. In the end, the judges voted in favor of his experience accumulation and business acumen in the field of deep learning. Haiqing was lucky to pass the defense and was officially promoted to one of the youngest P9-level employees in Alibaba's AI field.

Conclusion

Haiqing speaks at a steady pace, and his answers always exceed the expectations of the questions asked. He is an interviewee who makes the questioner feel at ease. From the conversation with him, it is not difficult to see his excellent qualities: unlike many programmers who are not good at speaking, Haiqing is good at communication and can accurately express his attitude and feelings; and he has been working in the same company for 9 years. This patience is really unusual in the Internet technology industry where job-hopping is popular; in his previous job changes, his pursuit of excellence in professional skills has also benefited him a lot. It is this pursuit and patience that made the development intern who once lamented that he had only learned the basics step by step become a technical backbone in Alibaba's AI field.

Regarding his seemingly accurate career direction every time, Hai Qing replied that he actually did not agree with career planning based on positions. After all, trends are constantly changing. He said that he just happened to smell the trend of technology.

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Source: 100offer