Foreword to "The Engineer's Guide to Entrepreneurship": Welcome to the World of Engineers

I read most of the chapters of this book on the train between Sunnyvale and San Francisco. Over that fifty-odd-minute ride, whether seated or standing, I read with real relish — often only scrambling to grab my backpack and dash out with iPad in hand after the conductor announced my stop.

This book records not the glossy stories of successful entrepreneurs, but the arduous and exhilarating pilgrimage of ordinary yet great engineers. Though the title contains the word “entrepreneurship,” in my view it covers far more than the narrow, fashionable sense of the term — it is entrepreneurship in the broad sense. Take one of the interviews in the book: it is hard to call Wu Fengguang, a senior engineer at Intel, an entrepreneur, yet the Linux kernel 0-day test framework he built single-handedly embodies exactly that spirit — “the mountain is there, so I must climb it.”

I have been writing a technical public account for nearly two years, and many readers have asked me these questions:

1. How do I keep growing technically?
2. How should an engineer position himself — cutting his teeth at a big company, or fighting it out in a startup project?
3. How can I make my technical ability change my own life — or even the lives of others?

In the vivid stories of this book, you will more or less find answers to all of them.

The stories of Liu Ruimin of Borui Data Technology and Xu Shiwei of Qiniu Cloud Storage tell us that technology is a process of deep accumulation followed by sudden release: build a solid foundation in the fundamentals, and it becomes far easier to integrate disparate techniques — like Cook Ding carving the ox, “inserting what has no thickness into what has gaps, so that there is ample room to move the blade.”

Guo Hongjun of CSDN believes: “People grow because they run into problems; once you solve the problem, you have grown.” Look at the wave of engineering and ops people who rose with Taobao — every one of them hammered away at one problem after another at work, and grew into the giants everyone looks up to today.

Gao Yang of SegmentFault says: “All in — if you want to do it, do it, leave no regrets.” That is exactly the same as Master Yoda’s classic line while training Skywalker: “do or do not, there is no try.” I love that line, and it is a style of operating I have adopted myself. In a conversation with the founders before I joined my current startup, adRise, I said: “Once I choose to join, I put myself in the position of a partner — all in.” Whether it is engineering, product, or life itself, all in is the most responsible attitude you can take toward yourself.

Chen Xin, who has built a Japanese-language forum, Renren Fengche, and smart hardware projects, sees a technical life this way:

The company pays 250,000 a year to keep me around; for the company that is no problem, but for me, you are only 25 once. The risk I am taking is bigger than the company’s. As Zhang Xuan sings, “everything I gained was luck; everything I lost was life.” You are always trading a piece of your life — your time, your energy, that fearless and precious stretch of your youth — for a chance to do what you want to do.

By the same token, iOS entrepreneur Deng Yuguang is remarkably open-minded about his own startup’s failure:

From the standpoint of life experience, if my life only spanned 25 years, these 3 years would obviously be a failure; but if you look at life across 50 years, the growth and experience these 3 years brought are fascinating, and may leave me with a little less confusion in the years ahead. When the mobile internet wave came, I tried and I failed — rather than watching other people’s stories and fantasizing about whether I could have made it.

Failure on the entrepreneurial path is all but inevitable, but such failures form a crucial part of life — they are the “core memories” described in Inside Out. Randy Pausch said in his last lecture: experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

Engineers will always encounter failures of all kinds, whether or not they start a business. Once I was chatting with a friend at Facebook, and he told me that shortly after he joined, he shipped a release that hadn’t accounted for an edge case, and it took down one of the features on Facebook’s main site. An experience like that — if you face it squarely and cross over it bravely — becomes like the scar on Harry Potter’s forehead: awe-inspiring and, frankly, enviable. “A body covered in scars is the best thing life can give you” — that is roughly it.

As for technology changing life — even other people’s lives — look at what Tang Qiao, a big-name iOS influencer, does. He is a great believer in personal influence:

Personal influence is extremely important to a programmer’s development, but many people never realize it. Once you have some influence, you may be able to push a technology forward, or change how people think about a particular technical idea. You can not only drive projects within your company, but possibly even change the direction of the entire technical ecosystem.

Today his personal technical ability influences his company, while his public account reaches tens of thousands of iOS engineers.

Huang Yunsong of QingCloud is certain: “Technology can change everything. Because technology eventually becomes a tool, and tools affect humanity, and so the power of engineers is amplified.” I believe this without reservation. Paul Graham says in Hackers & Painters: “To get rich, you need two things: measurability and scalability.” The internet revolution now in full swing gives every engineer scalability and measurability with ample room for imagination.

…

I will not enumerate more examples one by one. I believe that through this book, every engineer will find different answers in different people.

More than a decade ago, the internet’s infrastructure was nowhere near as complete as it is now. A programmer who wanted to be a maker and influence the world with his own two hands did not have it as easy as today. Now, from IaaS to SaaS, a complete turnkey chain has taken shape; the obstacles to building a product solo (or with a small team) — ops, systems, frameworks, user management, permissions, data processing, monitoring — have all been swept away by tools. Engineers can now move in either direction: advance, and you can command the field by cleverly designing and organizing internal and external services into a coherent system — the organizer of systems, the founder of products; retreat, and you can dig deep into some fundamental domain, get to the bottom of it, and become its master. This great era, for engineers, is like the French Revolution in Dickens’s pages:

This is the best of times,

this is the worst of times;

this is the age of wisdom,

this is the age of foolishness;

this is the epoch of belief,

this is the epoch of incredulity;

this is the season of Light,

this is the season of Darkness;

this is the spring of hope,

this is the winter of despair;

we had everything before us,

we had nothing before us;

we were all going direct to Heaven,

we were all going direct the other way.

Welcome to the world of engineers!

VP of Engineering, adRise / Tubi TV