Is a Silicon Valley Internet Company a Good Choice?

For the past week or so, I’ve worn headphones every day, phone-screening the résumés in my inbox that caught my eye. As an ‘introvert’ who doesn’t much enjoy phone conversations, I’d never made so many calls in such a concentrated stretch — my tongue and jaw muscles got an unprecedented workout, as if all the long phone chats and sweet nothings of a lifetime had to be crammed into just a few days.

Many recruiters treat interviews with a condescending attitude, as if a job offer were a gift, a charity — ‘You’ve got a job already, what are you being so picky for, what more do you want, come if you want, if not get lost’ (this is a conversation I personally overheard from some team in the co-working space where our company is located). I (and the main companies I’ve worked at: TubiTV, Tukequan, Juniper) hold a completely opposite attitude. The company and the interviewee are equals — or more precisely, the interviewee is a notch higher. A company courting talent should be like a young man courting the girl of his dreams: humble, deferential, persistent. This should come through in the first phone call, the first on-site interview email, the very first contact. Perhaps I’ve done reasonably well at this, because the other day on a call, an interviewee shyly asked me: ‘Excuse me, are you HR?’

I was stunned for a moment. For the trivial work I do, is there a more wonderful recognition in the world?

But back to the point. For us at Tubi TV, one question many interviewees care deeply about — probed through various explicit or implicit questions during the interview — keeps circling back to confirm one thing: Is a Silicon Valley internet startup a good choice for me?

Today I’ll answer that question. Even though ‘where you sit determines how you talk,’ I’ll try to stay impartial.

What Advantages Do Silicon Valley Companies Have?

Against the backdrop of the internet industry’s meteoric rise, traditional foreign firms have fallen from their former lofty status as a prestigious white-collar industry down to earth; in growth opportunities, salaries, and benefits alike, they’ve been yielding ground to domestic internet companies. What’s more, thanks to the sluggish global economy and to Chinese firms and emerging players wresting power on all fronts, many foreign companies — Adobe, Yahoo, HP, IBM, Oracle — are retreating one after another, even ceding half their territory. And internet foreign companies, for reasons best left unspoken, can’t operate domestically, so they rarely run R&D operations here either. Microsoft (including LinkedIn), Amazon, Hulu, and the still-gasping Google China are among the few well-known internet foreign companies that have set up R&D centers in China.

Most internet foreign companies carry on Silicon Valley’s corporate culture: a relaxed, flexible working style, a strong engineering culture, humanistic care (advocating work-life balance), results orientation, and so on. Many also offer certain implicit benefits not written into the employee handbook: chances to practice English, chances to broaden your horizons, chances to travel on business to Silicon Valley or Seattle, and — something many people care about — the chance to physically scale the Great Firewall and move abroad (肉身翻墙). Let me walk through these one by one.

Engineering Culture

Let’s start with engineering culture. The engineering culture at Silicon Valley companies is denser than anywhere else in the world — no one comes close. This shows in several ways:

• Openness. Core information and metrics are basically accessible to everyone in the company (at least during the startup phase). At Tubi TV, all our dashboards — DAU, sessions, retention, user counts, ad opportunities, current CPM, and other metrics — have detailed charts, and every employee can see real-time results whenever they want. To give everyone a better sense of the company’s state, we also scroll the current core metrics on the big TV in the dining area. Openness means trust — what I called ‘trust over control’ in a previous article ( ).
• Results orientation. Everything is judged by its outcome — heroes are measured by results. When data is within everyone’s reach, the merits of various proposals can be proven through data. If the data proves the boss wrong, then the boss’s proposal can be overturned. This is what’s called ‘data over authority.’
• Providing employees with opportunities for continuous growth. Take a course on Coursera/Udemy, attend a conference now and then, buy technical books and materials — as long as it’s reasonable, no problem, the company reimburses it. Even more, if you go to a university for further study and earn credits, the company will reimburse that too (big companies typically cap it at $5,000 per person per year — enough to take a course at Stanford).
• Respect for engineers throughout the company, top to bottom. Take Tubi TV: our business model is to help Hollywood studios monetize their long-tail content — we provide users with TV shows and movies they can watch for free (shows we license from Hollywood at zero cost), monetize through interstitial ads while users watch, and share the revenue with the studios. In such a business, our core competitiveness lies in the long-term relationships we’ve built with Hollywood, not in our technology or product; our ability to monetize depends on how well sales can bring in advertisers (at least in the early days). Before I joined, our technology was an absolute mess, yet the company was commercially very successful, with substantial revenue. The founder didn’t therefore treat technology as merely a tool, a means to a business end; instead, he firmly believed that the company’s ceiling depends on our technical capability, and spared no effort instilling into everyone on every occasion the importance of technology and the importance of engineers. When free cash flow was tight and we had to cut headcount (not cut people), the most expensive technical positions were always the ones we fought to keep, and recruiting for the technical team was essentially continuous.

Humanistic Care

Compared with domestic companies that pursue breakneck growth and use their employees without reserve, Silicon Valley companies’ care for people is commendable. The most important idea here is work-life balance.

At twenty, we don’t much chase work-life balance. Apart from the occasional flirting and dating, work can be all of life.

From twenty-five to thirty, this becomes a question you have to reckon with. Most people start families during this stage; as the saying goes, ‘marry and establish a career’ — basically family first, career second (there’s a theory: the male marriage wage premium). Once you have a family, you have ties, you have responsibilities, and you need to carve out lots of time to care for it.

After thirty, with children come more joys and more worries. Children need their parents’ company; for them, even if materially well-off, a childhood (or adolescence) without that company is unfortunate.

Yet for the vast majority of engineers, financial freedom at thirty is still a stretch. And even with financial freedom, ‘personal freedom’ is hard to come by. The 996 culture advocated by domestic internet companies sets work and life squarely in opposition. I have a pair of engineer friends — no longer young — who’ve worked for nearly ten years; together they earn over a million yuan a year, making them standouts among their peers. But the cruel price they pay is that they mostly see each other at eleven or twelve at midnight; on weekends they can never find the time, and holding hands to catch a movie together is a luxury. Under that kind of work pressure, without the woman making sacrifices, even having a child is nearly impossible. Once when we met up and got onto this heavy topic, I opened my big mouth and said: ‘I can’t help feeling your life is like a pair just tolerating each other to share a meal…’ — they were left speechless.

Silicon Valley companies don’t advocate this way of working. There are several characteristics:

• Flexible working hours. No clocking in and out, no 996, and certainly no demand that you become a ‘striver’ (奋斗者).
• You can ‘work from home’ when you need to. Something comes up at home, or the weather is terrible, or you’re a bit under the weather — no need to burn precious vacation days; just let your boss and colleagues know, and work from home.
• Vacation is virtually hassle-free. If an ordinary employee has vacation plans, just notify the boss in advance and hand off projects properly, and they can fly off to some godforsaken place with no cell signal and no internet to have a blast. One or two weeks, two or three weeks — the boss will rarely object. Sometimes homesickness strikes but your leave isn’t enough (say you want to go home for a month but only have two weeks left); you can take whatever you have first, then work from your hometown for two weeks, fly back, get cured, and come back to work properly. At Tubi TV, I told my colleagues in Beijing that they can work from their hometown around the Spring Festival, to avoid colliding with the terrifying chunyun (Spring Festival travel rush).

This is, in fact, the greatest care and trust one can show a person. As long as it isn’t abused, this kind of system dramatically raises job satisfaction.

Implicit Benefits

Some benefits are invisible and intangible but very helpful to your career. English, for example. Inside a foreign company, thanks to a good English environment, within half a year an engineer’s English listening, speaking, reading, and writing will improve by leaps and bounds. We know that the engineering profession cannot avoid dealing with English — much of the first-hand material (online docs, books) is in English, and first-hand Q&A is mostly in English too. We joke that some engineers practice ‘stackoverflow-driven development’ (see my article: ), little realizing that being able to do stackoverflow-driven development is itself a sign of English ability. What’s more, for some complex problems, if your written English is decent, you can discuss them on Google Groups with the creators of a language or framework. I once discussed a compile-time BSS segment issue with engineers on the Go team, and asked the creator of Elixir some rather silly questions — they all answered me patiently. Without good English, those discussions would never happen. When you’re in a workplace whose written language is English and where cross-team meetings are discussed in English, your English improves enormously.

Another benefit is your network. The internet circle is small; for an engineer, after attending a few events and changing jobs a few times, you’ve probably covered the industry’s main connections, and after that it’s mostly gradual development. Joining a foreign company actually helps you expand a network you couldn’t have reached otherwise — especially overseas connections. At Juniper, without the help of my bosses Shalang and Gilbert, I couldn’t have successfully scaled the wall and moved abroad; without haofei’s referral, I couldn’t have changed status and joined a startup like TubiTV, achieving my main goal of going abroad ahead of schedule. Many engineers want to move abroad, and many overseas companies want to recruit domestic talent, but constrained by their circles, information doesn’t flow between them, and each can only gaze across the water and sigh.

There’s also the broadening of your horizons. I’m not saying you can’t broaden your horizons at a domestic internet company — like a network, at a certain point it starts to ossify. Joining a Silicon Valley company helps break through that fence. Through on-the-job experience and exchanges with overseas colleagues, you can update your skill stack and ‘know that you don’t know.’ What’s more, potential business trips let you, during the few weeks you’re on the ground in Silicon Valley, attend local tech meetups or various startup events, even Stanford’s open classes (you need to register in advance on the event page), to further broaden your horizons. When I was at Juniper, I often traveled to Sunnyvale on business, and every time I packed my schedule full, afraid of wasting a hard-won opportunity. I attended a lecture by one of Siri’s founders, saw a demo day organized by 500 Startups, and sat in on Wharton and Stanford open classes in lecture halls alongside throngs of students. This is enormously helpful for elevating yourself in terms of perspective and discovering a bigger world.

As for the chance to scale the wall and move abroad, I can only say: if you have that goal and do the groundwork above, it’s just a matter of time and opportunity.

These implicit benefits — it’s hard to put a price on them, but when you need them, they’re priceless.

The Problems with Silicon Valley Companies

Having said so many good things, let me also talk about the problems. There are two sides to every coin, and you need to see both.

• Salaries and benefits aren’t the best. Some outrageously lavish teams in China — perhaps influenced by the TV drama Struggle (奋斗) — will now and then hand out year-end bonuses in a whole sack of cash, or bestow a Tesla on everyone as a grand perk. Less lavish teams will still pay out several months — even ten-plus months — of salary as a year-end bonus. This is nearly impossible at Silicon Valley companies.
• Your personal growth may not follow the best trajectory. The domestic internet, especially mobile internet, advances by leaps and bounds every day. If you get in with a good internet company, the appreciation in your skills and credentials grows exponentially. If you’ve seen Dragon Ball and know the Hyperbolic Time Chamber (the Room of Spirit and Time), then the speed of internet development at home versus abroad is much like the speed inside the Time Chamber versus the outside world.
• For young people who champion striving, the Silicon Valley atmosphere feels more like retirement. Last year I talked with a friend about product development speed; their team, about the same size as ours, develops roughly several times faster than we do. He often uses a VPN to check out our app, and the first thing he says upon meeting is: ‘How come three months have passed and your iPhone app only added a few small features like xxx and yyy?’ I had no reply. Silicon Valley’s relatively comfortable living environment means startups don’t feel the same ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ pressure as at home, and the overall social atmosphere places great emphasis on work-life balance, so some young people can’t stand the ‘leisurely pace.’ Paul Graham once said (I think it was him): the pain a person endures is constant. Some people prefer to concentrate that pain into a shorter period (striving); others prefer to spread it evenly across a lifetime. Neither is wrong. The ‘victims’ of 996 may one day be grateful for those days of struggle; the beneficiaries of a relaxed atmosphere may one day regret not having worked a little harder back then. Problem stacked upon problem weaves our days; choice following choice shapes our lives.

So the choice isn’t obvious. Tell me — what’s your choice?