【V2EX】Three months of my internship in ByteDance

This article is slightly modified based on my application when I jumped from the ByteDance.

The short three-month internship at ByteDance started from the resume submission in October last year, and ended yesterday after completing all the resignation procedures. What I experienced in the process confirmed and supplemented all my assumptions on the domestic Internet industry before the internship, including the good and the bad .

Let's talk about the good ones first.

ByteDance, as the current sub-top Internet company in the country (perhaps becoming the top one in the future), holding today's headlines and Douyin products has developed rapidly, and the outside world is full of expectations for its future. Naturally, ByteDance completely has the working environment and working atmosphere that a "startup company" should have. In my opinion, it is quite good.

Whether it is a variety of benefits enjoyed by outsiders (such as delicious and rich afternoon tea, snacks and drinks), or a relatively free and flexible management system, ByteDance Beat provides a good working environment. The younger staff, modern management system, and efficient work processes make communication smooth and the interpersonal atmosphere harmonious. Or to be more mundane, the compensation of ByteDance is also high enough, and regardless of the various sky-high offers that are circulated, it is only for the intern's salary that I have to admit to being kind.

However, ByteDance, which has always claimed to be a startup company, Always Day 1 is flexible and fast, but inevitably, it is also full of disadvantages (at least in my opinion).

First, emphasize fast-paced work, stay entrepreneurial, and focus on output. This is reflected in the colleagues around me who are extremely busy (such as my mentor, sometimes I feel that he is too busy to embarrass me to interrupt his work with my trivial questions). In contrast, sometimes I would doubt myself or even feel guilty: everyone is so busy, why am I so laid back? Is this a healthy mindset and working atmosphere? I tend to deny. Besides being busy, the more serious problem is endless overtime. However, since I do not work overtime as an intern, I will not talk more about this.

On the other hand, the short and flat work output leads to an unavoidable reduction in the quality of work, which is inherently contradictory to the so-called "pursuit of the extreme", no matter what sounding reasons to justify. Even when looking at some of the work in the group from the perspective of a low-level intern, I feel that many things are not satisfactory. For example, the code in the group is complex and there is almost no documentation, which makes me have to look at the code implementation across multiple microservices when I want to understand an API; in the code, comments are often missing, and occasionally After seeing a few lines of comments, it is as follows, this kind of useless as if the template generates general comments, which is useless (I initially suspected that such comments are automatically generated, but git log tells me that is not the case). And the code itself, I have no intention to judge (after all, my level is not enough to convince me of the judgment), but at least, I think that many places can be written more "elegant".

// implement XXX method
func XXX(){
  ...
}

For another example, at a group meeting one day, a colleague proposed a good compilation performance optimization solution (at least I think it is very good, compared with various technical terms and programs that sound dazzling), and also did Some more in-depth work to solve the problem, but was questioned: How does doing this help our business? Now this is not our bottleneck. Where is the necessity? (The original words are not the same, but the intention is so.) I wanted to say "pursue the ultimate" at that time, but think about it and forget it. After all, the slogan is just a slogan. Documented and commented code, to achieve more features required by the product, and to get more salary and bonuses.

Let me talk about the work I have been assigned. I am extremely skeptical that our project team did not think about whether they really need an intern before they recruited me, and what jobs can be done for the intern, but they are recruiting purely for recruitment. Recruiting in the name of back-end development, but assigned to me the task of testing, but also the son-in-law supplementary testing (after all, before, the test work was useless, the regression test on Jenkins has been sitting on the cold bench for unknown time ). I don't think testing is not important. On the contrary, I think testing is important. Because of this, I have great doubts about the rationality of such a work assignment.

One more thing, halfway through my internship, I proposed to Mentor to change the job content, but was rejected, asking me to "finish the test work" before I can do anything else. Ironically, shortly before I left, the leader finally realized the importance of testing and hired several new full-time employees to focus on this, planning to complete the job in a few months. So, was it possible for me to do this work alone before doing anything else?

Therefore, in the first two months of the internship, I was always in a daze: too ambitious work direction, too busy and difficult to give me guidance, too boring work content. Frankly speaking, from this kind of work arrangement, I can neither have fun (this is the biggest motivation to support my programming from junior high school), nor can I learn too many useful things (this is the purpose of my internship), and I feel more What I do cannot create value (this is my fantasy of trying to self-motivate). As for the last month of the internship, objectively speaking, things have changed slightly due to the addition of new colleagues. However, it is too late, and I have lost the desire to continue.

Say no more, so far. I'm not demeaning the ByteDance, nor the ability of my colleagues (the so-called code quality is created by the environment, has nothing to do with the ability of people). However, after a three-month internship, I realized that I didn't go with ByteDance (at least not with the current project team) , so don't leave it alone and wish everyone and me a bright future.

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Postscript: After submitting this resignation statement, both the HR and the project team leaders communicated with me. They made some explanations, but they did n’t have to. I fully understand that these issues are the product of trade-offs and trade-offs. Company, and I ’m just looking for the best company for me. Although I am not very satisfied with the ByteDance (or more specifically, this project team), this internship is not a failure. After all, as far as internship is concerned, it is enough to gain something and not ask too much.