The innovation environment in the technology industry is completely different. Those high-input projects with no short-term return in the past are now difficult to sustain.
It is often difficult for top talents to be retained by enterprises. Huawei is already a leading enterprise in China in the cultivation and retention of top talents. Mr. Zhihui’s departure may reflect that the innovation environment in the technology industry is completely different. In the past, those projects with high investment and no return in the short term are difficult to continue now, and cost reduction and efficiency increase are becoming industry practice.
Big companies, in the end, still failed to accommodate the ambition of “genius boy”.
On the afternoon of December 27, Mr. Zhihui, a well-known UP master at station B who joined Huawei as a “genius boy”, issued a post in response to recent rumors of resignation, officially announcing that he would leave Huawei to start his entrepreneurial career. “Together is a ball of fire, scattered is a sky full of stars, I will always regard myself as a member of Huawei ER~” Zhihui wrote in the farewell copy. As for the reason for leaving, Huawei’s internal voice community posted that it had devoted itself to the robot startup project and had received angel round investment.
Zhihui Jun, formerly known as Peng Zhihui, was born in 1993. He is a well-known KOL in the technology circle and one of the top 100 UP owners of station B in 2021. He is called “Zhihui Jun” and “Wild Iron Man” by fans. He graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. , the school is also one of the base camps of Huawei’s school recruitment. According to the data, after graduating from graduate school in 2018, Zhihui Jun worked in the AI Laboratory of OPPO Research Institute as an algorithm engineer. In November 2020, he joined Huawei’s “Genius Boys Program” and was responsible for the full-stack research and development of Huawei’s Ascend computing product line.
In 2019, Huawei launched the Recruitment Program for Talented Teenagers, aiming to attract the world‘s top talents. The program is not limited to academic qualifications and schools, but it places extremely high requirements on the personal qualities of the recruiters. It needs to go through seven rounds of screening, including ministers and The president interviewed alone, but correspondingly, the starting annual salary of the “genius teenagers” recruited into Huawei through this plan is as high as 1 million yuan.
Huawei Xinsheng Community once published a speech by Ren Zhengfei on June 20, 2019, saying that in 2019, Huawei will recruit 20-30 young geniuses from all over the world, and another 200-300 in 2020. These young geniuses are like Like a “loach”, sneak into Huawei’s organization and activate Huawei’s team. In the next 3-5 years, I believe that Huawei will take on a new look.
But looking at China’s technology and Internet industry, many top talents with halos on their heads are ultimately difficult to make their way out of this system, and more “geniuses” finally emerge after starting their own businesses. And this may also confirm that large companies may not be suitable for “entrepreneurial” talents.
“Genius” leaves
Jun Zhihui’s departure was actually foreshadowed long ago. On December 23, the Huawei Xinsheng community began to have related rumors. According to Zhihu, an anonymous netizen quoted a source from the Huawei Xinsheng community, saying that at that time, Huawei’s internal software Welink could not find Mr. Zhihui’s job number. According to many netizens, Zhihui Huijun submitted a resignation application two or three months ago.
As for the reason for resignation, according to Zhihu netizens, it is not because of performance. After joining Huawei, Mr. Zhihui has won the President Award, Star of Tomorrow, Gold Medal Team and other awards. “The performance has been all A in recent times.” In order to join the robot entrepreneurial project, it was revealed that the project has received angel round financing. Some people in the industry speculate that Huawei will most likely not increase investment in the field of robotics in the next few years. In addition, the computing product line where Zhihui Jun is located will undergo relatively large personnel changes in 2022, and multiple leadership positions will be replaced. Hui Jun resigned.
As a representative of Huawei’s genius boy, Mr. Zhihui is well-known in the technology circle. In October 2021, Mr. Zhihui released the video “I Made an Iron Man’s Robotic Arm” on Station B. The video was played more than 6.4 million times. It aroused the attention of the industry, and related topics appeared on Weibo hot searches.
According to Mr. Zhihui’s introduction in the video, he found a second-hand robotic arm produced in 2014, but was not satisfied, so he built a robotic arm Dummy himself. The operating system of this project uses the open source Hongmeng, and the AI computing platform uses the Huawei Ascend Atlas edge computing platform. In the video, Peng Zhihui remotely stitches a broken grape, but the grape was not damaged by the robotic arm. This video shows Mr. Zhihui’s accumulation in artificial intelligence, deep algorithm, etc., and also secretly reflects Mr. Zhihui’s research direction in Huawei and the direction of this resignation and entrepreneurship.
(Part of the video of Zhihui Jun B station)
Regarding the reason why he chose to join Huawei in the first place, Mr. Zhihui once disclosed in the documentary “100 Faces of Huawei”: “The high annual salary is an attraction, but the main thing I come to Huawei is not because of this. When I came, here The president told me that there are a lot of good people here, such as “genius boys” like me, and many high-level experts. I used to work in artificial intelligence, and I can do both artificial intelligence and robots here.”
Regarding the aura of “genius boy”, Mr. Zhihui has publicly denied it, and he prefers to call himself “wild iron man”. In October 2021, Zhihui Jun and others said on Weibo: “I think I am neither a genius nor a teenager anymore. I am just a geek who loves to toss around.”
In June last year, Mr. Zhihui released the video “I made a bicycle into an automatic driving!” on Bilibili! ! “, once again attracted attention, and was praised by Chen Rui, Chairman and CEO of Station B. “Too strong, Master UP redefines ‘bicycle’.” Chen Rui commented below the video.
In addition to Chen Rui, the bicycle autonomous driving researched by Peng Zhihui has also been recognized by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei. In August 2021, Ren Zhengfei said at the Innovation Pioneer Symposium of Huawei’s Academia Sinica: “Someone studies the automatic driving of bicycles, and the company has not restrained him. Are we going to produce bicycles? No. This is what he has mastered’ Scalpel’, maybe what role it will play in the future and what huge commercial value it will generate.”
On the one hand, the representatives of young geniuses have left, but on the other hand, in fact, Huawei has not recruited enough “young geniuses”. This mode of stirring up the vitality of a huge organization with a few top talents has not yet been verified. According to Huawei’s original vision, Huawei will recruit 200 to 300 talented teenagers in 2020. However, according to Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping, only 300 of the 26,000 fresh graduates recruited by Huawei in 2020 and 2021 meet the requirements of Huawei. The definition of “young geniuses”, of which there are only 20 truly top-notch talents.
However, it is not Huawei’s problem that it is difficult to retain young geniuses. The retention of top talents in the enterprise has always been a problem. Many former technical experts eventually chose to leave after joining the enterprise.
“Genius” is always hard to stay
In China’s technology industry, there are not many companies like Huawei that are eager for “genius boys”. Facing the “stuck neck” field.
Taking Huawei’s semiconductor industry, which is most affected by sanctions, as an example, Ren Zhengfei once mentioned that China is deficient in semiconductor processing technology and EDA (electronic design automation) technology, and a large number of technical talents in the EDA field have been poached by the United States. Extremely scarce.
In the technology industry, such difficult technological breakthroughs are often extremely dependent on high-end talents. Hu Houkun, the rotating chairman of Huawei, once said: “At Huawei, when it comes to innovation, we first think of top talents. We hope to use global problems, Attract world-class talents to jointly meet challenges and promote scientific and technological progress.”
Regarding the importance of the genius boy, Ren Zhengfei once told the story of a Russian boy genius in an interview with CCTV’s “Face to Face” column. According to Ren Zhengfei, this young man has joined Huawei for many years, “he plays computer games every day, and everyone doesn’t know what he is doing”, and he is not good at speaking or dating. But it was such a math genius who had been sitting on the bench for many years, and suddenly told Huawei one day that they had broken through the algorithm from 2G to 3G, helping Huawei achieve a leading position in the 3G field.
(Ren Zhengfei was interviewed by CCTV)
According to the data, this Russian math genius joined Huawei around 2000. Huawei offered him an annual salary of US$2 million because he was unwilling to leave his hometown. Huawei also established a research institute in Moscow.
In addition to 3G, the contribution of a Turkish scientist was also indispensable in the transformation from 4G to 5G. Ren Zhengfei mentioned in an interview that Huawei’s achievements in the 5G field are closely related to a mathematical paper published by Turkish scientist Edar Alekan in 2008, which published a polar code that is mainly used for 5G communication coding. Technical solutions.
After the publication of this paper, Huawei’s internal scientists quickly realized that the technology in it could be used for 5G coding, so they contacted Alekan for cooperation, and applied for a batch of patents based on this technology. A number of patents have been blocked based on polar codes. Statistics show that Huawei is currently the world‘s largest source of 5G essential patents.
However, such top talents are often difficult to be retained by enterprises. Huawei is already a leading enterprise in China in terms of training and retention of top talents. Like Zhihui Jun, Lu Qi, an industry leader who is deeply involved in the field of artificial intelligence, joined Baidu in 2017 and was fully responsible for Baidu’s technology, products, sales and market operations. Just over a year later, Lu Qi stepped down as Baidu’s president and chief executive officer. Operating officer, and ceased to serve as vice chairman of Baidu in July 2019.
In fact, in recent years, there are only a handful of top talents who are born in technology and have climbed to the top of China’s technology and Internet industry. It is only after starting a business that it really emerges.
On the other hand, the patience of large companies for top R&D talents is also decreasing. After joining Huawei, a Russian genius boy has been playing with computers for many years. Now such stories are becoming less and less. In the past two years, as the pressure on Huawei to respond to sanctions has increased, the overall revenue of the company has also shrunk. “Survival” has become Huawei’s main goal, and technology investment that is difficult to implement may be reduced as a result.
Not long ago, Tencent founder Ma Huateng made an internal speech, in which he mentioned that there is not much time left for certain businesses, and projects that are difficult to make a profit in the long run may be cut off. Now Tencent’s “hope of the whole village” is in the video No. Many businesses have lost the ability to innovate.
This actually reflects that the innovation environment of the technology industry is completely different. In the past, those projects with high investment and no return in the short term are now difficult to sustain. Nowadays, most large companies are reducing costs and increasing efficiency. If the robot project favored by Mr. Zhihui cannot be profitable in the short term and implemented on a large scale, the internal support may be limited.
Huawei is still seeking change
One of the main goals of Huawei, which recruited “genius boys” heavily, is to get rid of the technological blockade of the United States. and self-government.
At the operating system industry summit on December 28, 2022, Wang Tao, executive director of Huawei and director of the ICT Infrastructure Business Management Committee, said that by the end of December 2022, the cumulative number of commercially installed and deployed Euler operating systems reached 3 million sets. In the new market of China’s server operating system, Euler’s market share reached 25%, and the number of enterprise members in the open source Euler community exceeded 600.
Compared with Euler, which focuses on the enterprise market, the Hongmeng system, which focuses on the consumer market, is more well-known. During the HDC held in early November, according to Huawei’s official disclosure, there are currently more than 320 million Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS, and the shipments of Zhilian products with built-in Hongmeng system It has also exceeded 250 million, and the Hongmeng ecology is constantly growing and improving.
(Photo source/Huawei)
Both Hongmeng and Euler have open sourced to the industry in the past two years to strengthen the corresponding operating system ecology. According to Huawei’s recent disclosure, the open source Hongmeng has derived 23 software releases, 76 developers/modules, supported by 18 chips, and 74 commercial devices.
But whether it is for Huawei or China’s technology industry, a large part of technological breakthroughs ultimately depends on top technical talents. However, if companies want to retain these talents, especially high-tech talents represented by Ph.D. has always been a problem.
As early as 2018, Huawei began to pay attention to the problem of the drain of highly educated talents. In 2018, Huawei conducted in-depth interviews and data analysis with 82 ex-PhD employees and 115 current Ph.D employees, summarized the reasons for the resignation of Ph.
Data analysis shows that the longer a Huawei Ph.D. employee has been employed within five years, the higher the turnover rate. Among the resigned doctoral employees in 2018, those who joined in 2018 accounted for 2.06%, those who joined in 2017 accounted for 15.63%, and the resignation rate of doctoral employees who joined in 2014 and worked for more than three years reached 43.11%. Moreover, a considerable part of the resigned doctoral employees are specially recruited doctors who are defined as technical leaders.
A large part of the reasons why doctors leave their jobs is that it is difficult to use their technical capabilities in enterprises, or the technology does not match the position. According to Huawei’s survey results, 56 of the 82 ex-PhD employees who resigned at that time reported that their positions did not match their personal skills, and their supervisors’ technical capabilities were weak, resulting in limited performance.
However, Huawei has always attached great importance to the cultivation of doctoral talents. In particular, Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, has always cherished doctors and asked them to play a role in exploration.
At that time, Huawei noticed that although the overall turnover rate was high, the turnover rate of doctors in the manufacturing department from 2015 to 2019 was only 7.7%, because the manufacturing department could match the job requirements and functions of employees after they joined the company. A doctor from the manufacturing department said that after joining the company, he can make the best use of people and feel the respect of the leaders.
Referring to the experience of the manufacturing department, Ren Zhengfei mentioned rectification opinions in the open letter: to assign doctoral employees to work that requires research and exploration, do not arrange repetitive tasks, and give doctoral employees a quiet and continuous research space. In terms of human resource management, strategically attack the team. Following the example of European and American companies, adopting minimalist management, adopting an annual salary system for doctors, giving three years of research time, and being brave in trial and error, this is more conducive to discovering and identifying talents and reducing management consumption.
For Huawei, talented young people are important, and the issue of retaining talents is the top priority. But at the same time, if the entire technology industry wants to get rid of technological blockade and achieve further autonomy, it needs the joint efforts of the entire industry upstream and downstream. , Establish a positive cycle ecology in the fields of domestic semiconductors and operating systems.
The author of this article: Zeng Guang, the source of this article: Shi Jie, the original title: “When the “Genius Boy” Leaves Huawei”
Risk Warning and Disclaimer
Market risk, the investment need to be cautious. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account the particular investment objectives, financial situation or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, opinions or conclusions expressed herein are applicable to their particular situation. Invest accordingly at your own risk.