Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

Chapter 153 Net Worth

Wang Xiaochuan stared at the code logic written on his notebook, his eyes growing brighter and brighter, his fingers unconsciously tracing the logic line by line.

He had only skimmed through Qihang's core codebase that afternoon and was already impressed.

But now, sitting in Bai Yuhang's office, looking at the advanced architecture design diagrams on his laptop and comparing them with the actual code he had reviewed in his mind, a strong sense of disparity welled up inside him. The source of this disparity was not the disparity between Qihang and Sohu, but the disparity between himself and the young man of similar age in front of him.

He spent a month at Sohu.

In one month, he watched as Chen Yizhou had the graphic designer use the Windows Paint software to cut out the white border of the vegetable garden watchdog. As the technical lead, he couldn't do anything about it. In the end, they cut out a halo around the character and rushed to put it online, creating a huge joke.

He had seen Old Zhao holding a goji berry cup, studying how to hide Minesweeper in a hidden folder. He was just there to work, hoping to earn a more relaxed wage.

He watched a group of people arguing for three days about whether the button on the page should be placed on the left or the right. They seemed to be racking their brains for work, but in the end, the button was placed in the middle. However, clicking it would redirect to a 404 empty page.

Such awkward situations, along with the various review, application, approval, and office procedures of large companies—which he was supposed to do or shouldn't have to—gradually wore down his energy.

The mess they made at Sohu 5Q Campus Network wasn't something a technical team should be doing; it was something a makeshift team did.

Every logic diagram and code in front of us is clean and concise, every function is named precisely and accurately, and exception handling is flawless.

The traffic splitting logic in high-concurrency scenarios is written like a rigorous mathematical proof—without a single unnecessary word or a single lazy compromise.

Wang Xiaochuan took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. He realized that it wasn't the lenses that were scratched, but rather that his eyes were a little sore.

"Mr. Bai." He pushed his glasses up his nose, his voice lower by half an octave, "I've studied at Tsinghua University for so many years, and I consider myself to be pretty good at coding compared to my peers. But after seeing what you guys have to offer, I realize what a real gap is."

"The gap is temporary; vision and attitude are what matter in the long run. If you want to get things done, you need to have a humble and modest mindset," Bai Yuhang said casually, holding a purple clay teapot.

"I'm not just being polite." Wang Xiaochuan, unusually, didn't adjust his glasses and looked directly at Bai Yuhang. "Back at Sohu's 5Q Campus Network, Chen Yizhou asked me to write a front-end module for a forum. I finished it, but he didn't even look at it. He just had the graphic designer put a layer of fancy skin on it and added a few pop-up windows. I said that would make the user experience terrible, but he said the user experience wasn't important. The company's metrics were important, as long as the user data looked good."

Bai Yuhang didn't respond, waiting for him to continue.

"I had an argument with him once." Wang Xiaochuan's hand rested on his knee, his fingers gripping it slightly. "The day after the argument, he gave the module I wrote to someone else to modify. After the modification, the page loading speed changed from 0.3 seconds to 4 seconds."

Four seconds. I wanted to quit right then and there, but I thought Sohu was a big platform after all, and maybe things would get better if I just endured it. What I got in return was a bunch of jerks.

He paused for a moment, then his lips twitched into a bitter smile.

"Mr. Bai, I want to work for you. Part-time is fine, any odd job is fine. I'll do whatever you assign me, even starting from writing the lowest level of code, no problem."

Bai Yuhang put down his teacup and looked him over for a few seconds.

"A low-level programmer?" Bai Yuhang laughed. "Chuan'er, do you know how much you're worth?"

Wang Xiaochuan was stunned for a moment.

"The message queue you just added—the solution that Zhang Jian and three others couldn't figure out in two days—you provided the optimal solution in just one afternoon. I looked at the exception handling module you modified; it's about 10% more streamlined than my original version."

Do you think it's an insult to your intelligence to ask someone with your skill level to be a low-level programmer?

Wang Xiaochuan opened his mouth, but no words came out.

Bai Yuhang pulled a piece of paper from the drawer. It was Wang Xiaochuan's employment approval form that Jiao Liwei had given him to sign earlier, and he had kept it.

He picked up a pen, crossed out "Technical Department Intern Engineer" in the job description column, wrote a new line, and then turned it around and pushed it in front of Wang Xiaochuan.

Wang Xiaochuan looked down and his pupils suddenly contracted.

"Search Engine and Big Data Lab — Head?"

"Right." Bai Yuhang tossed his pen back on the table and leaned back in his chair. "You just asked me what the concepts of microservice gateways and container orchestration on the architecture diagram meant, which shows your technical intuition is sharp enough; you've got the hang of it. Qihang is currently making money through social networking and virtual value-added services, but I believe the next battleground for the development of the internet will be search, data, turning every ordinary person into an information hub or node, the display of multimedia resources after further expansion and optimization of the network, and the innovation of user push algorithms based on large-scale data platforms. I want to claim this land now, but I don't have the time or energy to cultivate it myself. You can cultivate it."

Wang Xiaochuan held his employment approval form, his fingers trembling slightly.

When he resigned from Sohu, his biggest hope was simply to find a quiet corner at Qihang where he could write code in peace.

He was prepared to start from scratch and work his way up as an ordinary programmer.

What Bai Yuhang gave him wasn't just a corner, but an entire battlefield.

"Mr. Bai, I've only been here one day," Wang Xiaochuan said, his voice a little dry. "Aren't you afraid I'll mess this up?"

"If you can mess up search engines, Tsinghua's computer science department might as well close down." Bai Yuhang stood up, walked over to him, and patted him on the shoulder. "Let Jiao Liwei talk to you about your salary. Don't be shy about asking. If he offers too little, just come to me. Qihang doesn't mistreat tech people, especially those who can write beautiful code."

Wang Xiaochuan stood up, carefully folded the employment approval form, and put it into the pocket of his shirt.

"Mr. Bai, I'm not going to talk to Mr. Jiao about salary anymore."

,,"Um?"

"Any amount is fine." Wang Xiaochuan pushed up his glasses, and a genuine smile finally appeared on his lips. "But could you show me the microservice gateway design document you mentioned earlier tomorrow? I think that's more important than my salary."

Bai Yuhang chuckled: "Okay, I'll give it to you tomorrow. Go back and finish the mobile interface completely first. It'll be tough to do something else after only doing half of it, won't it? Zhang Jian is waiting for you."

Wang Xiaochuan turned and left, his steps much lighter than when he came in.

As they passed through the technical area, Zhang Jian was dozing off at his desk. Hearing the noise, he looked up, saw the expression on Wang Xiaochuan's face, and immediately perked up.

"Chuan'er, are you done talking? What tasks did President Bai assign you?"

"Search engine," Wang Xiaochuan said softly, sitting down at his workstation as he handed the onboarding approval form to Zhang Jian. At the same time, he pulled the keyboard over, and the moment his ten fingers touched it, his entire aura changed.

After looking at it, Zhang Jian was stunned for two seconds, then slapped his thigh: "Holy crap, you became the lab director after just one day? I worked for months before I became a technical director!"

"Brother Zhang, finish the mobile interface issue first." Wang Xiaochuan had already started coding, the light from the screen reflecting off his black-rimmed glasses. "Boss Bai said this has the highest priority."

Zhang Jian muttered, "That brat, he's only been here one day and he's already trying to intimidate me with Boss Bai's influence," but his eyes were practically disappearing from his grin. He turned and yelled at the tech section, "Wake up, all of you! Chuan'er isn't asleep yet, how dare you just lie there like that?"