Team Red is a fictitious short-story about working in big tech. Linus Chen is a research scientist who was given an opportunity to interview for a Volga during a global pandemic, the largest e-commerce company . As one of the pioneers in the “Great Resignation”, he has been given a short time frame to go through the application, interview and relocation process. Working through the job transition, it helped him learn the ways in navigating big tech interviews, landing what seems like a dream tech job for many people and learning to thrive in the corporation. As Linus gains experience in big tech, the reader gets a front seat view to the insider view of the corporate tech world.

P/S: This short story by inspired and written in similar style as “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and “The Unicorn Project” by Gene Kim.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to real persons or other real-life entities is purely coincidental. All characters and other entities appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, or other real-life entities, past or present, is purely coincidental.

Long Lost Contact

“Hey Linus, how have you been doing? All safe and okay?” the message left on my messenger inbox from an ex-classmate at dinnertime. It has been a while since I've caught up with the classmate from my German student exchange days.

It was a weird time in the world when the leaders of a world superpowers seemed irrational and yet another animal to human transmitted disease brought the bustling world to a temporary halt. Being an otaku was the norm and people who didn't used to read suddenly bought billy bookcases and used books to create the picture perfect Zoom meeting backgrounds.

As the Chinese saying goes, “无事不登三宝殿. wu shi bu deng san bao dian”, it literally means “without a reason, one would not enter the temple of Sanpo". Some might see the inbox message as a unsolicited communication, and if you do see your ex-friend spamming his/her social media feed with all sorts of “get-rich-quick” pyramid scheme, ignore the message and don’t bother wasting your precious time on convincing him/her if Bill Ackman and John Oliver had already done so.

As the Chinese saying goes, “无事不登三宝殿. wu shi bu deng san bao dian”, it literally means “without a reason, one would not enter the temple of Sanpo"

But me, I see utilitarian communication as part of evolution, it comes a point in life when your social life is no longer as colourful as your days of youth. And interactions beyond your immediate family (spouse, kids, parents) is most often utility based and less about desire to be socially connected. We seem to be content with the occasional celebratory or somber announcements, reactionary emoji reactions and comments to random life photos. Our habitual death scrolling or swiping through social media feeds seem to already satisfy that inner need to connect with friends and extended family.

“Hi Ben, what’s up?” I replied the message after I came back from a dinner appointment, “It’s still in a lock-down state in Singapore. How have you been doing? All safe and okay?”

We are 12 hours apart in different time-zones so my 10pm works just fine for Ben, I got an immediate “Typing…” response after sending off my reply, then “It's kinda like Covid never happens here in the US.”

“BTW, are you still working on MT?” he asked.

“Yep. Never solved, never jobless,” I replied; I am one of the few blessed people in the world to research on what I love, languages and their nuance translations. I had started my under-graduate and post-graduate research working on cross-lingual semantics and machine translation (MT) in the broader field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), you can think of it as Artificial Intelligence for language data.

“I see. I’m doing the same thing now!” he replied, “At Volga”. Volga is the world’s largest e-commerce site that started from selling books and transformed to a company selling anything from toilet papers to cloud computing.

“We are recruiting a scientist globally. My manager asked me, the first person came to my head was you,” he continued.

I felt honoured but the thought of moving to Volga never crossed my head. At that time, I was working for Rocket, a rival e-commerce company that focuses on their Japanese marketplace but tries real hard to break into other regions, esp. in the US where Volga dominates the market. Very often, I read the research from Volga and thinks that most of their work are good incremental improvements to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) and they did have a couple of researchers that I look up to and would very much want to work with.

I headed to the kitchen for some cold water before deciding how to reply to the previous message. In my head, I don’t want to give any hope that I will move to Volga. I was pretty comfortable with my position in Rocket and my influence in the company has reached a level where C-suite executives are reachable. Moreover, money is no concern and I have my side-gig teaching as an adjunct lecturer at the local university, providing additional income that had paid for our family vacations.

Before I could reply, he typed, “Are you interested?”

The standard laughing abbreviation reply should make my attitude towards Volga unrecognisable, I replied, “LOL, hmmm…”

“Where is it based?” I asked out of curiosity, I didn’t really want a response and I was thinking if he said any other location outside Asia, I’ll have a simple ‘I will need to consider relocation’ response. In-retrospect, relocation was never a real concern to me and most probably the worst excuse one could have to an interview opportunity.

Before Ben could response, I added, “You know I do work for Rocket right?” Just in case, Ben didn’t know that I work for Rocket, and Volga had been the primary ‘nemesis’.

“I can offer more information if you are interested. I would be very happy to work with you,” Ben replied, “Can I give you a call?”

“Perhaps not now, the baby is sleeping,” I replied. It’s already 11pm and it is a work day tomorrow.

“Oh... I see. There is job post. I will forward it to you through LinkedIn,” he typed.

“Maybe tomorrow or anytime later this week?” I replied, feel treasonous to Rocket, “Ah sure. You can forward me the position.”

“Let's me know when you have time,” he replied as the short interaction ended for the night.

It has never crossed my mind to abandon a team I have built, desert a product that is consistently generating value to Rocket and leave a close-knitted data science community in Singapore. Furthermore to join Volga, a company known for their shrewdness and frugality.

It has never crossed my mind to abandon a team I have built, … Furthermore to join Volga, a company known for their shrewdness and frugality.

“Have you taken a look at the job posting?” the notification banner pops up from the instant messaging (IM) app, leaving an oddly attention seeking red bubble on the app logo.

“Let me know if you have any questions on the position, team or Volga in general,” the number increased by one on the red bubble as Ben left another message on the IM.

It was Friday evening and I really didn’t want to think about anything more than spending time with my wife, kid and parents over the weekend. I ignored the message hoping that it might just go cold and go away like the thousands of unread emails in my inbox.

As we were heading towards my parents place on Sunday morning, another message, “Let me know when you’re free for a call,” Ben left another message. That’s some good cold-calling skills at work, if you don’t get a “no”, there’s still hope for a “yes”.

I remembered how we were relentless on getting the best people for our program committee when we organized an academic workshop. We tried to reach out to famous researchers that never in my dreams would I thought they would reply to my cold-emails. But the persistent and well-timed follow-ups helped to get that no-reply into them accepting the invite as keynote speakers and committee members of the workshop. I was inspired by

Leonardo DiCaprio’s depiction of Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street, remembering the mantra whenever I approach cold-emailing, “Be sharp as a tack. Be enthusiastic as hell. Be an expert in your field.”

Be sharp as a tack. Be enthusiastic as hell. Be an expert in your field. - Jordan Belfort

“Hi Ben, sorry was busy over the weekend,” I replied, obviously an excuse but a good one and I do really want to spend more time with my family, “I took a look at the job posting, the eligibility clause has a PhD requirement, I don’t have one.”

Almost instantly, the triple dots appeared. It is kind of a weird evolution of human communication for the need to know that the interlocutor in the conversation has read a message by putting a checkmark and and the desire to know that someone is typing a reply. It is almost like seeing a person hmmm and ahhh before responding in an in-person conversation.

“Don’t worry about the eligibility, it’s some boilerplate that the HR people copied and pasted. Are you interested in hearing more about the position? Could you send me your resume?” Ben replied almost instantly.

Bouncing between an academic and an industry researcher career, I kept two versions of my resume, a brief two-page version for the industry and a detailed one spammed with technicalities of the projects I had worked on before.

“I have two versions of my resume, a long 5 page one and a 2 page, which one would you like,” I replied.

Triple dots for a split second, “The shorter one would be good,” Ben answered.

While it seems natural to attach documents, audios, videos and meme gifs in a messaging app, it is something that I would have looked like magic in the early days of the internet. We would have to make do with tedious phone calls and ending the calls with, “I’ll email you the document”, log into the advertisement filled Yahoo site, compose a new email, attach the document only to be shown the “File size exceeds 25MB” warning, change the windows to the File Explorer, zip/compress the file till it barely reach 24.99MB, re-upload the document, type in some boilerplate email subject and body text and press send. And today, we simply click on the “+” symbol in the IM, link the storage to Apple iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox and send, voila!

While it seems natural to attach documents, audios, videos and meme gifs in a messaging app, it is something that I would have looked like magic in the early days of the internet.

“Here it is,” I attached my short resume, “Let me know if you have any feedback on it.”

“Thanks! I’ll take a look at it,” Ben replied.

I did not expect much from sending a resume to Ben, not that I would get an interview opportunity nor any feedback to help me improve my resume. Little did I know, Ben was reading my experience and education on the resume seriously and just before I knock off for the Sunday, “Hey Linus, I’ve some pointers for you on your resume,” Ben texted on the IM.

It’s a Sunday night, I’m kinda sleepy and anticipating the Monday onslaught of meetings and all-hands, I thought I had better ignore the message until tomorrow morning. But damn modern technology, the fact that I read the message, the checkmark appeared on the IM.

“Hi Ben, sure, let me know what can to be changed to improve it,” I replied.

“Free to call now?” Ben answered.

It’s totally out of character of me to receive a call before I sleep, especially on a Sunday night, moreover a video call. But somehow, I responded.

“Sure, let me get to the living room, brb,” I replied.

“Okay, I’m here,” I continued.

“Ringggg… Ring Ringg…. Ringgg…” the IM pops up the call.

“Hi, long time no see!” I was kind of excited to see a familiar face that I hadn’t seen for a long time, “How has it been for you? Are you in Volga, USA?”

“Hallo!” Ben replied in German, “Wie gehst?”

“Hahaha,” I laughed and replied, “Ja gut.”

“Yeah, I’m in the US now, working for Volga.” Ben responded, “Let me tell you a little more about the role and the team first before I give you some feedback on the resume”.

It makes sense for me to get some context before I adjust my resume to fit the position. I learnt it the hard way before I joined Rocket. I noticed that my resumes sent out has a call-back rate of less than 10% and I experimented with customizing my resume to fit all the job descriptions of the postings and it increased my call-back rate to ~25%. Since then, I no longer randomly send out “one-size fits all” resumes to the positions that I am interested in but carefully re-word my resume to catch the attention of the HR personnel or AI algorithm reading them.

I no longer randomly send out “one-size fits all” resumes to the positions that I am interested in but carefully re-word my resume to catch the attention of the HR personnel or AI algorithm reading them.

After describing the job position and the hiring team, Ben said, “I think the first thing is to change the resume format into a more modern template. Add your phone number and try to include some sort of 1-2 sentence summary.”

I purposely chose an ultra-plain template to avoid unnecessary head-hunter poaching and unsolicited messages on LinkedIn. But I think it’s a valid feedback and I did design that template 10 years ago. At that time, it was refreshing to have my design with no boundaries boxes and no header banners, just text with varying fonts to highlight the sections and populating each experience/education point with any noteworthy achievements.

“For some particular reason, Volga treats data scientists and research scientists differently, although the job scope seems similar. I see that you call yourself a ‘Research Scientist’ on LinkedIn. Why don’t you use that title?” Ben continued his feedback.

“Sure, I kinda put the ‘data scientist’ there because that was what they hired me in 2016 as but the research managers at Rocket changed the job title to ‘research scientist’ since data scientist seems to lose any sort of meaning today. Sure, I’ll change my title to research scientist” I replied. In retrospect, this minor difference in title is a big thing in major tech companies, I encourage job seekers to checkout the job title differences on https://www.levels.fyi/; in many cases, the same job scope under different titles actually compensate differently.

in many cases, the same job scope under different titles actually compensate differently.

For reference, this is how it used to look like:

"Here’s my resume, you can use that as a reference for the template,” Ben sent his resume over and I did agree that the aesthetics was definitely more pleasing than my resume.

“Thanks, I’ll do some edits and send it to you again for some feedback,” I replied, “It’s late for me, so I’ll go and get some rest first and get back to you tomorrow.”

“Okay, have a good night!” Ben said.

“Have a good rest of the Sunday,” I replied

I should have been sleeping on the Sunday night but I spent the next couple of hours looking at modern resume design and settled on something that looks like Ben’s. I come to realize that some contrastive color in the text would better capture the HR personnel’s attention. Without changing much of the content to satisfy the AI overlords scanning for buzzwords that fit the job description, the updated resume looks a lot more “fresh”.

It’s already 2am in Singapore and I just finished the resume refurbishing, “Hi Ben, thank you again for the feedback on the resume. I’ve updated it and here it is”.

Immediately, the *triple dots, “*This looks great! I’ll send it to my manager!”

“BTW, do I have to apply online or something?” I asked

“Oh no, don’t apply on the public site, I’ll make a referral internally and the HR person and/or my manager will try to contact you.” Ben answered.

“Thanks! I’ll just wait then. I better get to sleep, it’s late already,” I replied.

“Guten nacht!” Ben responded. Tired, I replied with a thumbs-up.

Monday evening, an email notification while I was having my post Monday mayhem dinner, “Hello Linus, this is Linda, Benjamin’s manager from Volga. We received your interest and Ben’s referral for the applied scientist position. Would you be able to schedule a phone call to talk about the job position? Please reply with your availabilities for the next few days.”

つづく… To be continued…

Next on “Team Red: The Interview”

Synopsis: Linus continued the communication with Volga’s personnel and eventually scheduled a Volga style full-day virtual ‘on-site’ interview, disregarding the oxymoron of ‘virtual’ and ‘on-site’. During the interview, Linus was surprised at the rigour of behavioural questions sprinkled throughout the interview process, bewildered at some of the interviewers’ technical questions and charmed by an interviewer who sat in front of what looked like a full metal rock recording studio.