I was sitting quietly, reflecting on life, when it suddenly hit me that I’d already been at Coupang for a full year. Running through the whole experience in my head, a phrase popped up – “days like years.” But not in the miserable sense. Quite the opposite. What I gained in this single year at Coupang far exceeded what I’d accumulated in the several years before. Whether it was luck or good decision-making, I’m not sure. As my boss put it: “If you want to know which company will IPO next, just watch where Johnson goes.” I might be one of the few people who’ve lived through three consecutive IPOs. But looking back, the decision to join was anything but easy.

What Do I Really Want

When I was leaving Kuaishou, my former team lead at Didi learned that I was exploring opportunities and took me out for the most expensive dinner I’d ever had. He made it clear he wanted me to come back and help him, and the title was right this time (that had been one of the reasons I’d left in the first place). After a long conversation, his sincerity was hard to refuse. On top of that, the people and environment were all so familiar – this was the place where I’d gone from nobody to somebody. People there respected me. Honestly, part of me really wanted to go back.

But I couldn’t commit. Looking at the bigger picture, Didi was hemorrhaging talent. Even if I returned, could I single-handedly turn things around? I didn’t have that confidence. From an investment standpoint, I already held a pile of Didi options – if the company never went public, I’d be in serious trouble. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While I was going back and forth, I called Da Zuo and asked: “What do you think about me going back to Didi?” Two seconds of silence, then he said: “You need to figure out what you really want.”

Right. What do I really want? What do I really want? What do I really want?

Title? Money? Respect? Opportunity? …

None of the above? So what do I really want?

The Real “Days Like Years”

With only three months left before the first quarter of my Kuaishou options would vest, friends told me to hang in there – don’t leave money on the table. I said: “This isn’t about money. Every day feels like a year – the kind where you’re suffering. I can see the end from here, and that’s not what I want.” Having gotten used to being respected at Didi, I couldn’t adjust to this new reality. After three months of self-persuasion, I thought I’d made peace with it. “I’ve been gritting my teeth for nine months. My teeth are nearly ground to dust. I genuinely can’t take it anymore.” I had every skill in the book but no room to use any of them. Days with a visible ceiling. Gone was the sense of being valued. What replaced it: PMs dragging me into midnight meetings to go over requirements, overtime I didn’t want even at double pay, and cafeteria food that upset my stomach every time – I reported it three times with zero improvement, until I gave up and started buying milk and bread from Lawson every day. I couldn’t find a single reason to keep gritting my teeth.

Still, as painful as this chapter was, it filled in the most important gap in my professional growth. Before this, I’d always worked on infrastructure and rarely touched business requirements directly. I never truly understood the architectural pain points that business teams faced. Only after experiencing it firsthand did I realize there was a real gap in my understanding – and this experience bridged it perfectly.

What I Truly Want

After some deep soul-searching, I finally figured out what I want: to do the right things, and to do things the right way. At Didi, every time I sat on a promotion panel and listened to candidates defend their work, I’d feel puzzled – are our evaluation criteria actually correct? When you stay at one place long enough and get used to doing things a certain way, you develop an illusion that the whole world works the same way. That’s one reason you shouldn’t stay at any single company too long. For me, the burning question was: what is the right way to do things? Or better yet, what does “better” look like?

Over the years, I’d been learning how things are done at top Chinese tech companies. I picked up bits and pieces, but it never formed a coherent system. I always felt like I’d learned a lot, yet whenever I tried to articulate it, I didn’t know where to start. In just this one year, I not only learned how to do things the right way, but also developed my own methodology – one I could use to guide others and help them grow quickly. Even more fortunately, I got to work alongside engineers from the world’s top tech companies, which showed me just how vast the world is and how boundless the sea of knowledge.