What made you realize that working for someone else would never get you anywhere?

In 2017, I was still working as a software engineer at Huawei.

At the time, my department had invested an enormous amount of effort into rewriting an entire core component. Since the hardware was not yet available, nearly the entire development process consisted of running test cases and simulations.

Then, one day, the hardware finally arrived.

A senior expert got hold of it and spent the entire morning making a debugging cable. Immediately afterward, he compiled the first build to run on the actual hardware. Unsurprisingly, it did not work.

The senior expert then brought three other employees—including me—into a debugging marathon. We reviewed tens of thousands of lines of code and thousands of lines of logs. At one point, it felt as though we were going blind from staring at the screen.

Finally, at 6:00 a.m. the following day, we got the system up and running.

The senior expert sent a screenshot of the successful result to the head of the department. The four of us then asked our respective supervisors for leave and went home to rest.

I slept until the afternoon and had only just begun to recover when I noticed a celebratory announcement circulating in the work group chat. The gist of it was that, for the first time, we had successfully brought the system online within 24 hours of receiving the hardware.

Then, people from all across the department lined up to give their congratulations and praise.

Looking at it rationally, if we had not stayed up all night and had simply gone home at the usual time, we still would have had the system running by the end of the following workday.

But the instruction given to that senior expert was simple: get it running as quickly as possible.