Guo Yu is under the cherry blossoms of Lake Suwa, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. (Photo/Picture provided by the respondent)
This 29-year-old programmer named Guo Yu suddenly became the focus of public opinion.
In February 2020, he issued a resignation letter announcing that he would “retire at the end of 28 years old”. Unexpectedly, he was suddenly found out four months later and detonated the social network.
Self-study code entered Alipay, jumped to start a business, and was acquired by ByteDance. Every step of Guo Yu stepped on the Internet. Young, retirement, wealth and freedom-every key word in his body has poked young people's hearts.
"He is a very powerful person." Guo Yu's junior and friend Luo Lei said. For example, GitHub is an open community for programmers worldwide, and Guo Yu was once the top three in GitHub China. Luo Lei told the Southern Weekend reporter that at school, Guo Yu used to write code quietly at night, and worked hard after work, often leaving the company at three or four in the morning. "He knows exactly what he wants."
"His experience is very special, and most people cannot copy it. He is too young. From the growth platform, it is difficult for other companies to compete with companies like Bytedance. Compared." Luo Lei said.
"The most critical choice is my mother, not me." Guo Yu self-analyzed, "She let me start school when I was 5 years old. If it was not so early, I would not be able to catch up with the explosion of the entire mobile Internet."
What does wealth and freedom mean? On June 19, 2020, Guo Yu, who is in Japan, told the Southern Weekend reporter his story on the phone.
29-year-old retirement life
I recently lived in Tokyo, in a house where my friend was idle. I wake up naturally every day, eat lunch, then go to the gym to exercise, or find friends, and occasionally play mahjong.
I have bought a lot of houses in Tokyo in recent years, and I have been considering buying a house or building a building in the Japanese countryside. Houses in the Japanese countryside are very cheap, and the land is basically free. Even in Tokyo, the most expensive city, it is not much expensive. From the countryside to downtown Tokyo, the limited express train is only 30 minutes away, and driving is basically 30 to 40 minutes.
During the epidemic, most of the time I read and wrote at home, and I drove to many places. Mainly hot spring trips, destinations are hot spring hotels in various places. Every time I go to a place, I will open the local main road again.
My car is a Bentley 2020 Continental GT. The domestic purchase is about 3.5 million yuan, and the Japanese side is about 2.3 million yuan. The first car was bought in Beijing, Porsche's 718 convertible sports car.
likes a convertible sports car, because it gives a very good sensory experience on the move. From one hot spring town to another hot spring town, you will pass through mountains or plateaus, some places with very good natural scenery. With the hood open, the smell you feel on the move is very rich. For example, from Kurokawa Hot Springs in Kyushu to Aso, the latter is a plateau with volcanic terrain. Alpine meadows are very lush, which is equivalent to driving along the cliff. To the left, you can see the entire Aso Basin and the volcanic landscape in the distance. Smell the scent of a lot of grass, and sometimes meet some animals.
About three years ago, I started investing in Japan. I like to travel. I have a 150,000-kilometer flight plan every year, but at that time the company only took a break every two weeks, so I could only visit Japan nearby.
I like hot springs. This is a space for introspection. The Hot Spring Township is a very peaceful place. Here, you can give up your social identity and soak in the pool. There is a stream next to it. There are a few cranes standing and you can hear the birds.
The service of the hot spring hotel is very exquisite. Many hot spring hotels update the flower arrangement every day, which is done by the hotel staff themselves. Dinner is also great. It takes 2-3 hours to eat. There are more than ten or twenty dishes. Good can reach the level of two Michelin stars and three stars. It only accepts hotel guests.
These very high-quality things appear in an 18th-lane village that is so remote that it can't be any more remotely. Some people have lived here all their lives. The hotel has been here for 100 or 200 years. These people choose to use it all the time.There is nothing wrong with such a lifestyle.
I think that maybe this kind of life can continue forever, so I started to gradually get some money from US stocks to Japan, buy a house here, and get some stable remuneration.
Everyone is full of vigor
I am an only child and grew up in the countryside of Fuzhou, Jiangxi. His father is a Hakka and his mother is from Jiangsu. In junior high school, he immigrated to Shenzhen with his parents.
I still remember to take a long-distance bus from home to the south, passing through many cities, and finally stopped in Shenzhen. At that time, Shenzhen had many tall buildings and many construction sites, and everyone was in a hurry. In summer, it is very sultry, the street trees grow very well, and the twisted roots are very strong, destroying the floor tiles.
After the college entrance examination, I want to keep in touch with my friends from the previous high school clubs, so I just want to create a website and you can post on the forum.
I taught myself to build a website. The learning process was very painful, because no one taught, and there were no teaching materials at that time. I bought a few books, but the contents of the books were very backward. Most of the time I search on the Internet, read a few words, try and make mistakes and correct them myself.
I have been at my uncle's house in Shanghai that summer vacation. Uncle and aunt bought a computer. Every afternoon, I was in a very hot little room, naked, sweating, and wondering how to solve this problem.
After going to university, I gradually have the ability to do outsourcing projects. There are often various information on the work-study recruitment board of Jinan University. I went to tear up these lists and made some money.
In my sophomore year, I voted for Tencent's internship resume, but didn't make it to the end. In the third year of 2010, they wrote an internship cover letter to Alipay. They called and asked for a few words and let the intern in the past.
I find it very magical. I am not a computer professional, nor is the person who recruited me. He is learning English. At that time, there were a lot of people who were not from a major but had very good skills. After going to the internship, I realized how junior I was.
In 2011, Alipay was still in Huaxing Times Square in Hangzhou, occupying three or four floors with only more than 4,000 people. After half a year, he moved to the newly built Huanglong Times Square, the floor was expanded and he began to recruit people frantically.
At that time, there was no concept of mobile terminal, and Alipay was mainly doing web pages. My job is front-end development. At that time, Alipay had no competitive pressure. Going to work is very easy. I only go to work after 10 in the morning, and leave after 6 in the afternoon. Then I ride an electric bike to the West Lake for tea. Ali is definitely not like this now.
Alipay has a very good technical team, and everyone is full of vigor and earnestly studying technology.
During my internship, I got an offer from Alipay and I will continue to stay here after graduation.
At that time, I lived in a friend's dormitory on the Yuquan campus of Zhejiang University. They were from the software engineering department of Zhejiang University. They discussed every night to make a stock trading system, a quantitative trading system and other advanced things. They are indeed very capable, and later they all got better offers.
Some people choose to go to Ali, like me. Alipay's salary was not high. At that time, Baidu had the highest salary in Internet companies. Freshmen can get about 200,000 in the first year of Baidu, and about 150,000 in Alipay.
However, as more and more money flows into the Internet industry, those who have made the best choices in the past are not as good as those who go to the Internet industry. Once the money poured into the Internet industry, the salary almost doubled every year, and this was only the cash part.
When I was working at Alipay, I did many projects. One of them was Alipay’s 2012 personal bill, which won a CEO special honor award.
Things changed in 2013. In that year, WeChat launched "WeChat Pay", and Ali realized that it would start to fight back, and that employees could no longer lead the "aged life". At that time, there was a strategy called "allin wireless", which allowed everyone to be client engineers, develop mobile terminals, and learn new technologies. The strategic focus also became mobile Alipay clients.
At that time I was readyBei left his job not because he was aware of changes in the industry, but because he felt that he could see his head at a glance and didn't want to lead such a life. Coupled with the end of a relationship, I want to leave Hangzhou. Everyone says that many people start their businesses in Beijing. I think I should go to Beijing to take a look.
Guo Yu's work position when working with byte beating. (Photo/Picture provided by the respondent)
Byte Beat Six Years
I met my entrepreneurial friend at university, and he is from Peking University. I asked him on WeChat if he wanted someone, and he said, "Hurry up!" He was doing "Do Shuo" (a social commenting system) and "Tu Chong" (a photography community).
In the summer of 2014, I came to Beijing. A total of three people in the company rented a two-bedroom and one living room in the Zhongguancun community, covering more than 80 square meters. Every day I woke up to go to work, and lay down on the floor when I was tired.
In that year, Hetuchong was acquired by ByteDance, and we joined ByteDance along the way. I don't know why it wants to buy us. I don't care about money, and this is not something I should take care of.
After adding byte beating, I am still writing code. Mainly do the operation technology of the applet platform. At the time of resignation, he was regarded as an upper-middle technical team, and his rank was a senior technical expert.
After I went to Beijing, I grew a lot of white hair. If you have worked in Beijing for 6 years and only spend a weekend every two weeks, you will understand.
In the summer of 2019, I feel that things are on the right track. This is an opportunity and easy to handover. At the same time, my rent income and other passive income in Japan are basically equal to my salary, so I chose to leave.
何为自由
On February 12, 2020, I submitted my remote resignation.
wanted to give myself an explanation, so I wrote a resignation letter, which was first sent to Toutiao circle and some groups on the company’s intranet, and then to Moments of Friends and Weibo. Somehow it is on fire now. I got up the other day in the morning and my phone was full of messages. Various people sent me more than a thousand questions.
I actually don't like to actively communicate with others, so I have always avoided communicating with others. The programmer is considered a very superior environment for me.
When I was in college, I wanted to be a very good person. This goal is actually meaningless, because there are always people who are better than you, and there is no end to it.
Later I thought, I should think about what kind of person I should be. I want to be a reliable person and be responsible to myself-what I do is indeed what I want to do, or help me accomplish what I want to do, rather than messing around.
I like reading and writing. I wrote a lot when I was in middle school and even held a book club. There are several writers who have had a deep influence on me, such as Cao Wenxuan and Wang Xiaobo.
I think I have been taking a detour in my life, I want to see if I can come back again.
When I was in high school, there were many children with good family conditions around me, so I could make my own choices at that time.
There is a classmate Xiao Zhang in the biology class. Later, he has been following the path of biology. Now he is a researcher at a cancer research in New York. Maybe he has a dream, such as to eliminate cancer, so he will do it all. Some people think that the researcher can't make much money, but I think that if this is the choice he really wants to make, then he is a very successful person.
In the past ten years, although I was lucky to get something, now I am back to that point—the point where they made their choice many years ago.
If I can go back more than ten years ago, I can choose according to my wishes again. I want to be a writer. But at that time, if you tell your parents that you want to be a writer, it would be nice if they don't kill you.
I once gave up some things I wanted to do more, such as reading and writing. Anyway, it is freedom in the pure sense. Freedom is not a state of doing what I want, but not doing what I want.
This resignation, IMom said, "Just be happy if you are happy, and always pay attention to safety when you go out." We don't contact frequently. My father is in poor health and passed away a few years ago. This should be the best time in my mother's life, and I shouldn't bother her.
When I did not leave my job, I taught myself Japanese for two years and passed the N1 exam. In 2019, I opened a travel agency in Japan that specializes in hot spring trips.
I think the so-called wealth and freedom are two different things. Wealth represents whether you have money, and freedom represents whether you have the right to choose. The rich are not necessarily free, and the free are not necessarily rich. The older you are, the more people you will come into contact with. According to Japanese terms, the more fetters you have in life, the smaller your choice of space. I am a selfish person, don't choose so many fetters, just want to follow my heart.
There are not many people who enter the Internet industry like me who retire early. Many people who have children will work hard for family responsibilities and future development. No matter how rich they are, there is no freedom at all.
I don’t have much material needs. The most expensive item I ever bought is the Bentley. My bag is less than 10,000 yuan, and it has been used for many years. Buying something on Taobao every year will only cost 20,000 to 30,000 yuan. But I spend hundreds of thousands every year on travel, which is the bulk of my consumption.
After the epidemic is over, I will resume normal operations and lead a group to let more Chinese people understand Japanese hot spring hotel culture. To be honest, how much money can this hotel make? The profit is not much, it is a small part of my assets.
I may write a lot of popular science about hot springs and novels with hot springs as the background. There are many literary novels in Japan that are based on the themes of hot spring villages, such as Kawabata Yasunari's "Dancing Girl in Izu" and "Snow Country". In the next ten years, I want to build my own hot spring hotel.
Self-report: Guo Yu Interview: Southern Weekend reporter Jing Yibu Southern Weekend intern Ye Zi
