The entry-level aircraft carrier, the entry-level screwdriver

A few days after this incident, Lin Yuan resigned from his tutoring job.

This decision had little to do with that interlude. Instead, it was because Professor Zhang found him an internship.

Previously, because the admission letter had not been officially issued, Lin Yuan's resume from Tangcheng Institute of Technology alone was not enough to secure an internship opportunity at a large company. And Professor Zhang was not the type of person who liked to use his old connections.

After decades of teaching, Professor Zhang had many students who were now thriving in the IT industry. He gave Lin Yuan several choices, and Lin Yuan ultimately chose his old profession—delivery.

Of course, this time he wasn't going to deliver food again, as in Professor Zhang's eyes, even tutoring was considered not doing proper work. How could such a good time in his youth be wasted on an area that only made money without growth?

This time, Lin Yuan went to Haotuan Waimai.

His choice had a bit of a mischievous element to it—rooting himself in the delivery industry could be considered not forgetting his original intention.

Of course, the real reason was that internet companies operate at a faster pace. And because delivery is an industry with massive demand, Lin Yuan could use this opportunity to get exposure to large-scale applications of big data and AI.

Lin Yuan absolutely did not believe that scenarios like delivery, with low single-item profit but massive order volume, would not involve AI. The key was to what extent AI had penetrated it, which was what Lin Yuan was most curious about.

So, in early August, Lin Yuan took his official admission letter to Haotuan Waimai's Zijin Branch in Zijin City.

Haotuan Waimai's headquarters are located in the capital, and its core R&D is also primarily there. The Zijin City location is a server cluster and data center that serves the southeastern region.

Haotuan Waimai's Zijin Branch is located in the High-tech Industrial Park in River West New Area. After completing all the procedures, Lin Yuan received an intern employee card on the same day.

He even played with the employee card for a while.

The overall style of the card was still predominantly yellow, and the long-eared koala, which is the Haotuan Waimai logo, was smilingly printed on the back of the card. The front of the card showed Lin Yuan's half-body photo, as well as his department and position.

Department: Technology Department.

Position: Data Maintenance (Intern).

The department head was very busy. After a quick greeting with Lin Yuan, he handed Lin Yuan over to an older employee.

By the end of the day, Lin Yuan had a better understanding of his position.

Since the core R&D was not located here, the main responsibility of the Technology Department in Purple Gold was data collection and organization, and then packaging and submitting the processed data to the R&D headquarters in the capital. Another responsibility was to undertake model deployment tasks from the headquarters.

Good Group is a national company. It cannot centralize its data centers in one place, so it has several data sub-centers across the country.

The Zijin Sub-center is just one of them, but because the Zijin Sub-center serves the southeastern region, and the southeastern region happens to be the economic core area of the country, the status of the Zijin Branch is also quite significant.

As Lin Yuan was new and an intern, it was naturally impossible for him to be entrusted with any important work.

He had thought he might be responsible for simple tasks like CURD, but in reality, his work was even simpler than CURD.

CURD refers to the initial letters of the four basic operations of a database: Create, Update, Read, and Delete.

CURD is considered the most basic of fundamental skills for IT practitioners, and the industry even jokingly refers to newcomers as "CURD engineers."

It could be said that Lin Yuan was mentally prepared. He didn't expect to be commanding things during his internship at Good Group, but reality was even more...

It wasn't that it was more difficult, but rather simpler than he had imagined.

Good Group already had a complete set of procedures for data processing, as well as relevant operational specifications and software tools. Lin Yuan's job was simply to follow the established pattern, use existing software tools to process data according to the operational specifications, and then submit the results.

The most time-consuming task, surprisingly, was writing reports.

After a week, Lin Yuan hadn't written a single line of code at Good Group; he was buried in various meeting summaries and reports.

This was not a deliberate targeting by Good Group, but rather that large companies had long established a complete workflow. What kind of person comes in, what position they are assigned, and what kind of work they do, are all fixed by this workflow.

Although Lin Yuan had Professor Zhang's recommendation, he couldn't break this workflow.

One could even say that if it weren't for Professor Zhang's recommendation, Lin Yuan wouldn't have had the chance to intern here at all. Because in the current economic environment, Good Group is not short of people at all; in fact, it's still laying off employees.

Although Lin Yuan was not very satisfied with his internship, it made others extremely envious.

With cost reduction and efficiency improvement becoming the main theme, hiring outsourced personnel has become a common strategy for major IT companies. The Zijin Branch of Good Group is no exception.

A few days after Lin Yuan arrived, he already felt the difference in the work atmosphere.

Regular employees generally didn't mix much with outsourced personnel. Occasionally, when working overtime and having dinner in the evening, the department's regular senior employees would naturally invite Lin Yuan, but outsourced employees would not be seen at such private gatherings.

Of course, during work lunches in the daytime, there wasn't such a clear distinction, and everyone got along with smiles and laughter.

But that subtle sense of estrangement, Lin Yuan could feel it if he paid a little attention.

This feeling was like that between locals and outsiders, because outsiders don't know when they will leave. Outsourced personnel have extremely high mobility, much like outsiders, so regular employees, as locals, tend to be less close with them.

Despite various discomforts in his work, the treatment at a first-tier internet giant truly made Lin Yuan feel very comfortable.

On the day he joined, he first received a one-time internship living allowance of 3,000 yuan, then a rental subsidy of 3,000 yuan, said to be issued every half month, and a monthly commuting subsidy of 600 yuan. In other words, he received 6,600 yuan without doing anything yet.

And this didn't even include his internship salary.

Lin Yuan's internship was for one month, and his salary was set at the standard for a Class 211 graduate student—a basic salary of 8,000 yuan, plus performance evaluation.

In short, even if the performance evaluation was 0, he would still get 8,000 yuan.

Lin Yuan felt very dazed looking at such treatment.

He recalled the days when he sweated profusely delivering food. Was some of his past sweat also contained in the 6,600 yuan he just received?

Lin Yuan did indeed obtain this opportunity after diligently studying and being admitted as a graduate student at Zijin Aviation School.

However, he was very clear in his heart. Given the complexity of the current work before him, it actually didn't require so much effort to master; his former self, who delivered food, could actually handle it. In fact, those outsourced personnel could also handle it.

Lin Yuan couldn't help but vaguely sense a reality: the threshold requires you to be able to build an aircraft carrier, but after entering, you might only be required to tighten screws.

Who knows why it has to be this way.