My First Month at a Research Institute

warning

This article only records personal experiences and information that can be shared publicly. Details about the institution, projects, location, and technical work have been deliberately generalized.

Preface

Somehow, I have already been at the research institute for more than a month. School and industry are ultimately very different environments, and I genuinely miss the carefree life I had a few months ago, right after finishing my interviews.

Back then, I did not have much pressure. When I was tired, I went to bed; when I woke up, I worked on a project or two. During those three months, I built quite a few things, including babel-window-translator, Lumera, and Demiuge, which I have been working on recently.

At the time, the future felt limitless, and so did my creativity. I did not make much money from trying to build a business, but I made a huge leap in both technical ability and experience. Then I collected myself, joined a Fortune Global 500 company, and started learning how to settle down and build things patiently.

The First Few Days

The first stage was training, which helped me become familiar with the work environment. It was actually quite interesting. The institute has a pleasant campus, and many of the buildings are beautifully designed. Along the road near the lake, black swans sometimes come ashore to groom themselves, which reminded me of the time I spent at Slender West Lake in Yangzhou.

Seeing a swan come ashore is not especially difficult. The unusual part is when one walks close to you on its own. People come and go at the institute, and there are employees of all ages. There are a lot of people around. As someone with relatively little experience, seeing so many senior colleagues for the first time was honestly a little intimidating.

There were also many practical things to figure out outside of work. The most important ones were food, clothing, housing, and transportation. I had to arrange those things before I could work with peace of mind. So the first question was: where was I going to live?

The company had opened a seven-day hotel with what was, honestly, a pretty good four-star standard. But I still had to think about renting a place and commuting. The driver who took me there recommended a friend who worked as a real-estate agent, because finding a place in that area was genuinely difficult. It was graduation season, and agents were clearly targeting new employees like us. Rents had generally gone up by around 500 yuan per month.

Most of the reasonably close apartments were already gone. There were plenty of empty places left, but they either had no furniture or had not been properly finished. The agent did find me an apartment in an old campus area whose basic renovation had been completed only a month earlier. It had no furniture, and it was still surprisingly expensive.

We thought about it, raised the budget slightly, and asked whether there was a two-bedroom apartment for around 2,000 yuan a month. Eventually, he found me a place in a rather remote but newer neighborhood. It had no furniture at all, and the landlord required half a month’s rent as a deposit, with all the furniture to be added within seven days. I had already started to feel that finding a place was impossible, so I accepted it and paid a 1,000-yuan deposit.

For a long time afterward, I kept thinking about that decision and felt that I had acted too hastily. The market was already chaotic, with supply and demand seriously out of balance, but that was still a temporary condition. It did not mean the situation could not change later. There would always be apartments being vacated or sublet. I did not need to carry the entire burden of finding a place myself. I could simply ask dozens of agents to look for me, and let whoever found the best place win my business.

So I added agents on every platform I could find and sent them my requirements, asking them to search aggressively. I saw more than a hundred listings in just a few days. Some were too expensive; others looked like they might hide problems. I had to watch out for so-called “renovation-flip” apartments. I could spend more money, but I could not risk my health or safety.

Even then, I underestimated how crazy the market was. If you did not go see a listing within five hours of its posting, someone else would view it and pay the deposit. As a result, even when I found a suitable apartment, the agent often could not take me there during my working hours, so I had to give it up. My rule was that I had to see and inspect a place in person before renting it. But the market had already reached the point where people viewed apartments online and paid deposits immediately. It was difficult to know what to make of that.

Eventually, I found a suitable place. Two or three minutes after I walked into it, another agent arrived with the next potential tenant.

It is technically possible to rent directly from a landlord and avoid the agency fee, but contacting the landlord is difficult. I had actually found a better apartment on a platform, offered for sublet at a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, the person subletting it did not reply to my messages in time. I happened to be viewing another apartment I liked, and that was how I missed the opportunity.

Her post was also attacked by various agents. They claimed that the listing was fake and did not exist because no apartment could possibly be that cheap. That is how the market works: agents have an incentive to inflate the bubble. They attack low-priced listings, and if a genuinely good one appears, they try to acquire it themselves and resell it. Some even pretend to be landlords on different platforms, posting large numbers of listings to crowd out genuinely valuable ones.

That was probably my first real lesson after entering society: when money and interests are involved, relationships are usually maintained by interests. You cannot judge everything only through the kind side of human nature.

My leaders were actually quite concerned about my housing situation. They told me about the local market, and I made many decisions based on that information. When you arrive somewhere new, making friends and gathering information is certainly useful. But I misunderstood my relationship with the agents. They were not really my friends; ours was a one-time transactional relationship. In many situations, they could put their own interests ahead of my actual circumstances.

I work in a very mysterious building. It is a classified facility, so photography is strictly forbidden. The corridors are usually unlit, with only natural light coming in from the north and south, which makes the place feel even more mysterious. When someone walks toward me against the light, I genuinely cannot tell who they are. There are laboratories on both sides of the building. Some have transparent windows through which you can see what is happening inside; others are more secretive, with frosted glass everywhere.

My mentor is quite young, only a few years older than me. I sit in the office next to him and learn how to write business-related code.

After a While

To be honest, I was full of enthusiasm at the beginning. By this point, however, I had started to run out of energy. There was a faint sense of becoming numb. It was not that work was unbearably stressful; I simply still had not adjusted to feeling less free.

No one really micromanages you. As long as you finish your work and stay for eight hours, things are generally fine. But I still miss the feeling of being able to lie down whenever I was tired or sleepy a few months ago. My schedule is actually more regular now. I eat balanced meals at the company cafeteria every day, and there is even a gym. But when I finish work, I only want to go home. I do not want to work out. Going home feels like freedom: I can do whatever I want, including scrolling on my phone.

On the technical side, I spent two weeks typing along with the official Qt tutorials. After I had a rough understanding of the framework, I used Codex at home to build a demo. It is still only a shell, though; the most important protocol layer has not been implemented yet.

I am not only writing code. I also have to learn various aspects of electrical, electronic-control, and powertrain technology. I can now access detailed product documents and specifications, and one of my leaders sent me a compressed package of learning materials. To be honest, the contents were extremely dense: departmental presentation decks, product documents, and electrical schematics.

After spending several months relaxing and playing around with projects, I found it very difficult to understand those materials because my brain had forgotten too much. I had to look up all kinds of information to catch up. Later, I worried that I would forget everything again, so I started taking notes in Obsidian. After writing enough notes, I realized that the training material could probably be organized into a standard operating procedure. I used the content from the Markdown documents and LaTeX to compile a book-like set of notes.

My leader was very pleased with it and helped me get more of the materials I needed.

After spending a long time in the office, I asked if I could visit the different laboratories and see what they were working on. I was eventually assigned to the environmental laboratory. The business there is expanding at an incredible pace, almost in a state of uncontrolled growth, with everything prioritized around keeping operations running.

As a result, some processes clearly have a lot of room for improvement, but there is simply no time or energy to improve them. My job is to experience the workflow in depth for a while, then optimize it while doing the work. To be honest, the process is quite painful.

Large companies require procedures for almost everything. My computer is not particularly powerful either, and there are many restrictions. Even installing software requires submitting a request and asking IT to do it for you. Since this is a classified institution, there are also layers of information-security requirements. Sometimes it is genuinely frustrating.

I have designed many process-improvement ideas, but for one reason or another, I have had to compromise on them. There is not much I can do about that. In a way, this is also a method of protecting myself.

Now

To be honest, I am sometimes troubled by questions of meaning. I learned so many things at school, yet many of those abilities are not useful in my current job.

Work can be exhausting for both the body and the mind, and this is not directly related to the workload or the content of the job. When something frustrating happens at work, I often let it raise my blood pressure. That probably comes from caring too much about responsibility. Sometimes I also feel sad because I do not think I have produced enough.

Engineering is a long, rigorous, and difficult process. We are not an internet company that can launch products quickly. Even in such a competitive environment, products related to human life require patience and care. A project cycle can be very long—often measured in years.

I think back to my first day at the research institute, when I saw all those experienced people walking along the road. Perhaps anyone who wants to work in engineering has to go through this kind of long-term accumulation.