Dictated: What I Learned in Shanghai Before Becoming a Supervisor at 22

Today a friend in a group chat recommended an input app called Typeless, a voice input tool.

So this whole article was entered by voice, and in the end I won't interfere with the result much.

I plan to use it to write today's article, and I want to write about my "legendary" and "dramatic" career.

Before I joined the company, I was basically a beginner in technology. My major in college was Internet of Things engineering. In my classes I actually studied everything, from designing circuit boards to making them, plus programming (Java, Python), Access databases, SQL Server databases. I learned all of it. But the problem is that very little of what I learned in college could be used at work.

So after graduation, I went through a very painful stretch looking for a job.

Finding a job in Chongqing after graduating was very hard. At first, a few classmates and I could only find a job in game customer service.

The work was roughly this: the company used livestream rooms and similar ways to draw in customers and then passed them to us. Then we sent customers game links, got them to play, and got them to spend money. The shift started at one or two in the afternoon and ran until one or two in the morning.

I wasn't used to those hours, and I felt the job had no future, so I quit before long.

Then I found my second job, which is the one I'm still doing.

It's a technical job, and the title is after-sales engineer.

What I repair is medical equipment. After the company sells its products on the market, when a machine breaks down, someone like me has to go repair it. To put it bluntly, I fix machines that crash.

When I first joined, I knew nothing, but the company had systematic training.

Looking back, the training was actually simple. I went to the company's production department and went through the whole process: making each part of the instrument, joining the metal parts, soldering the circuit boards, connecting the wires, installing the software, and debugging.

That gave me a lot of experience with the company's products.

That year was 2022.

I got my college diploma in June 2022, but I'd already joined the company in April. After getting my diploma in June, the company assigned me to Shanghai as an after-sales engineer.

In this article I mainly want to write about what I did during my time in Shanghai.

Although I'd had three months of systematic training, when I first got to Shanghai I didn't really know the equipment there.

That's because the equipment in Shanghai was special:

1. Only Shanghai had many of this kind of equipment nationwide
2. There were several hundred units

All I knew about this kind of equipment was that I'd glanced at it in the production workshop before leaving for Shanghai. Yet that's the state I was in, basically knowing nothing about the machines, when I was sent to Shanghai to handle problems.

By then Shanghai's engineer had already resigned, so it was basically just me going to Shanghai alone.

Before going, I'd already heard how "terrifying" the Shanghai market was. I heard the engineers there had a huge workload, running around to many hospitals every day to handle all kinds of problems.

With a nervous heart, I flew from Chongqing Jiangbei Airport to Shanghai Hongqiao Airport. I stayed in a place called Fengzhuang, in a hotel just outside Fengzhuang subway station.

That's right, the company arranged a hotel for me, so I lived in a hotel every day. The room wasn't very big, yet it cost ¥3,500 a month. Thinking back, renting an apartment would have been better, because the lighting in that hotel was so dim.

I spent half a year in Shanghai and lived in that hotel the whole time.

My daily work and life were as I'd expected. The workload really was heavy.

Sometimes when it got busy, I ran to five or six hospitals in a day and didn't get home until eight or nine at night. Most of that time was spent commuting. Handling a problem at a hospital usually didn't take long. Only the tricky cases took a long time.

But here was the problem: I knew nothing about this equipment. Whether it was a simple problem or a tricky one, I couldn't handle it.

So how did I get my work going step by step?

There was no real trick. The work had to be done anyway, with a whole string of problems in front of me, so when I ran into something I didn't understand, all I could do was call and ask.

I remember back then I made at least a dozen calls to company colleagues every day. Whenever I ran into something I didn't understand, I'd message them right away. If they didn't reply within a minute, I'd call them right away and ask my question.

During this period, through fixing machines and calling to ask, I gained a lot of experience.

Besides technical experience, I also learned something: asking questions takes some skill.

You need to be clear about what your question is, and also find the person who can really answer it. Sometimes, even if you know where the problem is, if you ask the wrong person and they don't understand the problem, you waste a lot of time.

So there are two lessons here:

1. Have a clear understanding and judgment of the problem

   (a) Work out what type of problem you're facing and what its nature is (b) When you don't know, who can help you solve it

2. You need to find that person quickly and accurately

   Simply put, it's "leave professional things to professionals." If you don't know, humbly ask for advice, but make sure you ask the right person.

So my technical skills grew through this process. Soon I could stand on my own and handle many problems alone.

Once my skills improved, I no longer scrambled when facing problems in the Shanghai market. I became calm, at ease, and capable.

But that was only part of it, because people need to keep improving.

Once I could handle the work well, I started thinking: what I should do isn't just fix the machines. It's to bring down the workload of the whole region.

This is the big-picture view: I was the engineer in charge of the whole Shanghai region. Once I was able to fix one machine, what I should do wasn't fix a hundred machines. It was to make myself need to fix fewer machines.

That lowers my own workload, and it also lowers the workload for the whole region. It also improves my own brand image. All benefit, no harm.

Given how heavy the workload in Shanghai had been, I couldn't help wondering: why was it like this?

In the end, I summed up what I'd learned from my work. After analysis, I roughly figured out why the workload stayed so high.

The reason is actually simple. Probably the earlier engineers only wanted to fix the machine in front of them. They only solved the problem right in front of them and didn't think about the long term. Often they fixed only the surface of the problem and not the root cause. That meant many problems kept recurring, and the number of repeat repairs was very high.

But if you solve the root cause when you handle a problem, you can avoid a lot of repeat repairs. That one step alone can greatly reduce the workload.

Second, there were some "chronic" machines, the ones in hospitals that often break and that ordinary repairs can't fully fix.

This kind of machine usually can't be completely fixed by technical means. So I applied to replace them with new ones, one after another. That solved the problem at the root and lowered the workload a lot.

And the most important point: from my work experience in Shanghai I learned an important lesson, which is to learn to solve problems from within the right "category."

Many engineers come from science and engineering backgrounds, and their way of thinking tends toward logic. When facing a technical problem, they often only think from the engineer's angle, believing they must fully fix the problem within their own technical category. Only when they think there's nothing technically wrong anymore do they feel the problem is solved.

But in reality, that's not how problem-solving works. We have to learn to look from the big picture and examine the problem within different categories:

1. Change your perspective:

   Since the problem appears at the hospital, at the client's, we have to learn to look for a solution within the client's category.

2. Differences between categories:

   Often, what counts as a "problem" in the engineer's category may not be a problem in the client's category, and vice versa.

So we should aim to solve problems within the right category, rather than blindly grinding away at technical details.

To sum up, the three main lessons I learned in Shanghai are:

1. Learn to judge the nature of the problem and see clearly what you're actually facing.

2. When you don't know, find the person who can really help you.

3. Learn to solve the root problem at the level of the category:

   (a) Don't stop at solving surface problems. Solve them at the root, and bring down the overall workload. (b) Learn to look for solutions within the right category, which is especially important.

Those three points are the most valuable lessons I learned in Shanghai.

After I learned them and applied them in my own practice, alone in Shanghai, I got 1 to 2 days off a week and no longer ran to five or six hospitals a day. The whole situation changed in kind.

In fact, this half year was the whole process of going from graduating from school, to starting work, to having a concrete understanding of work.

I went officially from a fresh graduate to a working professional.

That's roughly everything for today.

Simply put, this was an important stretch of my experience before I became a department supervisor at 22. In it, I built up a lot of technical experience, so I could not only do my work independently but also guide colleagues to do theirs better.

But after I went to Shanghai in June 2022, things changed:

1. June 2022 to Spring Festival 2023: I left Shanghai and went back to the company, and no longer served as the Shanghai engineer.
2. Spring Festival 2023 to July 2023: for these six months, I worked in a different role.

I won't go into the specifics of this period here. I'll leave that for the next article.

All the content of this article was generated directly by voice input, and we made no changes. It runs to about 3,700 characters.

I have to admit, technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. As someone who works in technology, I find such change a little frightening. I wonder whether one day my own job will be replaced.