Writing essay revision

Yue Huang 02/23 LLD 100A Cristin Boyd

DISCIPLINE INVESTIGATION

INTRODUCTION

The profession I want to introduce is data engineer. As a mathematics student, I have to face

numbers including data every day. The connection between the field and me is that I hope I can

make good use of the mathematics, an important foundation of data analysis, to find a data-

related job in the future. The interviewee’s name is Hao Wang, and his specific job title is data

engineer from CBU Group, Alibaba. According to Wikipedia, “Alibaba Group Holding

Limited (also known as Alibaba Group and as Alibaba) is a Chinese multinational technology

company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 4 April 1999

in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-

consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals, as well

as electronic payment services, shopping search engines and cloud computing services. It owns

and operates a diverse array of businesses around the world in numerous sectors, and is named as

one of the world's most admired companies by Fortune.” (Wikipedia, 2020). I will divide this

interview into three parts: background and career path, roles & responsibilities, and

communication skills. And I will elaborate on them with some questions I asked during the

interview. Before completing this interview, I hope I can get some suggestions such as what

should I prepare for entering the industry and know about the daily lives of those who have left

the campus to work. The reasons I expect these are that I think the suggestions might help me

find an internship and I think the lives of people who already work will be more interesting than

the lives of students.

BACKGOURND AND CAREER PATH

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Hao Wang got his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Nanjing Normal University, China, in

2010. The reason why he chose mathematics as an undergraduate major is because he is

interested in mathematics. And he thinks there are many developments related to mathematics.

Since 2008, the e-commerce industry is rapidly developing with a lot of opportunities and

challenges. Larger domestic Internet companies are also developing the e-commerce industry.

This industry has many top technical talents and the technology used in work is also relatively

cutting-edge. He believes that the development in this field can be rapidly improve. After

graduating from Nanjing Normal University, he felt that he should go abroad to study to increase

his knowledge instead of immediately entering a company to work. Therefore, he decided to

apply for USC and was eventually admitted with graduate major in applied data science in 2011.

As a CBU Group intern during his postgraduate study, he received a return offer after

graduation. Now, he has been working in CBU Group for 6 years. CBU is the domestic trade

department, which is one of Alibaba’s core e-commerce businesses and the oldest business of

Alibaba. The product the CBU Group made is the purchasing B2B e-commerce platform,

providing offline wholesale purchases services for offline physical shop owners, cross-border

sellers and other users. The internship he did while he was in college is data analyze. He made

use of CRM system to manage life cycle of members to improve the loyalty of members and

avoid the loss of members. According to the “Beginner’s Guide to CRM Systems”, we can know

that “A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage customer data. It

supports sales management, delivers actionable insights, integrates with social media and

facilitates team communication. Cloud-based CRM systems offer complete mobility and access

to an ecosystem of bespoke apps.”(Saleforce, 2020) At the same time, he also applied the

purchase data of members to discover the potential needs of members to provide sales and

increase influence.

ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

The interviewee’s overall qualification and responsibility are mainly the recommendation system

of Taobao. According to the Wikipedia, “Taobao is a Chinese online shopping website,

headquartered in Hangzhou, and owned by Alibaba. It is the world’s biggest e-commerce

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website and the eighth most visited website according to Alexa. The website was founded by

Alibaba Group in 2003. Taobao Marketplace facilitates consumer-to-consumer(C2C) retail by

providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online store that

mainly cater to consumers in Chinese-speaking regions and abroad, which is made payable by

online cellphone accounts. Its stores usually offer an express delivery-service to their clientele”

(Wikipedia, 2020). The interviewee works for a popular online shopping retail platform in China.

His job is to use recommendation algorithms to recommend items to users based on their order

history. His day to day task is to maintain the normal operation of the website, and develop and

test new features with team members. When he was officially working at the beginning, he found

that his programming skills were weaker than his colleagues. In this case, he spent his leisure

time in studying related skills on Udemy. After a few months of learning, his programming skills

had improved significantly. As a data analyst on the team, Hao Wang introduced this job to me.

He said data analyst needs to use appropriate statistical analysis methods to analyze the collected

large amounts of data, summarize them, and finally make decisions. The manifestation of their

daily work is that data analyst should find existing deficiencies through analysis of the data in

order to improve their products and make customers have a better experience.

COMMUNICATION

Hao Wang usually communicate the most with his team members at work. The software they use

to communicate at work is DingTalk. According to DingTalk’s office website, “DingTalk is

China’s intelligent mobile office platform, developed by Alibaba Group and provided to all

Chinese companies for free for business communication and work collaboration.”(DingTalk,

2020). In their daily work, they have a group meeting per three days and a department meeting

per one week. In his field, he thinks the important communication skills are rational persuasion

and discuss. For rational persuasion, they need to prove whether something is reasonable by

putting forward logical conjecture and factual basis. If the people do not understand this concept,

they would often turn things into a 0 or 1 game which means either agree or reject. This kind of

people is not suitable for participating in team work since they will make the discussion

meaningless. For discuss, they need to increase motivation for their goals by involving others in

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deciding how to execute plans and change. For example, if all staff are involved when the group

is discussing the development schedule, the team will be willing to work towards the goal they

set together, even if the estimates and actuals are different.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, I learned a lot of information about the field which is related to data as I expected

before. I am happy to have this opportunity to talk to the person who has a lot of work

experience and similar education background. I also asked about what I need to prepare to enter

the industry. He told me that for mathematics majors, probability, statistics and programming

skills are needed for this job. In addition, he said I have to know how to use big data tools such

as Hadoop, Spark, and data pipeline and workflow management tools like Azkaban, Luigi. It is

better to learn several scripting languages like Python, java and Scala. Finally, he suggested that

I could start submitting resumes to the companies in this field as soon as possible. It does not

matter if I do not get a job or internship, it is important to gain experience.

REFERENCE

Wikipedia. (2020). Alibaba Group. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group

Wikipedia. (2020). Taobao. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taobao

DingTalk. (2020). Introduction of us. Retreved from https://www.dingtalk.com/

Salesforce. (2020). A Beginner’s Guide to CRM Systems. Retrieved from

https://www.salesforce.com/eu/learning-centre/crm/crm-systems/