Yan Jing Electric Power University is less than an hour's walk from Baidu headquarters, and it only takes ten minutes by car.

Therefore, Meng Fanqi was not in a hurry. Instead, he continued to discuss the angle of the PPT and the speech with Han Ci.

After about forty to fifty minutes, they basically finished discussing the content.

Meng Fanqi couldn't help but sigh. Smart people are smart. Even in unfamiliar fields, they can quickly understand the other person's logic and train of thought.

In the past forty to fifty minutes, Meng Fanqi spent more than half of the time explaining the context of his previous PPT.

Why did he do this? What did he want to showcase and compare?

Han Ci basically understood it as soon as she heard it. Meng Fanqi often wondered if he really needed to finish his sentence.

In the next twenty minutes or so, Han Ci asked Meng Fanqi to confirm some questions and details, and then quickly went through her own content and logic.

Meng Fanqi thought carefully but couldn't find any problems, so he had to give up.

Han Ci, who was back in her familiar rhythm, felt proud and in a good mood. She felt like her intelligence had taken the high ground again.

She was usually a bit lazy and often lacked enthusiasm for most things, but today she even found going to Baidu headquarters quite interesting. They decided to go together and have a meal after finishing things at Baidu.

After all, coming to the Fifth Ring Road was not close, so since they met, they might as well chat more and clarify things.

They sent a message to communicate, and Baidu quickly replied. They were ready to go now.

"Speaking of which, I have never been to such a big company like Baidu before." Han Ci was still curious about the office building of a tech giant. "In movies and TV shows, these large companies always give the feeling of being crowded but orderly."

"That's just wishful thinking. We always hope that things are in order, but we selectively forget or ignore the fact that the more people there are, the more chaotic it becomes."

Meng Fanqi naturally understood this after working in several big companies. "It may seem orderly on the surface, but inside, it's all chaos. Of course, the company's top management doesn't really care, or they don't have the energy to care.

Who knows, as long as the employees below are busy working day and night, they are satisfied."

Even during this period, around 2013-2014, American tech giants like Google had already started allowing remote work or flexible working hours to some extent.

In the offer letter from Google to Meng Fanqi, they even gave him the freedom to study and start a business.

However, the research results needed to be reported on time, and there were certain targets for the quantity of research results.

This is what people often refer to as the OKR management method. It only focuses on whether your tasks and key indicators are completed. It doesn't interfere too much with your specific time arrangement and working methods, which is a more humane management approach.

But based on Meng Fanqi's experience of working in big companies for two or three times, until 2023, internet companies in China still heavily emphasized overtime.

"The scariest thing is those who have no life of their own. If capitalists and top management like to see employees working overtime, it can be somewhat understandable.

But because the employees themselves have no hobbies, no interests, no things they want to do, and no future life plans, they have nowhere to go when they are not at work. So they end up being imprisoned in the company all day, causing the situation of overwork. This is the most pitiful."

Meng Fanqi had encountered colleagues like this more than once. Some of them were maliciously overworking, while others didn't have any ill intentions.

He had even visited the living spaces of one or two of them, which were often small compartments that cost just over a thousand yuan, or small apartments of about twenty square meters.

Apart from a simple bed and some clothes, there was basically nothing else inside.

There were almost no ingredients or kitchen utensils. The furniture was minimal.

There was even one colleague who didn't even have a second chair to entertain Meng Fanqi with, so he had to temporarily find a cardboard box to use.

In this way, Meng Fanqi could understand why they always stayed in the company.

Free water and electricity, company meals, insulation, snacks, and even the internet, everything was more comfortable than their rented houses.

If they could have a five-square-meter space in the company, Meng Fanqi had no doubt that these people would even be willing to live in the company.

Meng Fanqi changed his perspective and told Han Ci about these things. After listening, Han Ci hesitated to speak twice.

For her, who had been pampered and had a smooth journey all the way, she couldn't imagine such extreme spiritual and material deprivation.

Meng Fanqi smiled and opened the door of the taxi for Han Ci. "You might feel that they are very pitiful when you hear this, but think about it again. During the rise of Baidu and Ali, how many people caught the fast train of the internet and achieved financial freedom. A few years of hard work exchanged for two houses in first-tier cities.""How many other more strenuous industries are there in our country, such as coal mining, metallurgy, engineering, civil construction, and so on? Compared to them, the hardships of programmers are nothing. But all these hardships only have value when they are seen."

"Discourse is power." Han Ci summarized this sentence, which is one of the strongest metaphors contributed to the world by French philosopher Foucault in his inaugural speech "The Order of Discourse", and also one of the most powerful philosophical propositions.

This proposition views discourse as a powerful social force that dominates and commands the subjects of social practice. Foucault defined this force as "power", and thus derived a famous philosophical proposition: discourse is power.

"This phenomenon is particularly prominent in the era of the Internet. Personally, I think that after the iPhone 4s, our Internet has begun to shift from the PC to the mobile end. In the next few years, the Internet will continue to sink with mobile devices until the vast majority of citizens use smartphones."

Han Ci took out her silver iPhone 5s and looked at it. She indeed loved her new Apple phone, but she had never really thought about what impact it would have on society and the world.

Search tinyurl.com/2p9emv8w for the original.

"But mobile payment is indeed very convenient. I basically don't carry any change with me now." In 2013, Ali strongly promoted mobile payment and Internet finance, subtly influencing the consumption habits of hundreds of millions of people.

"What I'm going to demonstrate now is also an algorithm technology specifically for mobile devices like phones, mainly to detect what objects exist in the captured images."

After all this talk, Meng Fanqi remembered that he hadn't yet told Han Ci what he was going to do next.