985 was the first to drop out of Ph.D., and then dropped out twice after going to a famous American school for a Ph.D.! How's it going?

Source| Muge Academic, World Chinese Weekly, Wang Yin Blog, Zhihu, etc.

Editor | Academic Jun

Genius or geek? He entered three world-class schools to study for a doctorate, and dropped out of the three famous schools. After graduation, he entered the IT company of the three world giants to work, but they made them angry for him, and Microsoft directly issued a "global ban" on him.

Throughout the experience, the ups and downs and drama are all surprising. Times have changed. This former Tsinghua PhD student who wrote a 17,000-word withdrawal application, how is it now?

He is a "three-drop doctoral student" who dropped out of two world-renowned universities after dropping out from Tsinghua for a Ph.D.

For Wang Yin, the Tsinghua Dream is something that grew up with him since he was a child.

In Wang Yin's self-report, his mother pointed to a photo of a big brother and said to him since he was a child, this is his father's student, he was admitted to Tsinghua University, and he is the pride of our middle school. When you grow up, you will also enter Tsinghua University to study and win glory for our family.

This was the beginning of Wang Yin's Qinghua dream. He seems to be a scientist by birth. Ever since he was a child, Wang Yin has liked things that can lead to a lot of exploration and experimentation, but after high school, following the rules of procedural reading made him miserable, reading books, doing exercises, exam papers and review books made him become numb .

The first rebellious period also followed. He began to think about some insignificant questions all day long, read physics books, and did experiments. Except for exam-related knowledge, he was interested in everything else. Until the second year of high school, his mother brought back a copy of the previous college entrance examination questions for him to do, and he got a score that could be admitted to Tsinghua University at that time.

At that time, Wang Yin thought to himself, I am here at Tsinghua University. By this time next year, I will have my acceptance letter! Since then, he no longer takes the college entrance examination in his eyes. But the first failure came very suddenly. In 1997, Wang Yin failed the college entrance examination, missed Tsinghua University, and entered the Department of Computer Science of Sichuan University.

The Tsinghua Dream did not end there. For Wang Yin, learning has never been difficult. With the idea of ​​realizing the Tsinghua dream, Wang Yin thought about going to Tsinghua for graduate school. So when he was studying at Sichuan University, his grades were the best, and there was a big gap between him and his peers, leaving everyone behind. He grew into the soul of the computer department because of his learning ability and operation. The strength is too strong. In 2001, Wang Yin was directly sent to Tsinghua University for a master's and doctorate degree in software engineering in the Department of Computer Science because of his excellent performance.

Tsinghua University is full of talents, and gathers top students from all over the country. Even so, he still stands out from the gold.

In 2003, Wang Yin published "Working with Linux" and "Writing to People Who Support and Oppose "Working with Linux", denouncing the drawbacks of windows and promoting linux.

ps: linux is an operating system similar to windows.

Wang Yin's speech on the two major systems of computer has unique insights and has caused a great sensation in China's computer and Linux camps. He also became famous in one fell swoop, becoming one of the most talented idols in Tsinghua Garden.

He has gained a large number of professional fans, and was once considered "China's future Steve Jobs".

In this way, he will have a bright future.

However, when everyone thought that Wang Yin would finish his studies with excellent grades and break new ground in the computer field, he made a crazy move.

In 2005, when Wang Yin was about to graduate with a Ph.D. in just one year, he wrote 17,000 words "The Shattering of the Dream of Tsinghua University" and applied to drop out of Tsinghua University . And this article has no other content. He scolded domestic higher education and expressed his complete disappointment with Tsinghua University and the domestic education system. For a time, it caused a heated discussion about the education system and idealism.

After dropping out of Tsinghua University, retake the test and then drop out

In Wang Yin's article "The Shattering of Tsinghua's Dream", he felt that studying in Tsinghua was no different from studying in Sichuan University.

Wang Yin also expressed his views on paper. He said: When he was studying in Tsinghua University, he had not seen a few decent articles in his direction.

In addition, many articles published by brothers and sisters are revised and revised on the basis of a research. If the English is not enough, they are translated into Chinese and submitted to domestic journals. In his view, their thesis is purely fried rice without any innovation.

" What Tsinghua graduate students do now is nothing more than to write a paper, and then find a place to submit it. SCI is the best, EI is the second. It doesn't matter if you are a remote magazine that no one reads, and it doesn't matter if you pay. I know Japanese. A journal indexed by SCI charges a page fee of 1,000 US dollars. The tutor pays the money, and the vote is not white, but it is a good graduation! "

In the end, at the request of his supervisor, Wang Yin wrote two papers on a research result that he did not like. Unexpectedly, he won the SCI award and won a best paper award. This made him feel guilty. In this way, he has to write papers and patents for the research results that he thinks are not very good again and again.

Tired of Wang Yin, he wrote in the text:

"There are so many beautiful things in the world, waiting for me to learn and develop, but I was like a prisoner and was sentenced to 5 years in Tsinghua. Now I am tired of the so-called academics in China, and I am ready to give up my doctorate in Tsinghua. , to go abroad for real research. I was told not to give up: Do you know how valuable a PhD from Tsinghua is? But I can no longer waste my youth for it, it is my shackles.”

As a result, he broke free of this "shackle" and became the first Ph.D. dropout in Tsinghua's history.

But what no one thought was that he had done three times to drop out of the Ph.D. He also dropped out of top schools every time.

Just one year after dropping out of Tsinghua University, Wang Yin was admitted to the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.

The university is ranked sixth in the nation for computer science. But two years after entering school, Wang Yin chose to drop out again. Contributed "Corner Feelings".

This time, Wang Yin scolded it like this: "Education in the United States is a commercial test-oriented education, and foreign graduate students are basically cheap labor. Huge homework and test-taking pressure have deprived students of their freedom of thinking and an environment to really concentrate on research. It's hard to find."

After leaving Cornell, Yin Wang transferred to Indiana University Bloomington, where he continued his Ph.D. studies and taught at the school.

But it didn't take long for Wang Yin to drop out of school without warning, and ended his "doctoral career" with an article "Farewell to a Ph.D.".

This time, he did not continue his studies. Because in his opinion, these so-called world famous schools are "so consistently bad"!

However, in the article "Farewell to a Ph.D.", Wang Yin said that these incomplete doctoral careers have helped him find something more important than a Ph.D.

Entered an IT giant company to work, but was blocked by Microsoft

Wang Yin ultimately did not get a Ph.D., but his genius in computing still qualified him to work at top companies in the industry.

In 2012, Wang Yin entered the world-class company - Google.

Just an intern, he was involved in making a cross-language "service-style" programming tool. How awesome is this project, used to retrieve and analyze all project code inside Google at scale.

However, Wang Yin disagreed with the person in charge of the project. In a fit of rage, Wang Yin refused to cooperate with the team and undertaken and completed the Python retrieval part of the project alone. In the end, the person in charge changed his opinion on Wang Yin, acknowledging that Wang Yin's project was "the most technologically advanced method he has encountered during his 20 years of cooperation with interns."

Until now, this part of the project completed by Wang Yin still indexes all of Google's Python code every day.

When Wang Yin talks about this, we can see the arrogance and loneliness of a genius between the lines:

"I can say that this Python thing, although it didn't cost me a lot of effort, is something that very few people in Google can do. Even Van Rossum, the creator of Python, is probably mysterious. So in fact This thing saved this moribund project in a big way...

The salary that Google gave me is actually not affordable for such software. You can refer to the price of static analysis software such as CodeSonar. Since I wanted to make some extra money, I let them pick up a bargain. "

In view of the unpleasantness during the cooperation period, Wang Yin did not continue to stay at Google. He chose to leave during the internship and published "My Story with Google".

Not long after, news came that Wang Yin joined Microsoft. Microsoft is one of the top companies in the world, but here, Wang Yin is once again unaccustomed to the situation. There are rumors that Wang Yin felt that the benefits and wages he created for Microsoft were not equal, and asked for a raise. As a result, there was a conflict with the company.

Finally, through negotiation, Microsoft agreed to give Wang Yin the money, but a contract must be signed, the content is: Microsoft will no longer employ Wang Yin, and its subsidiaries, affiliates, and joint ventures will not include Wang Yin. Such a request seemed to anger Wang Yin, who thought it was an unequal treaty, so he chose to refuse. The two sides also became deadlocked, and this time, Microsoft is determined to block Wang Yin globally.

Later, Wang Yin wrote an article called "One Man's Strike", which mentioned that "it is only a matter of time before such a company perishes." Wang Yin, who was unaccustomed to the United States, appeared in public opinion more recently. , is the public opinion battle between him and "Alibaba P10".

ps: "P10" is a technical title level of Alibaba. Alibaba divides employees into about 14 job levels. Among them, P4 to P14 are the job levels from "junior engineer" to "senior scientist".

Around the end of 2019, Ali had a project team that somehow found Wang Yin. According to Wang Yin himself, the project team spent a lot of effort and took two months to find him.

He didn't want to cooperate with Ali at first, but was moved by the sincerity of the other party. I didn't expect the other party to ask him to participate in an interview, because the company has rigid regulations, there is a process for entry, and the interview is from another department.

Wang Yin went there with pleasure, and said earlier that he would have a P9-level interview. This P9 corresponds to the "senior expert" of Ali company. During the actual interview, the interviewer was a P10 "researcher". The researcher is a former Microsoft engineer and is very famous. At the same time, he is also the first Chinese engineer on Facebook, which is why Wang Yin later ridiculed him that "the greatest scientist is nothing more than that" .

What happened at that time, the two sides later disagreed, but after this interview, Wang Yin wrote in the article "Let's talk about "P vs NP" problem again" published on the Internet:

I thought it was a high-level Ali "partner", but I didn't expect to meet this person. During the whole interview process, he wasn't trying to discover a person's talent and the positive effect he could play on the company, but he grabbed my resume at the beginning and said, "Why didn't you go to work a year after you returned to China? You are rich Second generation!" Then I turned out my blog, and derogated me one by one: "What's the point of writing this, what's the value of it? I don't think I can learn anything from it..." Then he started his talk about The preaching of "P vs NP" does not give people a chance to reply at all. Alibaba therefore left a very bad impression on me, and future cooperation is basically unnecessary.

So far, Wang Yin still hasn't entered into Ali's work this time.

Now Wang Yin has made a simple website for himself, and he will often share his thoughts and experiences on it.

Is he a genius or a geek? Everyone's opinion is different.

But what is certain is that Wang Yin has his own unique understanding of scientific research and life . As he said:

"Universities all over the world are gradually showing their flaws and weaknesses. Many prestigious schools are full of people who are eager for quick success and play with power. After more and more such people, the entire department has become a puppet of money."

To this end, he announced his career plan, one of the initial plans of this plan is to establish an educational institution of the highest level in the world.

As for whether this great plan will be abandoned halfway as before, it will take time to consider.

This article is funded by academics, World Chinese Weekly, Wang Yin's blog, Zhihu, etc.

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