Chinese Version
07-01-2021, Thursday, Drizzle

Yang, one of my close friends and longtime coworkers at eBay and Paypal, once asked me: “You are always very quiet and shy, but seemed very confident when discussing site issues. Why?” I then briefly told her this story which I am sharing now, a memoir to celebrate Alisa and Ronnie’s 50th anniversary. 

In the early 1990s, I was very stressed while preparing my PhD oral defense at CUA (The Catholic University of America). One day, while walking with Prof. Arron “Ronnie” Barkatt, my PhD advisor, from Maloney Hall to Hannan Hall, I expressed doubt regarding my research abilities to him. After hearing my thoughts, Ronnie stopped walking, thought for a moment, looked at me directly, and said: “Jing, if you are smart and if you have spent a lot more time on a subject than others, you have to believe that you are one of the experts on the subject.”

Ronnie’s advice not only helped me in my academic studies, as a PhD candidate, but also guided me in my IT career, as a software engineer in a fast-growing internet company.

In 2001, during my first year in eBay, I worked on a few very important products, such as the eBay Store, the eBay category tree upgrade, the PicturePack Bundle (PPB), and the eBay First Generation Checkout because I was in the core team that focused on developing eBay’s core products.

PPB would enable one sale item to have more images for a big fee (around $2.67). The images would not be stored by eBay, but by a third party, with whom eBay had signed a business contract on how to share the PPB profits. Both parties expected the PPB to be very profitable, as many new sellers started to sell on eBay in 2001.

And so I worked on the PPB feature, scheduled to launch in four weeks.

In 2001, eBay’s website system was developed in four languages with completely different syntax and grammar. To add a new feature to the eBay website, developers had to create and/or modify all four languages in different files. The job of developing the PPB feature was similar to a construction job of making a hole in a wall and installing a new receiving window that needs to be decorated and also to be connected to a newly-installed conveyor belt to reach the existing external inventory storage area.

To launch the PPB new feature onto eBay’s live website, I needed to merge the files that had my changes to the launch track. Commonly, files that were modified by multiple projects in different places by different developers often had overlapped changes, merging those files may accidentally lose new changes due to the overlapping, which will cause partial failure of new functions on eBay’s website.

PPB was a tough and time constraint task for a newcomer. I often worked overtime in order to launch the PPB on time.

After working on a new product for a few days, Jim, my boss, kept on blinking his eyes and said to me in a very unhappy tone: “After launching the PPB feature, the third party noticed a sharp increase of space usage from eBay, but our business analyst did not see the new money at all. QA said all functions of the PPB passed the QA test. It looks like you lost part of the PPB functions during your merge! ”

In eBay’s development division we have a well-known joke: “US law says ‘you are innocent, until proven guilty.’ But the unspoken rule in eBay’s development division is ‘You are guilty until you can prove you are innocent.’”

From Jim’s tone and expression, I knew that he was under very big pressure, so my pressure increased sharply and I felt flustered immediately. Then I suddenly remembered Ronnie’s advice in the 1990s, and I soon calmed down to seriously investigate the problem of no money coming in from PPB feature; because I spent more time on PPB than QA, and I thought I should have more say than QA. Finally, I reached out to Le, an expert on eBay’s batch jobs. She told me that the PPB needs to piggyback a batch job to inform the billing system to collect the new money from PPB. eBay’s website system and eBay’s batch jobs system were in two different worlds, communications between them was almost impossible to be traced in files, but only by human working knowledge, therefore piggybacking batch job was missing in the engineer design document initially.

So I told Jim: “The QA didn’t actually test all functions, as we didn’t know a batch job also needed to be tested.”

Jim said: “She is a respected QA, I was surprised to hear this.”

I started to learn that people sometimes quickly pass the blame to protect themselves under stressful situations. It also taught me to work more diligently to find the real problem instead of blaming others, in remembering my advisor’s advice.

Little Episodes

1. My advisor Ronnie and I on the day of my master graduation ceremony:

2. After my Ph.D. oral defense:

(From left to right: Prof. Brewer, Dr. Sassoon, Ronnie, me, the late Prof. May, and Professor from other department)

3. Today, I just heard from David Jesse, who I remember as the PM for “PicturePack Bundle” in 2001, said: “That was one of my first features as a product manager. ”