In 2020, everyone’s work rhythm was interrupted.

The pandemic suddenly changed remote work from an option into the default for many companies. Meetings moved online. Communication moved to IM. Documents and task systems became more important. Even many decisions that once had to be made face to face had to happen online.

Internet companies were, of course, more adaptable to remote work than many industries. Code can be submitted online, services can be deployed remotely, monitoring can be viewed remotely, and meetings can happen by video.

But “can work remotely” and “can work remotely efficiently” are not the same thing.

Remote Work Amplified Collaboration Quality

In offline offices, many low-quality processes are hidden by face-to-face communication.

If requirements are unclear, you can pull someone to your desk and talk. If documents are poor, you can patch things with an ad hoc meeting. If system boundaries are fuzzy, familiar relationships can coordinate around them. If decisions are messy, hallway conversations can still move them forward.

Remote work exposes these gray areas.

If requirements are unclear, everyone understands differently. If tasks are poorly split, progress becomes distorted. If documents are missing, onboarding and cross-team collaboration become hard. If meetings have no conclusions, they simply create more meetings.

So remote work tests not tools, but the engineering maturity of an organization.

If a team already values documentation, APIs, automation, testing, monitoring, and clear ownership, remote work is just a different communication mode. If a team survives on improvisation and temporary coordination, remote work makes the problems more visible.

The Internet Remained, But The High-Speed Feeling Weakened

During the pandemic, many online services actually became more important.

Content, social, e-commerce, food delivery, online education, remote meetings, and cloud services all benefited in some way from more online time. But that does not mean the internet industry as a whole still had the old feeling of high-speed expansion.

I could feel that growth was getting harder.

Users were already occupied by many apps. Traffic was getting more expensive. New products had a harder time breaking through. Platform competition became more direct. The stage where “as long as mobile internet keeps expanding, everyone has new room” was ending.

That affected engineering teams too.

During high growth, many problems can be covered by expansion. System cost is a little high? Hire more people. Process is inefficient? Business growth hides it. Technical debt is high? Grab the window first.

When growth slows, cost and efficiency are brought back to the table.

The Everyday Pressure Of Online Systems

2020 also made me understand the resilience of online systems more deeply.

When the real world is uncertain, online services must be stable. Users do not care whether you are working remotely, whether the team is scattered, or whether one colleague is temporarily unavailable. They only know whether the product opens, whether content loads, and whether messages send.

That is the responsibility of infrastructure.

A mature team needs systems that do not depend on one specific person sitting at one specific desk. Deployment, rollback, alerting, permissions, documentation, on-call, and incident handling all have to work in remote mode.

This sounds like management, but it is also engineering.

The more transparent the system, the easier remote work becomes. The more black-box the system, the more painful remote work becomes.

A Prelude To The Industry Tide Going Out

2020 was not the hardest year for the internet industry, but it was a prelude.

Remote work changed collaboration. The pandemic changed social rhythm. Slower growth changed how companies viewed cost. Many companies were still running, and many businesses were still profitable, but the air no longer had the simple upward smell of earlier years.

I was still at Weibo then. After experiencing the pre-IPO sprint, post-IPO years, the highlight of mobile internet, short-video competition, big data platforms, recommendation feeds, remote work, and slowing growth, I could clearly feel one era taking a breath and changing.

The next year, that feeling would grow stronger. The internet industry was still respectable and still had resources, but the wind direction had changed.

IT Events Of 2020

• Remote work spread rapidly. The pandemic pushed remote work, video meetings, and online collaboration tools into rapid adoption. Organizational collaboration quality, documentation, automation, and online processes became more important.
• GPT-3 was released. OpenAI released GPT-3, and few-shot learning plus large language model capability drew wider technical industry attention. Language models began showing the imagination space of general capability.
• Apple M1 was released. Apple released the M1 chip, making software-hardware integration and high-efficiency computing in personal devices prominent again. Desktop computing re-entered an architectural change period.
• Online services became more important. Content, social, e-commerce, remote meetings, online education, and cloud services became more critical. Users did not care whether teams were remote; they cared whether services were stable.
• The high-speed internet feeling weakened. User growth, traffic dividends, and organizational expansion all became harder. Cost, efficiency, automation, and stability moved closer to the front.

References

• Microsoft WorkLab: The next great disruption is hybrid work
• Weibo Corporation SEC Filings: Annual reports and company filings
• OpenAI: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
• Apple Newsroom: Apple unleashes M1

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