Poon Yat Sing

Please tell us the reasons why you applied

At the time when I was doing research back in university, the amount of big data processing was growing, along with the number of people involved in research, so data analysis was gaining a lot of traction. I used Spark, Mesos, Cassandra, etc. to build systems that analyzed and stored data acquired from IoT centers.

Hong Kong, where I lived at the time, had a population of about 7 million people, but when thinking about my future career, working for Yahoo Japan, which had much more users, really appealed to me as an environment for handling big data.

When looking to gain experience in a field that handles even bigger data, the options are somewhat limited. I was encouraged by the fact that the company was in Asia, which would be culturally familiar to me, so I chose Yahoo Japan to further study large-scale data processing methods.

Of course, I was worried about the language barrier before joining the company. However, Yahoo Japan provided Japanese language training after joining, and since many situations that involved communicating with fellow engineers were in English, there were no issues in the end. 

Even though there are times during meetings with other teams that I feel the need for better Japanese, that can be covered with proper preparation, such as reading materials related to the agenda in advance.

Could you please describe your main responsibilities and the specific workflow you follow?

I work in developing and operating big data processing platforms. My team's main responsibility is to develop systems for analyzing stored data.

Examples of data could be: when looking at items purchased on Yahoo! JAPAN Shopping, what percentage of them are black clothes? What links are clicked often on the internet? What characteristics do users have and what words do they use for searching? By gathering these kinds of information on user actions and intentions, we can collect “big data.”

With diverse services and an exceptionally large user base, Yahoo Japan needs a foundation with a high processing capability. In the past, collecting and analyzing one day's worth of data was the mainstream, but now that is not fast enough. Today there is the need to analyze events such as social media trends and reactions to the latest news in real time. Being able to develop the foundational system for Yahoo Japan that can withstand that immense speed and massive amounts of data is very rewarding to me.

What is the most rewarding part of joining the company?

My number one is that there is a lot of opportunity to gain new knowledge. There are many chances to learn and get involved with the latest technology, such as receiving support to participate in top overseas conferences and introducing new technologies into the company. The level of freedom and discretion given to us while doing our work is rewarding as well. For example, while I am currently in my 4th year at the company, I am involved in the operation of thousands of servers, and I am in charge of the system design and implementation work for Trino (Presto) on K8S towards automating system operations.

Having our work-life balance ensured is also something that I appreciate. Before I joined Yahoo Japan, I had the impression that Japanese companies did a lot of overtime, but when I started working, I was proven wrong. There is almost no overtime at Yahoo Japan, and the environment for remote working is well prepared. Being able to work without going into the office gives us the opportunity to make that time for ourselves.

Example of a Daily Schedule

• 9:00 am

  Start work

  I will first check emails, Slack, etc. In the morning, I do tasks that don't take much time, which can be code reviews and responding to inquiries.

• 11:00 am

  Team meeting

  We will report and discuss the progress of the previous day, as well as what we plan to do that day.

• 12:00 pm

  Lunch

• 1:00 pm

  System design and development

• 4:00 pm

  Participate in department study sessions

  Here we share information on new technologies and technical research papers.

• 5:00 pm 

  Take company e-learning sessions. OSS project tracking

• 6:00 pm  

  End of work

After work, I train at the gym and walk my dog for exercise.

What are the pros and cons of a remote-based working style?

With remote work, I feel like the way we communicate has changed. In the past, we used whiteboards in face-to-face meetings. Now in Zoom meetings, we try out new methods, such as using our iPads to draw and share concepts.

For development, we need to allocate some specific time to concentrate. Being able to focus on your work is a big advantage of remote working. However, I don’t move my body as much without going into the office, so I try to consciously incorporate exercise into my daily life, like going to the gym or walking my dog, in order to be mindful of my health.

Please share a message to our readers

My advice is to find what you want to do, and to choose a company that will give you the opportunities to learn and deeply explore those interests. For me, that company was LY Corporation.

I think LY Corporation has the best environment engineers could hope for. I hope you choose LY Corporation, and I look forward to working here with you!

• Engineer
• New Graduate