Western Digital - by Rick He
Western Digital Corporation (abbreviated WDC, commonly known as Western Digital and abbreviated WD) is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.
On May 20th afternoon, we met Dr. Liu at the front door of the Western Digital. Dr. Liu is currently at the Researching and Developing department working on computer vision.
Although Dr. Liu cannot bring us into the company due to the regulation, we had a walk around the campus of the company and then had a wonderful talk with him.
Dr. Liu used the hard disk as the introduction of what the company’s product is and then talked about his work at the researching department and his personal experience. After experiencing a lay off in his inter in one hard disk company, Dr. Liu talked with his Phd advisor and decided to change his gear.
Asked by one of the students “So is it the case that if we want to enter the industry, we need to prepare ourselves to be some kind of software engineer”, Dr. Liu suggested that choose what you like, always reconsider what you like and always learn something to fit the fast-changing world. He also recommended us to develop communication skills to do better teamwork.
Now Dr. Liu is working as a software engineer on computer vision, but he thinks that the four years’ study of electronic engineering in university, because it enhanced his learning ability to learn new knowledge and skills that are necessary to solve a new problem.
Why computer vision? One possible reason provided by Dr. Liu is that the company may need the video storage solution in the future. Dr. Liu’s answer to whether the SSD will replace the hard disk in the future is that, it’s not likely so. Because the hard disk has a cheaper price and higher reliability. Besides, Dr. Liu talked about that Western Digital is not a data storage company, it’s a data company and they are not selling only the hardware, they are selling a whole solution.
When talking about how the work in researching department is evaluated, Dr. Liu said that they don’t have a KPI, instead, they just talk to their manager and have a project review every week. They are mainly publishing papers and there are not hard requirements about the quantity of the papers. And one of the products of the researching department is the patent, people pay to use the patents. Dr. Liu also gave us some insight about firing patent: Engineers describe the technology in a plain text, and then the legal team translates the plain text to the legal term if the decide to fire the patent.
Finally, Dr. Liu talked about the quantum computing, he thought it may settle the problems that the hardware is facing nowadays like the break of the Moore's law.
Thanks to Dr. Liu for giving us such a helpful and inspiring speech.