2025-07-16 11:36

Why does Baidu always wake up early but rush to collect late?

Ye Xiaochai ©

Ye Xiaochai ©

follow with interest

This article is from the WeChat official account: Ye Xiaochai, the author: Ye Xiaochai, the original title: "Robin Lee's internal letter: Why did Baidu get up early, but catch up with the late collection?", and the title is from: Visual China

Article Summary

Baidu's early morning rush to rush late collection is due to organizational issues: distorted high-level information such as difficult to empathize with users for customized experiences, departmental walls hindering collaboration and causing internal friction, insufficient driving force causing employees to passively respond to key tasks, ineffective evaluations distorting promotion channels and ignoring achievements. The core needs to reform the evaluation system, focusing on collaboration and genuine value measurement.

•   ️   High level distortion: CEOs live in a customized world and cannot understand users' real pain points

•      Departmental Wall: Internal business conflicts and cooperation obstacles result in resource waste

•   ⚙️   Lack of driving force: Grassroots employees lack motivation and efficiency in handling dirty work

•      Elite internal friction: Elite culture promotes infighting, resource mismatch hinders innovation

•      Evaluation failure: distorted upward path, promotion of managers, elimination of practitioners

•      Reform direction: binding strategic core actions, encouraging collaboration, exposing real problems

Although I haven't been at Baidu for long, if you ask me which company has the highest status as a programmer, I would definitely say it's Baidu, because product managers really cry and kneel down to make us change our requirements!

But in recent years, Baidu's development has been very strange, causing many jokes and ultimately earning the reputation of "getting up early to catch up late".

Recently, at the quarterly senior management meeting, Robin Lee, the founder of Baidu, finally couldn't help himself. He made an internal speech with the theme of "Seeking Truth and Being Pragmatic", which was a rare way to systematically reflect on Baidu's organizational culture and also review the gains and losses in business.

The so-called "Baidu woke up early and rushed to the late market" is nothing more than these few things:

1. ERNIE Bot grasped the first mover advantage and then collapsed all the way, almost becoming the laughing stock of the industry;

2. Baidu Waimai once had a market share of 33%, but later it was directly eaten by Ele.me;

3. Baidu Intelligent Driving also got up very early, both on the track and in the initial evaluation stage, it was very good, and last year the collapse of Jiyue Automobile caused a stir.

Everything was right, but it seems that the factory director ultimately attributed the reason to lack of focus, which may have been wrong again

How to put it? Perhaps the factory director is different from the world we see!

Our world is different

This is not a joke, the factory director and the world we see may really be different! As far as I know, in some companies, various departments will conduct in-depth warnings on the CEO's account.

Let's take a practical example: a listed boss, whose hometown is in Chengdu, will feed back too laggy videos every time during the Spring Festival.

And the architects below have already deployed a complete monitoring link for the CEO's account, from when the CEO opened the app, to when he clicked a button, watched a video, and performed an action, it was almost restored like a screen recording.

On this basis, they quickly discovered that there was a problem with a CDN node in Sichuan. The result was that the boss only sent a message in the group, and the problem disappeared the next day, but it is unknown whether the problems of others disappeared or not

As far as I know, some big factory departments will develop customized APP functions for CEOs (no matter how complex the technology is), and the boss is likely to see something different from other users: when users complain about a lot of advertisements, the CEO is very confused, and there is no advertisement. When users complain about too laggy video, the CEO's beauty is flying

How do you want the boss to empathize with the users? How do you want your boss to complain about the products? His experience is really great!

Our world is different, and this world is the Truman world bestowed upon the CEO by middle and high-level officials.

Department Wall

We summarized the failure of AI+management 2B entrepreneurship earlier: the success of a company is difficult to summarize because they may not know why they became successful, but poor management will definitely bring down the entire team!

Baidu, as a company, has largely lost in terms of execution. From a personal micro perspective, there are too many elites and smart people in Baidu!

I remember it was still in 2023, when we were working on a medical AI project. In addition to our self-developed model (LLama), we were also trying various large models in China, including Wenxin and Zhipu.

In fact, Baidu's pre-sales work is very awesome. In order to promote Wenxin, two T8 senior engineers were directly assigned to debug with us every day, and achieved some results.

I used to work for Baidu, so I quickly got closer to the engineers and asked about the iteration status of Wenxin. However, the feedback from the execution team was somewhat pessimistic, which roughly means:

Although Wenxin is the leader internally, there are still many teams in the company using LLama for training, and some teams even find it troublesome to organize their data. There are many things that are easier for Yama than for the little devils to deal with

Later, it seems that Baidu sent a "star" team to discuss strategic cooperation with us. Our boss only asked one question before announcing the termination of the cooperation: we are in the medical AI field, you are in the general model field, and Baidu Health is also in the medical AI application field. In terms of layout, will they continue to work on it?

The person in the front row on the other side seems to have a high rank, but when they say something, it immediately turns cold: of course they will do it, how can we control them

This small matter actually reflects a huge problem: Baidu is really not unified internally, and their internal businesses are fighting against each other, and this situation seems to be very common?

The recruitment culture on Baidu's side is very fond of elites, such as qujing, who are particularly active in internal battles. After all, 'internal stability is the first priority in resisting external threats', so there are too many things to do internally and externally.

In fact, every company has a department wall. Baidu has a department wall, which is not a problem. However, at the company level, it is a big problem to not let the basic goals of departments be mutually exclusive when implementing major strategies.

Where is the driving force

Looking closer and pulling the timeline forward, when I was still at Baidu, it was very difficult to take on the big search business, and their product experience was not acceptable to people.

Firstly, the documentation for the company's most important business is extremely poor, and in order to access traffic, I need to consult with at least 5 people.

I still remember asking A a question back then. A asked me to find B, B asked me to find C, C asked me to find D, and D asked me to find E. In the end, E couldn't solve the problem and asked me to find A.

I worked from morning to night and returned to the starting point!

I really don't want to look for A as it is, so I first changed my female nickname on Baidu Hi, and then changed to a fresh and beautiful girl avatar, and then went to ask A. In the end, I don't know if it's an avatar issue or if it's an increase in knowledge after asking around. Anyway, the problem has been solved

There was another time (before changing the avatar) when I had to access the company's core business search because their documents were really bad and there were many language requirements. I couldn't help but complain: What if the user doesn't know that language? Are you considering adding language types?

Unexpectedly, the other person's words turned me upside down: I won't ask your mentor, I have no obligation to teach you!

That's the attitude they have towards the user experience feedback of their products

In fact, looking back, I can understand that maintainer because all he did was dirty and tiring work. If he did it well, he couldn't get promoted or get a raise. If he did it poorly, he still had a big problem, so he had a resentful look on his face. He didn't have much motivation

On the other hand, there is a returnee with a master's degree and a Beijing elder sister (special money!) in the team. Working in a remote location for a large company is very difficult, and I heard that she often wanders around outside during work. Once, the department head asked her to attend a meeting and couldn't find anyone. She lied and claimed that she was visiting a client, and within 10 minutes, she ran from the cinema to the company, which was really amazing

There are many people like this on Baidu, but just looking at the resume panel, they look very excellent

Information distortion and evaluation failure

In fact, many large companies have similar problems. Bosses live in a Truman world and have no idea where the opinions of various departments are being pulled, let alone how the lower level executives get by.

The distortion of information leads to the boss seeing everything as good, and the misjudgment in turn gives the wrong strategy, step by step wrong, step by step wrong.

Evaluation failure leads to a lack of hope for grassroots employees. If there are people around me who are cheating and playing tricks, then I can only do work that pays the right salary.

But the failure of this evaluation is by no means a grassroots issue! It directly points to the core flaw of the company's "elite system": the distortion of upward mobility and the mismatch of resources.

Here, you can compare the big company disease diagnosis book that exploded on Xiaohongshu with the situation on Baidu: bureaucracy is rampant!

The leader himself doesn't end up, he only knows how to draw big cakes and push the front line with macro narrative logic. The ultimate result is a pattern of you fooling me and me slacking off.

Senior sequences need to tackle tough problems. If they are enthusiastic about "analyzing upper level intentions word for word" and turn a blind eye to "important issues" that will truly affect user experience and business advancement, then the product will definitely be extremely difficult to use!

The most fatal problem here may be: those who have been promoted in management and those who have worked diligently have resigned.

From this perspective, the factory director attributed the problem to "lack of focus", perhaps seeing the surface, but the deeper reason is the underlying mechanism that supports "focus": the upward channel has failed.

Without solving the problem of ineffective information transmission and evaluation, strategic focus cannot be implemented.

conclusion

What Baidu needs may not be a simple focus, but a profound reflection: where should resources flow to?

What is the core strategy of the company? What are the key actions that support these strategies, such as bridging collaboration, optimizing core experiences, and tackling key technologies? The evaluation system must be strongly linked to these key actions.

Does writing poor product documentation lead to significantly high collaboration costs? Then make document quality and collaboration efficiency one of the core indicators for promotion and assessment! Has breaking down departmental walls made a significant contribution? The reward should be much higher than guarding one's own territory.

Next, how to measure true value? We need to break the simple mapping of 'rank=value'.

Can we explore more refined value assessment? For example, pricing projects/tasks in a tiered manner to ensure that behaviors that solve complex problems, take on high risks, and create significant user/business value receive corresponding returns?

Let those who do "infrastructure" and "tackle tough projects" have their value seen, measured, and rewarded, rather than just letting those who do "highlight" projects eat meat.

And then breaking the 'Truman World'? The evaluation system needs to encourage mechanisms for reporting concerns, exposing problems, and solving real problems.

For example, setting up a dedicated channel to reward "problem solvers", protecting voices that raise sharp questions, and using "user/frontline pain point resolution rate" rather than "boss satisfaction" as an important assessment indicator. Make the information pipeline more direct and transparent.

In fact, all of the above problems may seem like things, but they are actually human problems. As long as people are right, everything is right. If entropy increase cannot be solved, then find a way to break the system:

Choose the right person, build a new system, and let the leader handle the situation on their own. They should focus on doing a solid job in the business, rather than making judgments behind their backs. This way, the truth cannot be seen.

I believe the factory director's speech on "Seeking Truth and Pragmatism" is just the beginning, but "truth" and "reality" will not automatically emerge. It requires a profound revolution on "how to measure value" and "how to allocate resources".

What Baidu needs is not only a focus on business, but also a reconstruction of an information transmission system and evaluation system that can truly benefit those who seek truth and pragmatism, flow energy towards strategic priorities, and effectively curb entropy increase.

Finally, I hope Baidu continues to improve!

This article is from the WeChat official account: Ye Xiaochai, author: Ye Xiaochai

This content is the author's independent viewpoint and does not represent the stance of Tiger Sniff. Reproduction without permission is not allowed. Please contact for authorization matters hezuo@huxiu.com

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