From January 2015, she started to practice leetcode questions; she trains herself to stay focus, develops "muscle" memory when she practices those questions one by one.
2015年初, Julia开始参与做Leetcode, 开通自己第一个博客. 刷Leet code的题目, 她看了很多的代码, 每个人那学一点, 也开通Github, 发表自己的代码, 尝试写自己的一些体会.
She learns from her favorite sports – tennis, 10,000 serves practice builds up good memory for a great serve. Just keep going.
Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
Feb 1 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms Inc's (META.O) stricter cost controls this year and a new $40 billion share buyback sent shares soaring on Wednesday, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2023 the "Year of Efficiency."
The parent of Instagram and Facebook, which has fallen on hard times amid a broad post-pandemic slump in digital ads, is focused on improving its content recommendations powered by artificial intelligence and its ad targeting systems to keep users clicking.
Meanwhile, it will cut costs in 2023 by $5 billion to a range of $89 billion to $95 billion, a steep drop from the $94 billion to $100 billion it previously forecast, and it projected first-quarter sales that could beat Wall Street estimates.
Meta stock surged nearly 19% in after-hours trade. If gains hold on Thursday, it would set up the shares for their biggest intraday surge in a decade and added more than $75.5 billion to its existing $401 billion market capitalization.
Zuckerberg described the focus on efficiency as part of the natural evolution of the company, calling it a "phase change" for an organization that once lived by the motto "move fast and break things."
"We just grew so quickly for like the first 18 years," Zuckerberg said in a conference call. "It's very hard to really crank on efficiency while you're growing that quickly. I just think we're in a different environment now."
The cost cuts reflect Meta's updated plans for lower data-center construction expenses this year as part of a shift to a structure that can support both AI and non-AI work, it said in a statement.
The digital ad giant faced a brutal 2022 as companies cut back on marketing spending due to economic worries, while rivals like TikTok captured younger users and Apple Inc's(AAPL.O)privacy updates continued to challenge the business of placing targeted ads.
Meta in Novembercut more than 11,000 jobsin response, a precursor to the tens of thousands of layoffs in the tech industry that followed.
"Our management theme for 2023 is the 'Year of Efficiency' and we're focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization," Zuckerberg said in a statement.
Monetization efficiency for Reels on Facebook, a short-form video format, had doubled in the past six months and the business was on track to roughly break even by the end of 2023 or early 2024 and grow profitably after that, he said on the conference call.
INVESTMENTS STARTING TO PAY OFF
"Meta's better-than-feared results should refute concerns over the state of the digital advertising industry following Snap's horrible guidance earlier this week," said Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com.
"Despite all the challenges Meta must deal with, there are signs the business is still doing well," Cohen said.
Shares of peer Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) were up 3.3% while Snap Inc (SNAP.N) stock rose 1% in after-hours trade on Wednesday.
On the conference call, executives said Meta's investments in AI-surfaced content and TikTok competitor Reels were starting to pay off. The company also has been using AI to increase automation for advertisers and target ads using less personal data, resulting in higher return on ad spend.
Meta forecast first-quarter revenue between $26 billion and $28.5 billion. That was in with analysts' average estimates of $27.14 billion, according to Refinitiv.
Zuckerberg said generative AI - technology for producing original prose, imagery or computer code on command - would be the company's other big theme for this year, alongside efficiency.
Meta was planning to launch several new products that would "empower creators to be way more productive and creative," he said, while cautioning about the cost associated with supporting the technology for a large user base.
However, net income for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31 fell to $4.65 billion, or $1.76 per share, compared with $10.29 billion, or $3.67 per share, a year earlier. Analysts had expected a profit of $2.22 per share.
The decline was largely due to a $4.2 billion charge related to cost-cutting moves such as layoffs, office closures and the data center strategy overhaul.
The company previously said it was planning to account for much of that cost in 2023.
CNBC Marathon takes a look at how credit cards work in the U.S., including major industry players like Visa, Amex, and Discover.
$6.7 trillion. That is how much Americans spent using their debit or credit cards in 2019. More than 60% of those purchases were made using cards from Visa, a company that has long dominated the payment card industry. As payment cards become more essential in our daily lives, Visa has quickly grown to become one of the most valuable companies in America. So how exactly does Visa make money and why does it dominate the payment card industry?
Clarification: The 10% mentioned in the video at 12:30 refers to 10% of the average 2.2% of the swipe fee charged to merchants.
And armed with impressive rewards and a loyal customer base, Amex has achieved impressive growth over the years. The company’s revenue has increased over 32% since 2017 and shares of the company have shown resilience and growth in a tumultuous market. Yet Amex is far from dominating the credit card industry compared to the likes of Visa and Mastercard. So what is the secret to Amex’s success and where is it headed next?
Credit scores, which represent how likely a person is to pay his or her bills, affects almost every aspect of an American’s financial life. One key benefit built into the credit scoring system is its nondiscriminatory practice of using just numbers to determine a person’s creditworthiness. “Credit scoring when it was first developed was an advancement,” said Chi Chi Wu, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “It is better than having some banker sit across from you and judge you and read the information in your credit report, because they bring a lot of their subjective analysis and their own life experience into the analysis.” But despite the good intentions of credit report companies, many experts argue that the current system is still discriminatory.
Lastly, Discover is one of the largest credit card issuers in the U.S. and consistently tops a customer satisfaction survey. However, the stock has mostly underperformed that of the S&P 500 and its credit card competitors. So how does Discover stack up to its competitors and what’s unique about its business model? Watch the video to find out.
Chapters:
00:00 — Introduction
00:38 — How Visa Became The Most Popular Card In The U.S. (Published October 2021)
14:42 — Why Wealthy Americans Love AmEx (Published January 2023)
27:05 — How Credit Scores Work (Published October 2022)
41:10 — How Discover Won Over The U.S. Middle Class (Published February 2020)
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Microsoft CMO tells employees the stock price is the ‘most important lever’ to get a pay raise after cashing out on $4.4 million worth of stock this month
Kylie Robison
·4 min read
Microsoft's chief marketing officer Christopher Capossela, who just cashed out $4.4 million worth of stock, told employees angry about lack of salary raises that their best way to increase their pay is to make the stock go higher, according to screenshots of an internal conversation viewed by Fortune.
"The most important lever for almost all our employees' compensation upside is the stock price," Capossela wrote in a chat with employees last week on an internal social networking tool called Yammer. "So great quarterly results contribute to making the stock attractive which in turn drives everyone's total compensation up."
Microsoft told employees earlier this month that, due to economic conditions, the company will not provide raises for full-time salaried employees. This comes after the company announced it would layoff 10,000 employees through the end of March (thought some some reports are finding Microsoft is still making cuts past its self-mandated deadline).
"Our current employee count is around 250k people which is a large increase year over year. So the painful job eliminations and the difficult decision to not increase salaries this year has the effect of slowing down a large increase in our people investments," Capossela wrote in another message to staff on Yammer on Tuesday (A Microsoft spokesperson told Fortune that the most recent disclosed headcount is actually 221,000). "We are still investing heavily in our people as well as in our data center capacity to hopefully position us well for the Al transformation."
With company morale bruised by cost cutting, internal criticism of Microsoft management is growing, particularly among employees who feel the burden is not being shouldered equally between workers and executives. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella received a 10% pay raise in 2022, raising his total compensation to $55 million.
Last week, Capossela sold $2.85 million worth of stock, adding to the $1.55 million worth of shares that he sold the week prior, MarketWatch reported. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the CMO sold a total of 5,000 shares last Tuesday at an average price of $308.705 and on Wednesday, he sold another 4,177 shares at an average price of $312.905. None of the stock sales were through pre-arranged stock trading plans, which Microsoft does not require of its executives in contrast to many other companies.
A Microsoft spokesperson said that Capossela was not available for comments, and said that Capossela's "holdings significantly exceed the holding requirements set by the Microsoft Board of Directors. This sale is part of Chris’ personal planning and does not reflect any change in his dedication to the company's success."
According to screenshots of the conversation viewed by Fortune, an employee asked leadership what the rationale was behind not providing raises for employees given that Microsoft's net income in the most recent quarter increased 9% year-over-year. Microsoft is also pouring massive amounts of money into A.I. technology and on acquisitions such as the pending $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard.
"The same principles apply to the senior leadership team and me. This will be reflected both in the absence of salary increases and in the level of annual performance-based bonuses for the SLT [senior leadership team], which will be substantially lower than last year," Capossela wrote in response to one questioner in the chat. "Of course, I'm not asking you to agree with the decision (these are tough calls being made during a very turbulent macro-economic environment), but I hope this helps explain a little of the rationale as to why."
