IT engineer becomes Weibo sensation after giving up career to become a fruit seller

IT engineer becomes Weibo sensation after giving up career to become a fruit seller

Xu Jia was a PHP engineer for Sina Weibo in 2011 and often worked late into the night. -China Daily
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Sat, May 04, 2013
China Daily/Asia News Network

A former IT engineer has become a sensation on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo after he gave up a promising career to successfully turn into a fruit vendor. Xu Jia was a PHP engineer for Sina Weibo in 2011 and often worked late into the night. In 2013, he was promoted to a title equivalent to an architect in one of China’s most popular social networking sites. “I was in tears to see my promotion. It was a dream for many years finally coming true. But I changed my mind and wanted to discover the other me,” Xu wrote on Weibo. Xu quit his job to sell fruit in 2013. What surprised Weibo users most is the combination photo showing sharp differences in his looks between the two working environments. In his high-end IT job, he looked exhausted, wore glasses and had scanty hair on his head. But in the fruit store, he appears vigorous, well-dressed, and in good shape.The combination photo, uploaded on Weibo by his former colleague, was forwarded more than 6,000 times and received 730,000 comments. Some have urged programmers to pay more attention to their health, and some admired his courage to pursue his dream.

A Weibo user named housepearl commented that “to be happy is more important no matter how much money you earn. Fame and wealth are merely mundane possessions.”

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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