Programmers in China, are they really "short-lived"?

I don't think so!

Let's talk about the programmer's career planning

Preface

With the popularity of the mobile Internet, spawned a large number of various Internet-related careers, but also a large number of young talent into the market, although it is a blue ocean, full of dividends, but how can this wave of surge forward, rather than like a wave like a flash in the pan? Can be from the value of this wave of Internet industry careers, in-depth research, to find out the supply and demand in which the real value for the enterprise, to understand the real core competitiveness in order to keep moving forward like a bicycle, in a truly stable.

The real value of programmers

The reason why the boss hired us is that he wants us to bring value to the enterprise, to put it bluntly, it is directly or indirectly to help the company earn money. Our salaries, in general, are used as the company's labor costs. While controlling costs is important, the real focus is on the difference between the value you bring to the company and your salary.

So when the boss thinks your salary is high, he's really saying that you're not bringing enough value to the company. When we come to work for a new company, there will be some error between what you think you are worth, what the company thinks you are worth, and ultimately the actual value you bring to the company, since there is no actual work data to measure. Resumes and interviews, on the other hand, are designed to bring what you think you're worth and what the company thinks you're worth closer together. A resume is really a value proposition that says: I'm going to come to this company, I'm going to be able to do this and that, I'm going to bring this and that value to the company, and I'm only going to be paid this little bit of money, so hurry up and hire me.

In short, it's important to change the mindset that I'm going to work and someone else is going to pay me, and switch to the direction of what value I can create for this company. This kind of shift in thinking can help you figure out a lot of things, such as:

The same person with a range of skills tends to create different value at different companies, and so he gets paid differently.

Companies don't hire someone based on how good they are, but on what value they can bring to the company. While for the most part, there is a positive correlation between an individual's ability and the value they can bring to the company, if you can come up with and prove a better value proposition, you'll probably be a better fit for that company than the bull. An extreme example of this is that a top-notch architect would probably be useless at a startup that uses a serverless architecture, while a client-side whiz could probably handle everything at that company.

Supply and demand in the programmer market

When supply exceeds demand for a job, recruiters have more leverage to drive down salaries and thus capture more residual value, and when supply is less than demand for a job, candidates have more options and are worth more. A job supply and demand in the long run, is affected by the industry and technology development, such as with the large-scale development of the network, the same is engaged in software development work, traditional software development jobs are not as big as the demand for Internet and mobile development jobs; and in the short term, each wave of emerging markets and high-margin cross-segmentation of the industry will be more valuable, and as long as the focus on emerging markets and market segments will make the candidate more valuable, and as long as the focus on the emerging markets and market segments will make the candidate more valuable. Markets and market segments will allow you to always be at the forefront of the wave, enjoy the wave to bring you dividends. For example, when ios first came out, your competitiveness can catch up or surpass that of a senior engineer developing J2ME feature phones in a short period of time.

The nature of programmers

Automation In other industries, work needs to be done by humans; what you do today, you may have to do the same again tomorrow. But that's the way humans work, not the way machines work.

Software, when you think about it, isn't it just a series of commands that can be executed over and over again?

In order to get machines to do repetitive work, that's why we need coding, to tell machines how to do a particular job through various programming languages, and after that, the job is done by the machine, with no more human involvement. The programmer's attention moves on to the next job that hasn't been automated yet.

Why can a good programmer replace many average programmers?

After a deeper understanding of how programmers and repetition don't **** up, you'll understand why a good programmer can replace hundreds or thousands of average programmers, because machines amplify the gap. If an average programmer is doing repetitive labor, then a good programmer spending a day writing a snippet of code can take out a year's worth of his work.

So you see, programmers are the profession that constantly kills off their own backs, forces them to do creative work, and constantly exponentially increases their productivity.

Engineering is about how to accomplish a given task at low cost, efficiently, and on time.

So judging whether an engineer is good or not is not about how creative and famous he is, but about how steady he is and how much he can Getting Things Done, which in Chinese means reliable.

Sometimes a good solution doesn't necessarily use the latest technologies and frameworks, but looks simple and unadorned, with all the power wrapped up in the details behind it. It's like a top player playing Slocum billiards, where every shot is plain as day just because the previous shot's return was so on point.

Similarly, a good engineer will choose the solution that best suits the needs of the team and the needs of the team, and will consider the balance between development efficiency and system efficiency, so as to achieve the optimal result; instead of arguing all day long with others about what languages are best and what frameworks are outdated.

Engineering and automation are probably the two most important beliefs in a programmer's career, and how to avoid duplication of effort by creatively automating under the premise of guaranteeing engineering quality is a question worth spending years and years thinking about and practicing at all times in our work. Thinking about this question will help you gain unprecedented competitiveness, for example, if you have a series of semi-automated tools, in the era of increasing maturity of artificial intelligence, they may become fully automated tools, which is behind the career value and business value is self-evident.

Programmer anxiety

The Internet is an emerging but fast-growing industry. Emerging means that there are not so many industry gurus to give newcomers guidance, and there is not a set of recognized reliable and replicable career development tips. High-speed development means change and competition, a large number of newcomers because of the trend and the influx of newcomers, if you do not want to be the latter wave of the beach, you must continue to learn, constantly improve themselves to maintain the level of elimination above the line.

China's Internet industry is very work-intensive, and the front-line startups are even busier, yet most of the practitioners who just entered the industry 60% will enter the startups. Adhering to the principle of small steps, rapid iteration, the development of personnel is more of a battlefield in the charge of the cavalry, a long time to overdraw the body, high loads on the highway forward, that is, the top of the sports car, but also overwhelmed and anxiety.

Programmer career compound interest

It is like the financial interest calculation method, in the case of the same funds, compound interest returns to far more than a single interest, and the longer the number of years, the more obvious the effect of compound interest. And we are engaged in the occupation of the same effect, choose a good career, in the late career will show more and more high compound interest returns, just like the index of the smile curve, lawyers, doctors are high compound interest career choice, choice is greater than the effort, an excellent choice can be achieved by bending the road.

Software developers have poor compound interest in the following two aspects:

Different directions of developers have their own familiar development language, more specialized, although there is a certain degree of generality of the syntax, but the depth of the technology needs time to accumulate, can be transferred to only programming design ideas, coding specifications and other general information.

If there is no clear planning, or salary-oriented programming, even if you seize the trend and eat the head dividend. But what you accumulate in your daily work is not the general knowledge and comprehensive ability, it may be only the proficiency and experience in a certain technology. If you don't have self-discipline and motivation to be self-driven, and just fulfill the company's business, it's business-driven, and the work experience becomes your liability instead, dragging you down to the quagmire.

Programmer career barriers

Most of the struggling developers in the front line of their own careers are closely linked to a certain skill, as a developer will certainly understand a highly coupled code must be entangled, pulling one hair and moving the whole body, and only a high degree of abstraction of the functional programming can be iterative refactoring in one iteration of a steady as a mountain. The Internet industry is changing too fast, said the day in the sky, underground a year, Internet practitioners are not floating in the sky. Look back at the development of Nokia, desktop-level application development, the entire industry, such as the big wave of sand, with the rise of various cloud platforms, a variety of API services, open, the efficiency of the developers will be greatly enhanced, as if the agricultural society to the industrial society, is not a surplus of labor in the agricultural population, but technological innovation to liberate more laborers, thus flooding into the new industry. The same is true of the Internet, the increase in productivity, in the limited land will eliminate more low-productivity practitioners. If at this point by the middle of your career, relying solely on proficiency and seniority as your core competency in a company, then you will be liberated (fired) ......

And the Internet industry has actually long been shuffled with the invisible, such as basic operation and maintenance engineers, DBAs, basic algorithm engineers, security engineers, image algorithm engineers, data engineers and so on. In the blink of an eye 2018 has passed three-quarters, the Internet dividend do not know how long the continuation, standing in the wind mouth, the trend, but look back at the past, the wind mouth is so short-lived.

From the earliest microblogging microblogging social war fire three years, and then 020 and P2P financial inclusion fire two years, live and **** enjoy the bike fire 1 year, unmanned shelves layout of the smoke has not been diffuse, just in 2018, live answering questions, to the knowledge of the micro-business, to the blockchain, short video platforms and so on a lot of wind, but also chaotic flowers are not easy on the eyes. Opportunities never become less, as long as you keep study, keep hungry. Your transferable ability to continue to improve, you will eventually stand out in a round of big waves.

Programmer careers have limited value that can be leveraged

The more people a career can impact, the more value it creates, and the higher the ceiling value of the career.

The supply and demand of the Internet industry and the value system has created a phenomenon, the first few years of mass entrepreneurship, innovation in the tide of entrepreneurship, resulting in an oversupply of programmers, everywhere you look is that I have an idea that can pry the earth and change the world, and now there is still a programmer short of a programmer can be launched in 3 months MVP, 5 months to get the angel rounds, the NASDAQ is not no Then out of reach. With this phenomenon spawned in addition to a large number of training institutions, the Internet market has become mixed, uneven technology. As well as the constant iteration of the pig on the wind mouth, the o2o bubble fades, the market becomes no longer so in short supply, and will eventually return to the era of good money driving out bad money. You have to realize that the California gold rush made a lot of money is not those who traveled across the ocean, not for the thousands of obstacles to the gold diggers, but those who sell shovels to provide infrastructure sellers. Relying on technology in the it world foothold is only those who do not know how many days and nights, pay a lot of energy to improve productivity of technical experts, there is no shortcut to go, even if you are gifted, there are thousands of deliberately practicing more hard work to compete with you. For ordinary developers, the technology is not so deep love, often work for five years after the salary also tends to stabilize, for most companies, your proficiency and experience to reach a certain threshold, and its improvement of the company's efficiency is limited, in the five-year bottleneck, the practitioners after the long-term enjoyment of high-growth will give rise to slow-growth bottleneck anxiety.

How to deal with

The so-called stability is the biggest lie, before there is a circle of friends of the hot article, once crowded want to enter the highway toll collectors and other iron rice bowl is also slowly eliminated, there are many BB machine maintenance engineers and other popular terrain, which fully explains the person is like a bicycle, only to move, not love the past, indulge in the forward is the most stable. Reposition their careers, not to proficiency as their core competitiveness, not to bet their careers on a single target, but keep study, keep hungry, and continuously improve their transferability, vision, pattern, etc., and continuously strengthen their irreplaceability in the existing company.