“After working for almost eight years and not learning anything new for months, I always worry that I will be replaced by younger people.”
This is the typical state of life for developers right now, and seniority seems to be increasingly devalued in the developer industry. In the developer world, new technologies come out every once in a while, and to stay on the front line is to iterate, not only by spending time and energy learning new things, but also by picking out the ones that have a low dropout rate.
Anxiety at work
New technical frameworks and platforms emerge in an endless stream, and the underlying system architecture is constantly optimizing itself. As a result, facing the same technology platform, newcomers may be directly exposed to a more mature development ecosystem, allowing them to have a smoother growth path than the “old” programmers who have worked for a long time. The advantage of years of work experience is shrinking, and the previous work accumulation has become the basic framework with the rapid technological iteration. Technological updates constantly raise the starting point of development practitioners, and this starting point is being updated at an unprecedented speed. Almost every year, everyone will stand on the same starting line again.
From the tag data learned from the domestic high-quality technology sharing community digging, it can be seen that the above problems are particularly prominent in the front-end and mobile development, and the attention of the new technology classification has far exceeded the old technology classification. For example, vue. js, react. js, RxJS, wechat applet, Kotlin, RxJava, Swift and other new content and user attention has far exceeded jQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap, Objective-C, ThinkPHP and so on. Among them, the wechat mini program has increased by 200% in a month. Training schools, online courses and articles on wechat public accounts are all mixed, like a train that never stops. Every time the whistle blows out, it makes people panic.
Remember 7 or 8 years ago when web development (front-end development) was compatible with Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, QQ, 360, etc., developers wrote down every single Microsoft quirk that needed to be addressed in a small notebook. But with the advent of mobile browsers, compatibility issues are reduced, IE 6, 7 and 8 will be eliminated as The Times go by, new front-end developers will learn technology in a better development ecosystem, and the small book full of words will have to be sealed as capital to chat with the younger generation.
Three or four years ago, the complexity and confusion of multiple versions of Android cost developers a lot of time to adjust the various platforms, versions and manufacturers of Android system. It seems that the domestic mobile phone manufacturers are responding to the national call for exclusive compatibility with the official Google system. But just a few years later, with Google managing new versions of Android more rigorously and major handset manufacturers becoming more and more compatible, the topic of multiple Android compatibility has rarely been mentioned.
Not long ago, Left Ear Mouse and Tinyfool talked about how the programmer world is constantly learning and that “hip” technology will eventually become obsolete, but can most developers really settle for a project that lays the groundwork for the real world? It’s an anxiety that hangs over the heads of Internet developers who work around the clock. It’s a race that keeps getting faster and faster, and you can’t stop if you want to stay in the business.
This fear of obsolescence and heavy workload often leads a developer to feel that his work is only getting more and more tiring. How many people write programs all their lives? Even if you really like it. One of them quarreled with the product manager in the middle of the night, looked out the window like the full moon of wechat screen, and thought well, one day stay up to P8, take people, have a look in the future, and make a beautiful PPT for the boss…
Geographical limitations
“If I have a choice, I want to go back to my hometown, find a stable job and live a good life.”
According to the user statistics of Nuggets, most of the developers of existing Internet companies come from various science, engineering and even liberal arts students, with the exception of a small percentage who learned development in high school and continue to pursue it as a career goal. The reason behind it is simple, young people come to big cities to study, want to stay and find a good job, the Internet is hot, talent demand is big, and the salary is high, so they decide to enter this industry.
Then, you painstakingly study, prepare for BAT and other big companies interview, round brush questions, school recruitment, internship, internal push down, you finally sit down in west Erqi, Wangjing, Lishuiqiao, Zhongguancun a spacious office building. At this time, you will take a picture of your handsome job card, post a message on moments, say your English name, or say your employee number. All in all, this is a photo worthy of a smile, a joke about the company canteen or an orientation gift. On this day, you are happy, thinking in your heart that there is a line of code written by me in the App that all Chinese people open every day.
Although many people joke about working overtime every day, they didn’t mind so much at first. The bad day of bypassing the north fifth Ring Road in the morning and stuck in houchang Village was solved by some yellow and red bicycles, but they still didn’t escape the haze. Like the detailed description in “Changping Socialite Guide to Life”, in fact, everyone just smiled and forwarded moments, you know the developers are not so good.
As a result, the layers of life without rest have been weighing on the minds of developers, who seem to have trouble remembering what the sun looks like before 9 o ‘clock, just as they never know when the sun sets. Get up, subway, have lunch, open the computer, have a meeting, listen to the boss about the future, listen to the product manager about the demand, knock code, browse Bilibili, dinner, brush SSR, knock code, eyes a little blurred, the office becomes quiet, ready to go off work.
Finally, after a fortuitous return home feel here is not worth it. Although earn a lot, but still can not afford to buy a house, can not afford to buy a car, girlfriend can talk about everywhere, can not talk about. The crowded subway in the morning, the egg stand downstairs, the punch card outside the door, the gray sky outside the window, the group of people masturbating, drinking and punching codes all seem to be against themselves. You start to care about life, about what you eat, about whether being single too much is bad for your health, about weekends, about other job opportunities.
Then, you may change jobs, or even change cities. Unfortunately, nothing else has changed much, because you are still rotating in these cities, like a mysterious boundary.
Cognitive dislocation
“We care about a lot of things, not just girls, not just 1024, not just plaid shirts.”
Code dog, Xi Erqi, Zhang Jiang male, plaid shirt, obscene, no hair washing, no money. It’s as if these tags never left developers, and the stubborn stickiness makes them too lazy to explain. They have their own heart of loneliness and pride, with silence to express disdain to others. Yeah, how those people know what open source, GNU, VIm, VPN, Surge, HHKB, GitHub, Squidcat, and whether line breaks are a two-space or four-space war is still up in the air, and they don’t have time to explain it to us.
“Sometimes, it’s not that we don’t know how to speak, it’s really tiring to talk with you. Why do we understand your product terms to improve the communication efficiency with you, but you are never willing to understand us to improve the communication efficiency with us?” This is a very common complaint among developers.
“We need to speed up the launch of the new interface here in the back end, we may be a little busy recently.” Faced with such arrangements, developers often respond with silence and implementation, they are lazy to resist. Of course, in the end, the work will be delayed, the stability of the task may be problematic, and it is already a dream to launch on time.
Product managers scratch their heads, testers are on edge, bosses sit staring at burnout tables in their internal task management systems, and there’s always a voice in the back of their mind: Why aren’t they getting it done, or are they being lazy?
They don’t say it, and they don’t dare say it, but developers do hear it, and it comes from a terrible fixation.
The first people to land
“However, the developer community is often the first to land something new, a group that is either the first to pick the fruit or the first to taste it.”
These two years we all blow a variety of “god” level people every day, Zhang Xiaolong’s wechat, Zhang Yiming’s toutiao today, Ma Huateng, Ding Lei and so on, but they have been a developer, are a word in front of the computer to knock on the code. However, today’s people should have forgotten Yan Yuanchao, Qiu Bojun, Wang Jiangmin, they were the pioneers of the computer field and early Internet products 2000 years ago. CSDN, the largest Chinese IT website with 18 years of development, is still ranked among the top 30 content stations by traffic in China today, while the statistics system of station Chief’s Home and the earliest DOMESTIC BBS system are all created by the needs of technicians.
Developers tend to be the Columbus of the Internet, and it’s not necessarily them who end up conquering the world. They are always using new technologies to give the world a seed of possibility that will one day become a reality.
But the early adopters also need a place to make a big news story for them, and to be recognized for their occasional creations, so most of them have a blog that records their thoughts, even if it’s just one article: “How to Build a Blog”. Developers want to leave something behind in the process of changing things that will confuse the unread and make the understood worship.
No matter how many interesting things you write, it’s just hundreds of stars on GitHub or thousands of favorites in nuggets. But the technology ecosystem is still vibrant, and Web (H5) developers are in short supply; The decline in mobile development is not yet apparent; Applets ready to go; Strong demand for data analysis; Virtual reality, augmented reality has begun to take shape; Artificial intelligence in AlphaGo after a time luoyang paper expensive.
However, no matter how the new technology is trumpeted in the wechat public account and media, as a developer itself should provide a new perspective to the world. When all we-media people reported on the winning streak of Master 60, what the developer community cared about was that Deepmind and OpenAI opened their AI testing data Universe.
In fact, Chinese developers are never happy, they are often the first ones to land and few people care because people just look at the beam of light from the lighted lighthouse.