In 2012, I wrote an article called “Program Algorithms and Life Choices”. I used algorithms to compare how to make choices, which is how to calculate, but I did not talk about the directions that programmers can develop. Therefore, even with these so-called methodologies, we may still feel confused and confused about our own development, especially when we reach the age of 30.

Although I’ve written about programming age and Programming Skills before, there are still a lot of tech people who don’t feel confident that they’ll be able to do it as they get older. The biggest problem, I suspect, is that the current negative experiences of working in tech (constant overtime, being used as pawns or labor, etc.) can leave people with no hope and no future, especially as they get older.

It was also because I was asked at a conference, “What happens when programmers get old?” At the end of the year, I repeatedly talked about personal development with several friends. In the middle of my life, I have reached the age of “no confusion”. Naturally, I often look back and summarize everything. Therefore, DURING and after the conversation, I also have some thoughts that I want to write down.

Because I was on the same path myself, there was no guidance to be given. I was also a “lost in the world” who was wondering where I wanted to go. Moreover, I have very limited experience and vision, so the following words and thoughts on personal development are necessarily limited by my vision and experience. Your comments and comments are welcome.

These things don’t have to be true, and they don’t have to be the whole story, but they can give you something to think about at the end of the year and something to plan for next year.

The address of two articles mentioned above is attached:

Coolshell. Cn/articles / 87…

Coolshell. Cn/articles / 10…

Before I talk about personal development, I need to talk about a very important period of life — 20 to 30!

The primary task at this stage is to improve their learning ability and the ability to solve difficult problems. This is a very, very critical time! This time frame almost determines your future.

Before the age of 30, this time period, should be the time period of learning and accumulation, this time period, is the time period of hard study. This is the time when you must invest in your problem-solving skills. That is, the skill you must develop is that you can solve problems that most people can’t. So that the brute force buried in overtime hard work, when a brick old cattle is certainly no future.

If you stay in a place to move the brick, are out of breath business every day, I suggest you make your project delay would rather be the boss scold, also want to take time out to efforts to learn the basic knowledge, master more technology (many are interlinked in the train of thought), and then to have the opportunity to change your current situation. Getting chewed out by your boss for a project delay or not getting a bonus for poor performance is less important than your personal future.

To summarize, before you’re 30 and working for 5-7 years, you need to have:

  • Efficient learning ability. This means having a solid foundation of knowledge, being able to understand things by analogy, having no trouble reading English documents, being able to look for cutting-edge knowledge, being able to see the nature of problems and technologies, being critical, and being able to think independently.

  • Problem solving skills. That means being able to learn effectively, see lots of scenarios, make and deal with lots of mistakes, and be able to fight fires rather than put them out.

If you have both of these qualities, you are showing Leadership in your team or in the people around you.

Leadership is not about being a leader or a manager. It is a characteristic characterized by the following two simple signs:

  • Help people solve problems. Most people on your team or around you are asking, “What about this problem?” And it’s always you who stand up and tell people what to do?

  • To be depended on. Most people on your team or around you will come to you for advice on your meaning and ideas when making key decisions.

Once you develop signs of Leadership in your 30s, you will enter a positive cycle:

  • Because you are a quick learner, you will have more opportunities to solve difficult problems.

  • The more opportunities you have to solve problems, the more you learn, and the stronger you will be.

  • This cycle, repeated for just a few years, dramatically increases the possibilities of your life.

Pay attention to

  • To achieve such traits, you need to find your strengths and the environment that suits you. Just as fish are good at staying in the water, it is not a good idea for fish to pursue the thrill of life of land animals.

  • Generally speaking, people with such potential should show up in school. If you didn’t have that potential in college, then you need to work harder at work.

  • Leadership also has a range, such as friends around, team/part of work, within the circle, the whole industry. The greater the scope of your Leadership, the more selective your personal development will be. The smaller it is.

  • If you are in your 30s, you still don’t have this trait. You may not have that kind of Leadership in the future. And your personal prospects may be limited.

Reading this, I have to say that if you are starting to show Leadership, then you are talking about personal development and the rest of this article will probably be meaningful to you.

Based on my short experience and vision, I can only see the following three general directions of human development (there may be overlap between them) :

  1. Struggle in the workplace

  2. To experience something meaningful and valuable

  3. Pursue a life of freedom

I have more or less experienced all three directions, and I have seen many people around me succeed in all three directions. Maybe there are other directions, no way, now, my vision is so big, so I’m here, I’m mainly talking about these three directions. The prerequisite for a person to be qualified to go in these three directions is to possess the qualities of Leadership mentioned above.

Advancement in the workplace should be the choice of most people. Develop your life by joining a company.

We often see a lot of so-called “career planning”, but most of the career planning is just something made by human resources, and the reality is very different. Experience of my life, there are 18 years is spent in the company, in the bank, small companies, big companies, private companies and foreign companies, traditional IT companies, Internet companies, different companies have different style and culture completely, my experience is rich, but not very successful, here only to share some of thoughts in my workplace (not necessarily right, Fyi only).

One of the goals of going to a top company is to expand the scope of your Leadership possibilities.

There is also a large gap between companies, so even if you are a key member in a low-end company, you may just be an ordinary employee in a high-end company (just like the main force of The Chinese football team may not be selected to the Premier League). So, if you want to maximize your personal value in the workplace, you have to work for a top company. Because there are great working methods and scenarios in top companies, and it’s not something you can read or talk about, it’s something you have to experience. So, the skills, the vision, that you have at the top companies are generally much more than at the bottom.

In addition, the work level of each company is mutual target, for example: Ali’s P-several corresponds to Baidu’s T-several. Domestic first-line companies also have similar positions, but if compared with foreign first-line companies, there is a gap, and the gap is very large. A senior engineer at Google or Facebook, for example, might be equivalent to Ali’s P8/P9 or higher.

Yes, in the workplace, if you are the backbone of the top company, then if you go to the bottom company, there is a good chance that you will become their senior management and core. Just like if you work at Facebook for three or five years and become their technical backbone, then you have a very high probability of becoming a senior executive at BAT. On the other hand, if you graduate from BAT and become a screw and spend your youth working overtime every day, the probability that you can become a senior executive of BAT in ten years’ work may be very low.

Going to a top company and going to a startup sometimes don’t conflict. However, I would like to point out that a person with strong technical ability can be buried in a large company. Because when big companies succeed,

  • Successful companies don’t have a problem recruiting highly skilled people of all kinds, so there’s a lot less of you and a lot more of you.

  • Successful companies have their entire technology architecture done, and Legacy issues are many, so there’s not much left for you to do.

  • Successful companies are more likely to want stable systems, and stability inevitably leads to conservatism, while conservatism leads to inactivity.

As a result, for middle – and high-level talent, the personal value that can be generated in a large company may be far less than that of an entrepreneurial company that is hungry for talent, has no baggage, can be used freely, and has relatively more flexibility and freedom.

However, going to a startup requires careful selection and evaluation. There are many uncertain factors in a startup, and the factors of the founder are too big. Therefore, you need to be careful to know the founders and their business, ideas and concepts in order to work with them better.

A lot of start-up companies are not real start-up companies, they have a great deal of luck and drive psychology, to be careful screening.

First of all, it’s an indisputable fact that society gives 30-somethings their most important jobs. In other words, people in their 30s are the backbone of society.

So, this is an opportunity! If you have Leadership, you will be able to catch up with this opportunity within the scope of Leadership — where the company and the leader place the trust and expectation on you and entrust you with important teams and tasks.

Thus, your 30s and 40s are a period of career development, a period when your career is on the rise. If you don’t catch up by the time you’re 40, that’s the end of your career.

As you move up in your career, you’ll need more soft skills like:

  • Ability to lead product and business development

  • The ability to promote their preferred culture

  • Ability of project management — seeking perfection despite heavy task and tight schedule

  • Ability to communicate and persuade others

  • Ability to resolve conflict

  • Ability to manage and develop team

  • The ability to deal with emergencies… …

And here are a few cold facts about the workplace:

  • You need to start caring for and dealing with complicated people. Especially in big companies, a large number of people are butt to head, interests are complex, goals are not consistent, everyone has different ideas in mind. Talk is cheap, show me the code! Instead, code is cheap, talk is the matter. You need to spend a lot of time thinking and observing all kinds of people. Instead of spending time creating something of value, you need to expend your energy on juggling different people.

  • You need to start using all kinds of political tools. Office politics is inevitable, and the bigger the company is, the heavier it will be. From the day when you start to be a leader at the front line, you begin to play the role of “inside and out”, and need to deal with subordinates and leaders, employees and the company. Your level is higher and higher, at any time you need to use more political means, you will learn to judge the degree of the reform, learn to cater to the staff and leadership, learn to use the official language, learn to dubious advantage, learn to compromise and exchange, learn to submit to humiliation, learn in at the right time to express themselves, learn to stab knife, at the right time in the society are calm, Learn to hide…

It sounds really boring, so now you can see why executives don’t do anything, because they need the skills they need in the workplace! If you don’t want or can’t play with these things, then you need to go to a company where the tech people can do it in peace. I’ve seen this kind of company at Microsoft, Google, Amazon.

So, there are two ways for technicians to end up in the workplace — to become a technical person in a real technology company, or to become a professional manager.

Three stories to start with.

  • The first one was when I was in Ali. One day, I saw a post on the Intranet. A girl who made products said that she was going to quit her job and go to France to learn baking skills, which attracted a lot of comments.

  • The second one is the American boss of Amazon. Every year, he takes a training course to learn a skill, such as cooking, flying a biplane, and being a DJ in a nightclub. And even went to Washington to learn how to be a politician.

  • The third one, when I was working at Thomson Reuters, was a colleague from England. One day he said that he had quit his job and was going to travel the world with his wife for the rest of his life. I asked him if he had enough money. He told me that the money was not enough, and their plan was to travel while working, working enough money to leave the next station. ‘It’s so boring to take a vacation to another city,’ he says. ‘If you don’t live there for a period of time, how can you have a good travel experience?’ Well, there’s no arguing with that.

I mean, I’m impressed that they’ve made their lives so much fun. A bit of a leap across the line, but Why Not?

I would like to say that it is also good to pursue a life experience that is different from everyone else, and I personally feel that it is much more interesting than the workplace. If you’re bored with the workplace, why not pursue a different life experience? Even if you don’t want to go for a big life experience, there are plenty of valuable and interesting experiences to be had in the tech world. People who seek exciting, meaningful, and different experiences can count as a kind of success in life, right?

If I just talk about technology, I personally see two types of people who are successful in pursuing experiences:

  • Go to the birthplace of technological innovation and experience it. The engine of innovation in computing and Internet technology, basically, is in the United States. We caught the era and picked the hottest industry of the era, so what’s the reason not to experience the technology engine of the era? Silicon Valley in the United States, both large companies and startups are bursting with all kinds of innovation. If you have the ability and opportunity, why not strive to experience it? Don’t you regret it when you’re old?

  • To experience the development of the next hot technology. From IT, to the Internet, to mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and then to the future OF AI, VR, IoT… The wave of technological innovation comes one after another. Do you want to continue to move bricks and move down there? Do you want to ride the wave and experience the wave, or do you want to be a person who goes with the flow?

Whether working or starting a business, whether in China or abroad, these are forms, not content. Have you ever experienced something meaningful and valuable with someone who has ideas? Life is short and fast, and the greatest good fortune for us technologists is to be born in such an exciting era, so why not pursue these cutting-edge exciting experiences?

I believe that “freedom” is something that all people want to pursue in their hearts. “Life is dear, love is dear…” (ha ha)

But when it comes to freedom, most people think of “freedom of wealth”. In fact, this is not entirely true. In the path of freedom, my personal experience tells me that you can have many different types of freedom. Below, I understand several levels of “freedom”.

The first level of freedom — freedom to work. The first level of human freedom is “freedom to work”. I am not saying that you are free to work in the workplace. There are exceptions, but they are not universal. By “work free” I mean — you don’t feel the threat of losing your job. In other words, you become a hot commodity, and not only do you have no problem finding a job, you have no problem finding a good job at all. Imagine if the job came to you. On the one hand, you had a real job choice. On the other hand, you didn’t have to worry about the job, so you could quit and do whatever you wanted. At this point, you are “free to work.”

The second level of freedom — skill freedom. Freedom to work is fine, but only if you are dependent on other people to offer you jobs. Skill freedom is the ability to use your skills to support yourself without having to work for a company. That is, the so-called freelancers, the society, such people are also many, for example, some fitness sports coaches, designers, translators, authors… These are all freelancers, and as long as the programmer is not a brick worker with an idea, he or she has the potential to become a freelancer.

Think about it, you have programming ability, in fact, is a kind of creative ability, that is, creativity, as long as you Make Something People Want (YC startup slogan), you can fully through their skills to support themselves. If you’re making money through automation, or if you’re creating a software business on an App, or even if you’re creating open source software, and the community is donating more to you every month than you’re making, then you’re truly skill free.

The third level of freedom — material freedom. I’ve rephrased financial freedom. I personally think that in addition to having a good father in this particular case, if you want to have material freedom, essentially, you have to learn to invest, investment is not necessarily your money, time is a kind of wealth, youth is even more, how do you invest your time and your youth? What kind of things and people are you going to invest your money in? For investment this matter, the risk is also relatively big.

But perhaps the greatest risk of all is not to take any risks in life. There are many skills in the world that you can’t learn in a book, but can only learn in practice, such as swimming. Investment may be one. Only those who really know how to invest, or those who are very lucky, can achieve material freedom.

Pursuing a free life is actually a good choice for personal development. Generally speaking, free people, ability is not bad, money is not less. Because they know how to invest.

That is, people who have the capacity to pursue freedom,

  • Not only leadership and creativity (but also mentoring and being ahead of the majority)

  • He also knows how to invest (where to put his time, energy and money)

Whether it is striving in the workplace, pursuing wonderful experiences, or realizing freedom, I think they are all good directions for personal development.

They all overlap, for example:

  • Companies where you can pursue exciting experiences in the workplace.

  • Freedom can also be achieved by joining a company that has the potential to grow rapidly.

  • You can also achieve freedom in life by pursuing different experiences. …

Anyway, the logic here is —

  • People who are able to plan their own personal development are usually people who have a lot of opportunities and possibilities.

  • People who have a lot of opportunities and possibilities usually have Leadership and love to take risks.

  • People with Leadership who like to take risks usually have strong learning ability, active thinking, love to toss and know how to “invest”.

  • People with strong learning ability and active thinking, generally speaking, are people who like reading, like practice and new things, are not afraid of difficulties and challenges, and use intelligence rather than brute force.

  • People who understand “investing” are generally more concerned with future and long-term growth than with kpIs, bonuses and promotions in the present.

This article is written by Chen Hao, a cool shell blogger, and has been authorized to be forwarded by InfoQ. See link to the original article:

Coolshell. Cn/articles / 17…