Thirty-five years old is a real hurdle for many programmers. Zhihu, online a lot of this aspect of the discussion. In fact, as an interviewer, I can feel this kind of crisis. For example, the recruitment JD clearly requires that P7 should be under 35 years old, and Ali has required that P8 over 35 years old be phased out. The reason for writing this article is related to that.

To introduce the background, 37 years old, programmer, 985 master, 5 years of entrepreneurial experience, coordinates of a C round Internet company in Didu, P7, other… Income is not high, also still can live, why do sideline, do sideline is reliable, can the result is to affect the work and promotion sideline has not done well… Let’s talk about it a little bit.

One, the origin

I was originally engaged in research and development in A C-round Internet company S in Didu. My technical ability ranked Top in the company, and I worked hard and worked hard. My performance assessment was A+ in 19 years, but I was still full of fantasies about my career despite my age. But a sudden loss changed everything. “Failure” will not be detailed, involving the company’s internal more private issues. But this failure brought home to me the problems and risks of 35+ programmers:

  • 35+, the old and the young, is basically the economic pillar of the family. However, if there is no good development in the workplace (annual salary > 100W), and want to further development in the workplace, it is very difficult. Take yourself as an example. If a 37-year-old grass-roots manager wants to reach the middle and senior level at the age of 40, he or she must take a step every year and make no mistakes in the middle. Because once frustrated, there may be 1-2 years of no progress, frustration and failure for the new career may be a exercise, but for the old program that is a blow, and may be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Get frustrated, find another company. Finding a job is not easy. Take yourself for example, after the defeat, I tried to deliver a few, and the previous delivery must echo a big gap. The current epidemic and economic fundamentals have made it even worse. Then lower the standard a little bit, go to a small company, get a director title. This kind of choice is gambling basically, bet right, also may solve midlife crisis at this point, wrong, 2, 3 years later, may face unemployment, at that time 40 years old, will be where to go…
  • There’s got to be something good in it. Well, a headhunter has been looking for it recently. It is hot for Domestic Internet companies to develop the Southeast Asian market. The annual salary of the management post sent abroad can reach 100W +, which can only be considered as a last resort for me with a family and a family.

The bottom line is that basic 35+ programmers have very poor fault tolerance, and going to a small company or southeast Asia is just a way to delay the outbreak of the problem, not a long-term solution. What is the long-term solution?? In fact, when you are 40 years old and not in the middle of the company, the risk of being fired or eliminated, their own back-up. My answer is a side hustle (maybe 10 years ago my answer was entrepreneurship).

Okay, tell me about my experience

Second, the road to sideline

The road to the side business is just starting, for me, the first thing is to determine the direction, that is, what to do. Because of the previous entrepreneurial experience, for what to do this kind of direction before or step on a lot of pits.

First of all, there are many directions, such as outsourcing, “we media”, part-time entrepreneurship and so on. These are just general things. Maybe a lot of things can be searched online, but they cannot be implemented.

  • Outsourcing: tried the domestic programmer inn and the world’s largest outsourcing community http://freelancer.com/ two applications. The outsourcing demand of programmer inn is still too little, and mainly the front-end demand is in the majority, the unit price is a few k, the cost performance is too low, waste of time and energy income is too little. I looked at the main user base in India, which has more users than the US, and that surprised me. Chinese people make less money on it, I analyze several reasons: language and domestic Internet environment. India is an English speaking country, China is not. Language is the bigger issue. I have a deep experience of this, I even failed a PHP primary test (on the one hand, it is a language problem, on the other hand, the evaluation of things like memory, such as function names, can not reflect the real level). Finally, FREELancer was also rejected by me, at least not for me.

  • We media: this is currently more popular, “two micro one shake” + fast B war this is the current top level of we media platform, for technical personnel to do we media points:

    • The first thing to do is to have stable content production capacity: whether it is to be transported from abroad (now these platforms have anti-repeat strategies, not very easy to do), or to have their own long-term implementation of feasible solutions. Such as handling, how to ensure originality and be recommended by the platform, whether there is time for shooting, whether there is theme planning ability and so on. This is the cold start stage of the road of “we media”. At this stage, there is no one, no money and no experience. Sticking to it is the key. But for a lot of technical people, don’t know video editing, don’t know operations, can’t write jokes… + + + +

    • The cold start phase is difficult to overcome. For example, I have tried to make headlines in the past, mainly copying content from YouTube, Facebook or foreign content sources to the headlines, and once the playback volume of a single article was 50W +, but there was no bright spot behind, and the headlines were not recommended, and then there was no further. To sum up, if you want to do we media, you need to have a team.

  • Part-time startup: This is what I did when I started my own business, but I used to do it full-time, but now I do it part-time. Several patterns

    • 1. C2c (Copy to China): Introduce my methodology:
      • Appannie’s top 500 apps in each country can see the top 500 in each segment, with more permissions for paying users. For example, I saw a foreign TWO-DIMENSIONAL code app from AppAnnie. You can think of a 2C model, but it is 2B. What does it mean? Crunchbase: YC Techstars 500Startup, crunchbase: YC Techstars 500Startup But now that I’m charging, I can only see a partial list.
      • Tech blogs: TechCrunch and more
      • Technology incubators: YC (www.ycombinator.com/), Techstars (www.techstars.com). For example, YC 2019 has a project called PopSql, which I think is also worth doing. This is not to discuss the business model of specific projects (I will share it later), but to share ideas and methods. This is my implementation path of C2C

  • 2, based on industry problems -> solution

    I think this is a more reliable source of entrepreneurial projects, which is more reliable than C2C, but it is also the weakness of technical talents, because they do not understand business. So this is also something that needs to be solved later.

    I would like to share with you a case of my previous project: badminton wechat group robot. It mainly uses the wechat web version to hijack the messages of the wechat group and analyze them. If it is a supported command (such as # sign up), it will simulate a real person to reply, so as to achieve the registration management of activities in the wechat group. This is more convenient for badminton group owners, because they can directly chat in the group to sign up or other functions, we soon expanded to nearly 200 groups, 2W + users use. However, the good times did not last long swarm robots were blocked by WX, now all claimed to be able to do swarm robots are lying. But there’s a https://github.com/wechaty/wechaty a domestic company to, based on WeChat pad version (a lot) on the tall, seemingly YC investment, but also be wx now. So much for the details. I want to share this case with you mainly to say that entrepreneurship should be in the field that you are good at and familiar with, and the possibility of success will be much greater (although our project failed, we still made some achievements in the middle process).

Third, summary

Today, I would like to share with you the road of my side business. I also deeply realize that many ideas can not be landed, or because of the limited thinking and resources of a single person. So I want to set up a sideline communication group, we share ideas together, maybe there will be sparks. Interested to add group bar (qr code can be added after failure: Wubinzone)