I was surprised the other day when a longtime friend told me he’d been laid off by his company.

My friend has worked in a famous foreign company for more than 10 years, the level is not bad, it can be considered as a middle or senior level.

A few years ago, when entrepreneurship was at its peak, I and others wanted to pull this friend out to work together, how to lure, how to draw a pie he was not moved, he said that he estimated that he would work in this company until retirement.

Unexpectedly, the unexpected epidemic this year has a great impact on the business of my friend’s company. The company downsized its staff and then cut it to my friend’s head. Ah.

After being laid off, my friend was angry and helpless, saying: “I have worked in the company for so many years, so loyal to the company, devoted my best youth to the company, now I did not expect the company to be so unfeeling.” “It won’t be so easy to find another job with a similar salary.”

After chatting with my friend, TO be honest, I felt quite heavy, thinking about him and thinking about myself… I can’t help but think of a question that many of us face:

Does the company feed me or do I feed the company?



1. It’s hard to stay with a company until you retire

In my parents’ generation, a working worker can often work in a unit until retirement, veritable “iron rice bowl”. Even before that, the children of workers could take over their parents’ classes and work in a factory for one generation after another.

Times have changed, and there are fewer and fewer companies with lifetime employment.

In Korea, the average life span of many small and medium-sized companies is only two to three years, so it is hard to stay with a company until retirement, no matter how loyal you are.

2. Companies and employees are not families

How often do you hear “Welcome to the family” when you start a new company?

Please, if it’s a family, have you ever seen a parent say to a child, “I’m not happy with you, we don’t want you anymore, go to another family.”

It’s like the two biggest lies in the workplace:

  • The boss said, you do well, I will not mistreat you in the future. But most employers don’t think of giving money to employees first when they make money.
  • Employees said, I must do a good job, the company as the home. However, most people will choose to change jobs when they get a better salary.

“The relationship between company and employee is family and family.” If someone gives you this kind of chicken soup in the future, you should be careful to distinguish whether it is poisonous chicken soup.

In the market, most companies and employees only have an employment relationship. The company buys employees’ time and labor force by paying wages.

3. Who feeds whom?

After laying out the first two points, talk about who supports whom, the company and its employees.

As mentioned in my previous post, I worked for a mobile game company where there were multiple game teams, which can be divided into two categories:

  • A team: A team whose game generates revenue and whose revenue exceeds its costs. In short, it makes money.
  • Category B: a team that generates less revenue than it costs to play, or even zero revenue, is clearly unprofitable.

At that time, the A and B teams were living in the same sky and the same earth.

A-type teams have more bonuses, more team construction and more salary increases, which are the big stars in the eyes of the boss. Who let people are cash cow, a month big millions, tens of millions of income placed there.

The B team is much worse. If revenues remain stagnant for a long time, and the boss loses patience, the project can be shut down, team members can be transferred to other teams, or the team can be disbanded and laid off.

For type A teams, it’s the team that feeds the company. For type B teams, it’s the company that feeds the team, or even the Type A team feeds the Type B team.

In addition, I have said to readers before, do not blindly go to dachang, strive to do the core business, profitable team. Same company, different team, sometimes the difference is really big.

As with teams, so with individuals.

If the value you create is not worth your salary and other costs, the company is feeding you.

If someone else can create the same value as you, but at a lower cost, the company is feeding you.

In layman’s terms, if you leave and can’t find a job that pays more than you do now, or if you’re being taken over by younger people with lower wages, it means that the company is supporting you.

Conversely, if you’re hard to replace, or if you’re creating more value than the company pays you, you’re feeding the company.


4. A win-win situation is the best

In the mind of many bosses, they think that they support their employees. Employees should cherish this job, do a good job and devote more to the company. They should not always think about getting a raise.

As mentioned above, the boss pays wages to the employees, which buys the time, physical strength and wisdom of the employees. The two sides are an employment relationship, which is a kind of transaction. Moreover, there is no absolute who feeds whom.

A company is supposed to be a platform for people to come together and collaborate to create more value.

Take Internet apps for example. Let’s say you’re a skilled full stack programmer and you can develop an App that can live for ten thousand dollars a day. If you can find an excellent product manager and an excellent operation at this time, and the three of you work together, the daily sales of this App may reach 100,000.

Professional work should be left to professional people, and getting together should produce the effect of 1+1>2.

In Internet companies, to make a good product, it often requires development, testing, UI, DBA, operation and maintenance, product manager, operation, marketing and other professionals to work together.

So, ideally, both the company and the employee win:

Everyone in the company this platform, through the cooperation of many people, everyone can earn more than their own income; Naturally, companies are also making higher profits.

5. Don’t become a paid employee

Hornet’s nest cut its salary by 50% in February; Harrow travel redundancy compensation; Jot down 30% pay cut and 20% layoff; Eggshell layoffs, free layoffs; Creditease cut staff and salaries; Iqiyi laid off staff; Alibaba Pig layoffs; Sf Express cut jobs; Cheetah Mobile laid off staff; Mei CAI layoffs; Layoffs with Shield;

The above is the list of Internet companies that I saw on the Internet two days ago laying off staff and reducing salary. Do you wonder how so many companies? The truth is, TO save space, I only paste a quarter.

To be honest, in more than a decade of working at the Four Apes, I have not encountered a wave of layoffs of this magnitude and duration. The most surprising thing is that it’s impossible to say how long this wave of layoffs will last.

Our company has also laid off employees (compensated lay-offs) in the last year, and from what I’ve seen, there are two types of lay-offs:

  • It doesn’t matter — a sudden pay-off, a trip, a job and a pay rise. Some people are more exaggerated, knowing that they have been cut, as if it is a blessing from heaven, anxious to gongs and drums, firecrackers.
  • The end of the world – it’s sad to know you’ve been made redundant. Months after I was laid off, I still haven’t found a new job.

Needless to say, the obvious second category is the employees the company feeds.

It is estimated that many people, like me, used to think that layoffs are far away from their own, before we were young, before the Internet bonus period, more opportunities, more companies, more jobs.

Now it is different, no matter whether you are young or not, I hope you do not become the employees supported by the company, here casually to tell you a few points:

  • Take time for yourself. Let’s say I’m 965, working 40 hours a week and earning 20K a month. If a new job is 996 and you work 60 hours a week, you can raise your salary to 25K. I will definitely not accept this offer, it seems that the salary is high, but after careful calculation, the working hours have increased by 50%, the salary has risen by 25%, and the hourly salary has been reduced, which is a loss! And most of my time is devoted to work.
  • Do something on the side in your spare time. This one is related to the previous one. Time is so valuable that I can use my time outside of work to do something on the side in case it becomes my main job. Of course, many people waste their spare time, wasting it on Douyin and King, which is a topic of determination, self-discipline and time management.
  • Don’t make your salary your entire income. Financial management ability is very important, not to say, I am small white, still in learning.
  • Don’t lay dead on your laurels. Don’t let your previous achievements become an obstacle for you to continue to move forward, to have a constant zero mentality. There are many people who claim to be “former XXX company director, former XXX company CTO”. Don’t ask. Asking is embarrassing. Heroes do not mention that yong, think that two brothers or a tianpeng marshal.

  • Don’t be a professional hater. High pay, slow work, disobedient, others to do the work, take credit for their own, such employees are the focus of layoffs.
  • Don’t take advantage of your weakness and confront young people. Isn’t it a little sad if you can only compete with young people in terms of physical strength, energy and time?

6. How do YOU realize your value

Keep on learning

Learning occurs throughout a programmer’s life. The IT industry is rapidly updated, with the updating and iteration of technology, the improvement of the quality of the whole people and the advanced thinking, which will make the original technology or function become backward. Once their own abilities have been eliminated by society, it is difficult to survive without new abilities as a supplement. In addition, with the increase of experience, in addition to technology, a lot of skills such as dealing with people and leading decisions need to be learned.

Only by constantly learning, constantly grow, only by constantly learning constantly surpass themselves, will not be eliminated, we this industry, in particular, the iteration speed too fast, every year there are plenty of technology come out, good learning, not particularly perfect can draw lessons from, this is our own experience, a process of learning is very important, If the method is right, twice the result will be twice the result. If the method is wrong, twice the result will be half the result.

So what’s the solution? The method is reasonable time arrangement, systematic learning materials and clear learning roadmap. The following information is some of the better and more complete information I have collected over the years. I spent 3 months to make the figure, now here to share with you, you can refer to and then determine their own learning route.

If you need it, you can share it with me or click the link below

Android learning PDF+ architecture video + interview document + source notes

If you need anything else, you can also check it out on GitHub. The following information will be uploaded to GitHub as well

Improve technical capability

Programmer’s work is a technical work, coding technology is programmer’s basic skills. In the enterprise programmer must follow the product or project to strengthen their basic knowledge, at the same time according to the project involved in the technology to expand their own skill field, establish their own technology ecology. Only good technology, in the face of a variety of lofty needs to achieve the design can be handy, and they will slowly become the company’s technical backbone.

Improve the ability to analyze and solve problems

If you want to be a core member of the company or department group, you must have strong ability to solve and analyze problems, so that others will take you as the core and have prestige in front of you at the same time. Just as we record the set of wrong questions when reading books, we must record the problems encountered in work and study and find solutions to form a set of bug solutions. It is easier to solve when you encounter similar problems.

Improve business understanding

Whether it is industrial software or Internet products, only by knowing enough about the business you are engaged in can you make good products. Learn more about users’ requirements or policy documents and get familiar with the business logic and standards of the industry before doing projects. After finishing a project, we should sort out and memorize the business, and develop new innovative ideas according to the summarized business. If you just focus on how to copy and paste or limit yourself to one feature in a project, your mind will be locked in. The logical rules and relationships of each business should be considered from a global perspective. Only when you have a thorough understanding of the business can you go to pk requirements with users. Once you have a better understanding of the business, you become the team leader.

Promote efficiency

The fundamental of the company is profit, the fundamental of the staff is to make money, only the former to achieve, the latter can be achieved with it. And an important part of profit is efficiency. Before the project, the demand, resource allocation and project risks should be carefully analyzed, and all risks should be considered as far as possible and preparations should be made to prevent rain in advance. Review the project regularly and correct the deviation module in time. In this way, problems can be better prevented, and even if there are problems, there will be a quick solution. The same configuration, when you improve efficiency, the cost will naturally come down, the leader will naturally value you very much.


7. Former employees are a resource to the company

In this wave of layoffs, many companies are very impersonal, especially when it comes to compensation, which is more bullying, using all kinds of means to force disobedient employees to compromise.

The company wants to save money, that’s understandable, but isn’t it more important to get together on good terms? Former employees are also a resource.

The termination of employment does not mean that the company has no relationship with the former employee.

Now that the Internet is so developed and social media is so influential, former employees can either brag about the company online or trash it online. Why can’t we maintain this relationship and let the former employee spread some positive energy for the company?

Ideally, if there are incentives for current employees to recommend new hires, why not offer similar incentives to former employees?

The above is definitely not YY. In my previous company, there was a group of employees who left the company, and the boss of the former company was in the group. Usually, the atmosphere in the group was very active, and the boss often gave red envelopes on holidays. Not to mention helping the boss recommend talented people, there are even several people who have returned to work for the second time.

I’ll leave you there, and I hope that after reading this article, you will think about whether the company feeds you or you feed the company.

One last joke:

None of the above is true. The company makes money from customers.

Customers feed the company and its employees

You see haidilao did not see this point, dare to raise prices to customers! Don’t you know everyone is poor now?

A few days seabed fishing and obediently restored the original price, estimated that the idea of the employees.