It’s possible to make a living by your own craft and not depending on anyone or a company. But I get it. It’s what you do. This article is excerpted from Hao Chen (Left Ear Mouse) ‘s paid column “Wind in the Left Ear” on the Geek Time App.

The body of the

I’ll write the 1 out front

It is natural for programmers to monetize their technology. Writing a program is a “craft job,” so as a craftsman, programmers can certainly rely on their own craft and skills to support themselves.

However, many artisan programmers now refer to themselves as “code farmers”, migrant workers who work as hard as cattle under various orders and overtime. In the professional development of all kinds of confusion and hesitation, can not see the hope of the future, let alone can become a craftsman with their own skills.

From typing for some pocket money in college to gradually helping others with my skills and earning a relatively rich income, I realized early on that it was possible to make a living in programming entirely by my own craft and without relying on anyone or company.

This is supposed to be a natural thing for programmers, but not all programmers seem to realize their value. Here, I’d like to share with you some of my experiences. Of course, my experience is limited, not all right, just hope to give you a reference.

2 School days

I went to college in 1994, majoring in computer science and software. In 1996, when I was a sophomore, I was recruited to the teaching affairs Office to help me type some documents into the computer because I was good at wubi and typing very fast. After three months of typing, the school gave me 1000 yuan, according to 10 yuan per 1000 words.

As MY five strokes were getting faster and faster, and I could also use CCED and WPS typeset, I caught someone’s attention and asked me to help him with his typing studio, where I earned 400 yuan a month. My university is in Kunming, which is equivalent to the upper middle level of local income.

Later, in 1997, I helped a teacher who started a company to write some MIS software, and used Delphi and PowerBuilder to write some office automation and hotel management software. A year later, the teacher gave me 2000 yuan.

Because of the practical ability is relatively strong, at that time the department of the teacher to do anything for me to help. Moreover, because there were so few computer talents at that time, some people who needed to develop software or solve technical problems would also come to the university. Almost all the teachers recommended it to me.

Remember in 1997, my teacher recommended a man to come to me and ask if he could make a web page? Five static pages, 10,000 yuan. At that time, the school did not teach how to make a web page, SO I went to the bookstore to look for a book, only to find that the bookstore did not have a book on HTML, so I had to refuse and said, “I can’t do it.” A year later, I realized how simple it was.

3. Just entering the workforce

In 1998, I graduated to work in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China network division. Because I had dial-up Internet access, I made a personal page, which was super popular at the time. I learned to make fancy things, like menus on the web, while collecting information on the Internet.

In 2000, the editor of Computer News took a liking to me and sent me an email inviting me to contribute. I wrote some small technical articles about how to make menus on the web page. I wrote two or three articles a month, and got about 300 yuan per month. At that time, my monthly salary was 600 yuan.

Now you can find one or two articles by title, such as “Drawer Menu Design”, which is already a mess. The experience of being hired to do things in college had a huge impact on me, even subconsciously, on how I planned my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a strong feeling that I could make a living by my craft and not depend on anyone or a company.

I think the feeling, which I can now make clear, the subconscious feeling, was that I didn’t need to survive on a part-time basis, but instead worked in a company to develop my skills and to live more independently and freely.

So at work, for the less skilled jobs, I basically hand in my homework as I did in school. I did everything I could to improve the delivery efficiency, such as reusing more code, automating what I could, talking to requirements people, simplifying requirements so I could do less work…

This allowed me to spend more time on the more core, technical aspects of the business, both inside and outside the company.

At work, I can always be noticed by others and leaders, always have more time than others to read, to play some high-tech content of technology. Of course, this kind of “attention” is not all good.

In 2002, WHEN I was outsourced to a bank to do business development, I had nothing to do because I finished the project too fast. Instead, I spent all day reading books and writing other codes to practice my skills, and was complained by the users for being “idle”. Of course, I ignored the complaint and went ahead with it, because my homework was handed in and the user just said so.

In the same year, I went to a new, very technical company, and they were writing a company project in C that could build a bunch of PCS into a supercomputer and do parallel computing.

When I was doing my first project, one of the guys in the company came up to me and said, You use Purify to test your code for memory problems. Purify is an artifact of a former company called Rational (later acquired by IBM), a bit like Valgrind for Linux.

After I used it, I thought Purify was too good and read through the English technical documentation. The manager saw that I liked it very much and asked me to share it with everyone in the company. I prepared a powerpoint presentation carefully, and only one QA came. I talked to her for an hour and a half in a big conference room. The QA said to me, “You did a great job sharing, it was very organized, very revealing, and I learned a lot.”

With this positive feedback in mind, I shared an article about Purify on my CSDN blog titled “C/C++ Memory Check — Purify” (check out the Geek Time App for links). Perhaps because the software is paid for and not many people use it, this article has received little response from readers.

But one day in 2003 I got a phone call from a company asking me to help train Purify for clients. IBM’s training is too expensive, so the company that represents the software is looking for a cheap instructor because of the cost.

They searched the entire Internet in China and only saw my article. Then they found my contact information through CSDN and called me. In the end, the two-day training cost 10,000 yuan after tax, but my monthly salary at that time was only 6,000 yuan, before tax. It taught me a few things when I started out.

  • Go the way most people don’t, and spend your learning time in the hard places.
  • To write an article, you have to write something that no one else has written, or something that someone else has written, but I can write better.
  • What’s more, skills and knowledge are entirely marketable.

Looking back now, the realization of technology and knowledge was something I understood 15 years ago, haha! Since then, I’ve written a number of posts on the CSDN blog, from C programming literacy to makefile/ GDB manuals and various pitfalls at work.

Because WHAT I share is more systematic and unique, so the search engine is naturally optimized (the best SEO is unique). My articles are often promoted to the front page of CSDN due to the high volume of traffic. As a result, training companies and publishing houses, as well as unsolicited offers from other companies, and other coders who want to start their own business together, have all sorts of messages. Understand, the income of the author of the book is too low (the income of the author has two kinds: one is the manuscript fee, a page 30 yuan; One is the royalty, which is about 5%). After the input-output ratio of the training company was significantly higher, I began to take some training work (not frequently), seven or eight times a year. Training in C/C++/Java, Unix system programming, multi-layer software architecture, software testing, software engineering, etc.

One of the main reasons I like doing internal training is that I can go inside and understand what companies are doing, their technical pain points, and the thoughts of the engineers involved. This has greatly increased my understanding and awareness of society, which is very important to me. At the same time, I, a technical staff who was not good at expression, have greatly improved my language organization and expression.

There were some software development jobs, but I turned them all down. The main reason is that software development is mostly functional development, and I don’t grow from it. And there will be a lot of maintenance work in the later period. Although a small project can earn more than 100,000 yuan, the time spent for this is the most precious time in my life, which is more than worth the loss.

25 to 35 years old is the most precious time for everyone, should be used in the blade.

4. Career advancement

Because of these experiences, I feel the value of one’s knowledge and skills. I started investing my time in mainstream, advanced, and challenging technologies, which allowed me to stay on top of two things: technology and skills, and sensitivity to the nature and trends of technology.

Therefore, I have a strong desire to go to cutting-edge companies to experience and learn these things. For example, I learned a variety of knowledge and skills in team management at Thomson Reuters, and Amazon is the company where I improved the most. Although There are many bad things in Amazon, some of its ideas have indeed made a qualitative leap in my way of thinking and perspective of thinking.

I began to export not only technology, but also technical values. From Amazon to Alibaba is my work experience in the Internet industry, which gives me a more comprehensive understanding and view of these two seemingly similar but completely different successful companies.

These two completely different and even somewhat contradictory ways of playing make me often think, as if two little people are wrestling in my brain, which may be the result of the “standard answer” way of thinking that I have been taught since childhood. In fact, there is no standard answer in this world, or that a question can have several correct answers, and these “correct answers” are contradictory.

As a result, when I recorded some of my values and thoughts, I naturally attracted many people’s attention and attracted many different ideas to interweave in the discussion. On the other hand, it is a very good supplement for me. Whether others scold me or educate me, it is helpful to me and greatly enriches my perspective of thinking.

These experiences have qualitatively improved my way of thinking, making me think about technical issues from a relatively large perspective. This change has given me a higher level of thinking and a broader vision.

Maybe it is because I have some “unique” ideas, rich experience and solid foundation, which makes my knowledge and understanding of technical people more thorough and in-depth. As a result, I have gained some minor fame. More and more people came to me for advice and help with problems, and I began to charge more and more. One thing to note here is that I am completely passive and highly charged.

Due to my father’s health, I could not work full time, so I became a free agent. And because of that, I have the opportunity to solve technical problems for many companies. In 2015, a company’s back-end system failed as soon as it was promoted, and its performance was not good enough, so I was invited to take a look.

I spent two days working with their engineers on a simple process, reconstructing it directly on the production line, and the performance increased by 10 times. It was a little low, but it was all about emergency. The owner of the company was so happy that he saved the millions he had invested in the promotion and gave me 100,000 yuan. I said not so much, 10,000 yuan would be fine, and he said that was it. I readily accepted, then in the heart of a kind of technology to be respected moved.

In 2016, a company needed to do a high-concurrency solution that cost about 20 million TPS, and I did one for them. But they were only able to get to around 12 million TPS, so they asked me back.

I spent two days doing research, analyzing performance reasons, and then wrote over 700 lines of code in one day. Since I didn’t want to get into business, I mainly optimized network data transmission to keep packets as small as possible to ensure that a response to a request was transmitted in one MTU.

At the time of testing, it reached 25 million TPS. So the boss gave me $200,000.

The list goes on. In the above example, I did it without even talking about money. I thought it would be about 10,000 yuan at most, but the reward was far beyond my expectation.

What I want to say here is that it’s not that society doesn’t respect programmers, as long as you can help a lot, people will respect you.

So, I joke with some people, we’re probably all writing the same for(int I =0; i

I’m not a smart person, and I haven’t been particularly successful, but step by step, I think if I can do it, you can do it, and you can do it better.

How to monetize your skills

Again, programmers are artisans at heart, people with skills can make things that no one else can, and it’s natural to pay for them. The problem, then, is how to make their “craft” more valuable.

First, a journey of a thousand miles is a product of short step. Every great success is achieved through a series of small successes. So make sure you have one small success after another.

Specifically, you need to get people around you to ask for something or recommend you. This requires you to master skills or techniques that most people don’t, to learn more, and to have more experiences that others don’t.

Once people around you start asking for or recommending you, you’ll be noticed by outsiders and they’ll pay for your help. And once your help has the effect, it will produce the benefit, whether it is economic benefit or social benefit, will open up more space for you.

You’ll also get positive feedback that encourages you to learn and delve into more things, leading to a positive cycle. And this positive cycle, once it starts, can’t stop.

Second, focus on what is valuable. What is something of value? Value is actually affected by supply and demand. When supply exceeds demand, there is no value. When demand exceeds supply, there is value. This means that you need to look not only at the market, but also at the technology trends and be able to distinguish between mainstream and transitional technologies. When you have a better sense of smell than others, you can start faster and have a head start over others.

  • About market demand. To see the market clearly, you need to look at what companies are doing and what their problems are. Simply put, every company today, big or small, is short of people. Is there really a vacancy? China is a country with a large population. There is no shortage of people who can write code and move bricks. What is really lacking is people who can solve technical problems and improve team efficiency. So, by thinking in these terms, you’ll know which skills are really in “short supply” and can make you more valuable.

  • About technology trends. To see technological trends, you need to understand history, just as a ball moves, and you need to know where the ball is going to move in the future by looking at the trajectory of the ball’s completed movement. So it’s important to understand the trajectory of technology. To see if a new technology fits the trend, you need to understand the essence of some old technology.

Therefore, as you learn the technology, ask yourself two questions: “1. What problem does the technology solve? Why can’t other similar technologies do that? 2. Why was it resolved this way? Is there a better way?” In addition, there is a simple judgment method, if a new technology conforms to the trend of technological development, then the new technology will be supported by large commercial companies. The more such companies support, the more you need to pay attention to.

Third, find a place of value. In a fast growing company, the value of technical staff can be maximized.

Imagine being in a large company where the technical architecture and business are set and there is basically not much to do. And for big, established companies, stability often trumps innovation. In addition, large companies have a lot of senior technical personnel, more you not much, less you a lot, so your value is difficult to be reflected.

And the start-up company, business has not run smoothly, the company’s main energy will be on business development, this time also does not need sophisticated technology, so the value of technical personnel can not be reflected.

Only those in the rapid development of the company, the value of technical personnel can be maximized. A better growth path is to first enter a large company to learn its technology and successful experience and methods, and then find a company with rapid growth, so that you can realize more value. Of course, this does not rule out finding a place for rapid growth in large companies.

Fourth, hands-on ability is important. To be a craftsman, hands-on ability is very important, because in solving any specific problem, hands-on ability becomes the key. That’s why I write code all the time. Code is full of details. Details are the devil. Not something general and vague. It’s so important.

Fifth, pay attention to technology payment points. Technology payment point is basically reflected in two places, one is, can help others “make money”; Another is where you can “save money” for others. That means helping someone make money more smoothly, or helping someone become more efficient and save more money, the more direct the better. And the technology or solution had better be beyond the reach of most people.

Sixth, improve your ability and experience. The premise of paying is trust. Only when you improve your ability and experience, others will have certain trust in you, feel you are reliable and give you opportunities. And that trust needs to be filled with your skills and experience. For example, you are a core developer for a well-known open source software project, or you are a core developer for a well-known company’s core project, etc.

Find valuable sources of information. In the information society, if you have a better source of information than others, you can grow faster than others. For technologists, we know that almost all technology comes from the Western world, so you should go to the source of information.

If your information comes from moments, Weibo, Zhihu, Baidu or Toutiao, you’re screwed. Because there is not much valuable information in these channels, maybe only 1% of the information is nutritious, and for that 1%, you need to read 99% of the information, which is not worth it.

So how do you find these sources? Using Google well is key. For example, if you type “XXX Best Practice” or “Best Programming Resource” into Google search engine… You’ll find a lot of them. Using this better source of information requires your English skills, so improving your English skills is critical.

Eighth, export ideas and values. Truly great companies or products export values. Only by exporting more advanced values can one gain real influence. However, it is not easy for you to be able to export your views and values. It requires your accumulation and experience, not a one-time success, but a long-term accumulation. So if you want to monetize your skills, it’s essentially a process of accumulation.

Ninth, circle of friends is very important. One’s circle of friends is very important, what kind of circle of friends you are in will be affected by what kind of circle of friends. If you have a good network of friends, you’ll get better referrals and jobs. A good circle of friends basically has this characteristic.

  • These people have more ideas, opinions, and experience;

  • These guys have a wider range;

  • All of these people were more or less successful;

  • These are people who like to stir things up;

  • These are people who are dissatisfied with the status quo and want to make a change;

  • All of these people have some influence.

Finally, the key question is, birds of a feather flock together. If you don’t do that, how do you get into such a circle of friends?

In a word, the man who can make money is the man who can invest. I have always believed that the most precious wealth is not money, but your time, time is more valuable than money, because money you do not need to be there, while time you do not need to waste. Where you invest your time will determine where you will go in the future. So use your time and invest it in something worthwhile.

My experience is limited, I can only see these, but also hope everyone to discuss together, share your experience and experience, also let me learn and improve.

Reprint disclaimer: This article is from “Geek Time”, how programmers use technology to cash in.