Conclusion: Investing in technological ingenuity in China is a long-term investment with a significant lag, and to enjoy the unlimited benefits it brings, one must endure a long period of development.

In the early 20th century, China’s Internet was in its early stage of development. During this period, there were numerous myths of wealth realized through technology and business, which was the only way to go in the macro development strategy. In the era when traffic is king, domestic technical ingenuity is a difficult road. In a high-speed development and business-first Internet situation, technology through the realization of business products, to achieve the development of the company, through the market value of cash is the pursuit of engineers, successful, as god’s career path.

Over the past 20 years, engineers have followed the business, with traffic favoring capital and capital driving more talent. Therefore, a large number of “business expert engineers” who pursue business realization have created a unique Engineer culture in China, such as 996, code farming, engineers inside roll, day and night shift development, etc.

These cultures have nothing to do with right and wrong, but are all rules of supply and demand reflected in the macro context. Just as there is no right or wrong way for engineers to choose, what affects engineers’ decision is only the relationship of interests. No enterprise forces engineers to do so. On the contrary, these are the results of engineers’ pushing for change.

With rapid development of Internet in the country, manulife area because there are too many software engineers realized business do, class, wealth growth across the channel with the high speed will attract more people to follow the crowd into the engineer in industry, they fog did not know why, this is going to just say it can earn money, earn a lot of money, There are even a lot of people think that this is just a way to make a living like moving bricks, AS long as I copy and paste this API, page, foreman will give me money, nothing more.

Of course, as is the case in every age, the number of sober people is limited.

So you rarely hear the word ‘Engineer’ in China, because for most programmers, what they do has nothing to do with engineering or systems science.” The word “code farmer” is also called by these programmers themselves, isn’t it?

In 2020, at the end of the early 20th century, the country will put forward the new “14th Five-year Plan”, which involves planning and changes in many fields, among which the changes in the two modules of “economic development” and “innovation-driven” will be closely related to the engineering industry.

Understanding the macro background of The Times and their own career planning is the necessary condition for engineers to stay sober under the flood. The macro background is beyond the scope of this paper, which will continue to focus on the analysis of the career development of engineers.

Professional curve

The chart below is intended to describe the growth curve of broad career types in large industries, but there is actually a corresponding relationship in engineering as well.

  • Speed molding (logarithmic function) : repetitive, simple engineering work, limited to do some substitutable high, quick work, generally soon can get a standard is also good salary.
  • Expert type (convex power function) : common business development engineer, income has a step rise, as long as there is enough time to grow into a core business expert in some business fields, the ceiling of industry supply is the ceiling of its income, the growth of the late income gradually slow.
  • Outbreak type (Logistic function) : programmer inside the wild way, unwinding technical information bad selling, follow the wind to make money. When tuyere is not recognized by the mainstream and even by the mainstream engineers, but when tuyere is temporarily through the reselling of some industry information bad, a big profit. Such as: small program outsourcing companies, freelance outsourcing engineers
  • Explore type (concave power function) : the pursuit of deep, creative engineers, advanced engineers of the creator, previous experience long development period, its itself needs development, its work also need to develop, but grew up later in the late development growth faster, can even become the pioneer of the industry, be remembered through the ages, less affected by the industry supplies class. Such as: famous open source project author, the father of Java and so on

And these four types can change with each other, but it is very difficult to move flat. Every change will be subject to all kinds of resistance from the original safety zone, and it is normal that there will be change costs, and some people will even gradually disappear in the process of change.

I know an engineer, he is not a computer major, with its own little Web related fur understanding, in the university started the source of wechat wall business. In fact, its own technology is very simple, just docking wechat public account, the user to the public account of the message through the good animation effect on the webpage. But there was a new media outlet at that time, only with a set of 300 yuan unit price of source code sales, peak to 5W monthly profit.

Upon graduation, he gave up the business and began his internship in society. From 30 million yuan a month to 8,000 yuan a month, the amount of work in the company is much more than before, which is a very big gap. But he knew this business was only going to make a lot of money, a gift of The Times that had nothing to do with him. Later he successfully entered a well-known factory, successful transition to another path of development.

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The only constant is change, and it is necessary to pay attention to the changes in your career planning in the context of big changes in The Times.

However, with the gradual deepening of a field, many times the deeper the more difficult to change. This is the objective law of the world, like the differentiation of stem cells. If you take a sharp turn, it is easy to move its root, the gain is outweighed by the loss.

From the point of view of systems, it is necessary for software engineers to maintain a good dissipative structure, and this industry has a different rate of change compared to other engineering fields. This also means that good engineers need to pay more attention to and absorb incoming energy and information changes more frequently, as well as know which parts of their knowledge system can be replaced by new information, to remove the dross and properly apply it to practical projects. An engineer who doesn’t iterate on himself is a closed structure that will eventually reach a professional ceiling.

At present, the mainstream domestic engineers are in the “expert” development curve. In this curve, the value of most people depends on the recognition of the company and the business, and their recognition will directly determine the income of engineers.

Helping businesses find and solve problems is the main source of business recognition. As a result, the hybrid talents who know both marketing and technology will naturally come to the fore. I have met many excellent engineers, and books such as The Pyramid Principle and Influence appear in the later recommended books list, which also advocate business methodologies such as RFM and AARRR.

It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that they’re the kind of books that engineers want to read; What this reflects is the weirdness of engineers trying to prove their worth through marketing, desperately trying to get recognition through business understanding.

Some of them may have succeeded, but is this the path of every engineer? In the last 20 years, maybe; In the future, no, it’s just a compromise for engineers who are being held hostage by the business.

Ask its to rely on the fundamental, or this unprecedented rapid economic development under that big bait.

In the context of the era from “economic development” to “innovation-driven”, such values are bound to waver and this orientation is bound to slowly disappear.

There is no right or wrong in pursuing, and no high or low in advocating.

Return value

Technical ingenuity, the systems aesthetics that engineers pursue, engineering attainments are all value systems of a subculture, and trying to talk to outsiders about internal values is nonsense. But the strange thing is that the price of insiders is set by outsiders, and the strange thing is that insiders only think it comes from outside the circle.

There are not so many engineers in this world. From ancient times to the present, several generations were the time when everyone was a craftsman. There is only macro in the context of The Times. Recognizing this historical background, we may be able to predict the change of engineering culture in the next ten years.

As the end of the outbreak of the Internet age, there will always be the transfer of capital, talent market heat drop, the myth of software engineers across class burst, will make people into the sluggish even outflow, the threshold of the software engineers will increase again at the same time, the engineer the profession will slowly back to the subculture itself for its value orientation.

To put it bluntly, the Internet industry will not be so easy to muddle through. The ceiling of the old “marketing engineer” line itself will slowly fall within the next few years.

So is there no way out for software engineers in the next decade or so? Of course not, the supply relationship has not changed, the modern social Internet project has been deeply into every household, but before the rapid heat of this industry is full of impetuous and bubble.

Engineers face the return of value system, then those engineers who still have ingenuity will gradually appear on the stage, which has been reflected in some foreign mature Internet environment.

conclusion

Today’s engineers should keep thinking about their core values and true core technical assets.

Engineers now need to re-examine the core appeal of the business, the nature of systematic problem solving, and the implementation of system design and reuse capabilities.

Engineers today should settle down and spend less time trying to win recognition and power.

Today’s engineers should know how to do a good job in each hand, and treat each product with the attitude of their own works.

The rest is someone else’s practice.