This article source public number: programmer success
Hello, I’m Yang Chenggong.
A few days ago, I had the honor to watch the live broadcast of UYU. They talked about a topic, which is how the front-end people, or the whole group of programmers, do side business? In recent years, the decline of the Internet market, many people are thinking about whether to start a side business to resist risks.
Here we go again. Two days ago, there were Internet layoffs. After Ali “to the society to transport talent”, Jingdong made a “graduation ceremony”, the whole partners are on tenterfoot. The attention of sideline industry has been upgraded again.
Well, today we’re going to talk about programmers working on the side.
Why do programmers want a side hustle?
I understand why today’s programmers want to start a side hustle for two reasons.
First, the explosion period of the Internet has passed. In the past, the number of programmers was small, and they could work well if they knew basic skills. The salary was also very considerable.
Second, the abnormal working atmosphere of the Internet development circle, staying up late and working overtime is too serious, consuming vitality to catch up with the schedule. Especially big factory, money is to give more, but overdraft intensity know all understand, say a word not to listen to is to take life for money.
Before, we might just laugh at ourselves, but as the news of sudden death of programmers working overtime in big factories keeps breaking out, we start to panic. It turns out that health is our lifelong wealth compared with income.
There is another reason, of course, that is not just the career gloom of programmers, but the first and foremost, and that is the “35-year-old crisis”.
Programmer is a profession that fights learning ability and creation ability, the rule that advance or fall back is far greater than other profession. After 35, if you do not really love this industry, then you will find that the perseverance of learning and studying in your 20s has not been. In addition, your health condition is not as good as before, so you can’t work overtime. How can you compete with the new boys in all aspects?
All of the above, coupled with the crazy anxiety created on the Internet, we suddenly have a kind of salary at any time, at any time to be laid off, to join the internal work, or even at any time to die worry, began to think about the future. No. Get a side business? Can’t start a business?
So if you post an article in the tech community today about how programmers can start a side hustle, you’ll get twice as many hits. The fundamental reason is that people are worried about the future.
What if I can’t roll it? How to deal with a 35-year-old crisis? People want to avoid risk, which is why they have to focus on side business.
What do you think of “overtime” and “35 crisis”?
These two phenomena are a major source of programmer anxiety. It may seem inevitable, but have you ever wondered what the root cause is?
Digging deeper into these two questions, the real concern is: “Will I be able to keep working overtime until I’m 35? Will I be replaced when my competitiveness drops?
But I would like to say a misunderstanding, is junior and intermediate programmers, need a lot of code to improve their technical ability, constantly invest time to learn, research, broaden their horizons. But when it comes to senior programmers, such as team leaders and architects, they must write less and less code.
For these people, they do not need to work overtime to give full play to their value. They have their own core competitiveness and irreplaceability. They also write some core and key codes and spend more time on technology selection and problem solving solutions. So a programmer’s career doesn’t always involve overtime, and when you have a core competency, you have a lot of freedom to work.
What is the core competence? When I say a word, everyone will have experience: your technical leader, a decision can improve the development efficiency of the team by 10 times, or reduce the development efficiency by 10 times. There may be no results in the end, and he even tells you that this cannot be done again!
This is the core competitiveness! A programmer on the selection of technology, solution evaluation and judgment, this is his core competitiveness. This kind of competitiveness is not you brush a pile of algorithms, recite a pile of eight-essay, learn a lot of interview skills, he can have. These are skills that take years of coding, learning, experimenting, and thinking to develop.
So there are two stages to what we call the “overtime crunch” and the “35-year-old crisis”.
Within 5 years of working
If you are in the first five years of your working life, this is the time when you are energetic and quick to learn. Spend a lot of time and energy accumulating, adding, and trying to broaden your technical horizons while you’re on your way up. In this way, you can accumulate the height that no one else can surpass.
If you’re lying flat at this stage, you’re thinking that everyone else is rolling anyway, I don’t want to be a part of it, and it’s good to have a fish in your spare time at work every day. Go on like this for a few years, and you won’t gain much in technical depth or breadth, except for the business code. When you find that the new guys are getting better and better, and they’re bringing in more technology than you can handle, you suddenly realize, oh my God, the crisis is really here, is it too late to get involved?
I’m not encouraging people to introvert, but I’m very much against doing meaningless and self-consuming things. But hard work and accumulation is never volume, more is not an excuse for not wanting to struggle. If the volume really cannot be avoided, it must be “valuable volume”.
I actually encourage you to roll outside rather than inside. It means that after you have gained some experience in a certain field, you should try to get out of your current circle and explore the outside world.
Let’s say you’re a front-end programmer, and even though your Title is “front-end,” you can’t just keep going around the front end. As a programmer, as long as the program development, front-end and back-end product server, you have to touch, so that your vision will become broader, more perspective, and your judgment and ability will improve.
We always feel that a front-end should specialize in JS, only ready to move to the full stack development will contact the back end. No, contact doesn’t have to be done. Understanding the whole helps you develop a holistic view. For example, if you have a problem, you can only study it on the front end, maybe the problem is just a line of code on the back end, but you don’t know, so it will waste a lot of time.
After five years on the job
If you have been working for more than five years, you have not done all of the above mentioned, and you are almost 30 years old, or front-line development, and still have not formed core competitiveness, this time the 35-year-old crisis hit. Although your boss may not make you layoff, you may snapping at the thought of losing your job one day.
But if you do all the above, by the end of five years, you’ll probably be leading a small team or becoming an architect. Whether you enter dACHang or not, you will always be irreplaceable in one place.
The basic tasks of the work you will be assigned to the group partners, structure and problems to overcome, in the long run, you will be more and more valuable, this is no more severe graduates can do, this time you will have a 35-year-old crisis? Of course not.
And I have a hunch that the programmer industry must be more free to do. When you have outstanding skills and skills, you can choose to work anywhere. You don’t have to stick to a company or a city.
Maybe one day you can rent a small house on the beach in Sanya, get up in the sun every morning, turn on your computer, arrange your work for the day, read cutting-edge technology, review your colleagues’ code, spend a few hours solving the remaining problems, and then squint in the sun again.
It’s ideal to talk about it, because we have to look into the future. But the idea is that if you haven’t built up your core competencies in five years, the 35-year-old crisis may not be too far away. Conversely, it is a different situation.
How to do a side hustle
It says that the essence of the 35-year-old crisis for programmers is that there is no core competence. Back to the side business, how can a side business help us combat our 35-year-old crisis?
Since the crisis comes from the core competitiveness, the purpose of the sideline must be to help us improve the core competitiveness.
Here we will also have a misunderstanding, think that the purpose of doing sideline is to make money, open up a new way of income. That’s not wrong, either, but do you think a programmer making $1 million a year needs a side business?
People’s energy is limited, and if your side business isn’t meant to strengthen your main business, it’s meant to take some of the energy away from your main business, you may make money, but you won’t make as much money in the long run as you keep improving.
In addition to hard power, core competitiveness also includes the following:
- fame
- Word of mouth
- To help others
- Share technology
- Share ideas
Fame Needless to say, the road will be much smoother if you accumulate fame in any circle; Word of mouth is your ability to get things done; Helping others is your ability to help others grow together. Any strengths you have, including skills and ideas, that you think are valuable, share them so that people can get to know you in more ways than one. It’s another name card on your resume.
If your goal is to increase your soft power in these areas, OK, this is the best. These aspects may not see short-term returns, just pay, but stick to it, will certainly bring you unexpected surprises.
What are the specific ways to do sideline? I think two are enough:
- Write an article
- Record the video
Writing articles is a really, really good way to learn and summarize. The ability to hear and see is innate, but the ability to read and write is acquired. For example, if you watch a technical video, you seem to have learned it. In ten minutes I’m going to ask you to write down the key message of this video, and you think, hey, what was that again? I don’t think I remember. Something you think you know, but when you write it down, you realize it may be an illusion.
Writing forces you to remember and think, and you can’t write without really absorbing and digesting. So keep writing will improve our thinking and summarizing ability. If you don’t jot it down, you’ll probably forget it in a few months. It doesn’t pay to wait until it’s time to write your resume and suddenly find you have nothing to write.
In addition, you can also publish your articles to the community, which will get a lot of feedback from readers, which will give you very positive encouragement, and help you to find out what is missing, and at the same time, it will gradually accumulate your reputation and reputation.
However, the beginning of writing an article will be more painful, not good, but also unable to suppress. In fact, I am also in this state now. I have to write an article for a week, and I always feel that it is not smooth and the structural design is almost meaningless. But only hard scalp to write, write more will always be handy.
As for video recording, I’ve only recently discovered the benefits of this, somewhat belatedly.
Have to admit that most of us programmers are nerds, do not talk, the expression ability is just so-so. Many people would rather write a few lines of code than say a single word. But you know, if one day you’re really good at it, and you want to share your experience with others, if you can’t make the key points very succinct and understood, is that going to be your weakness?
Although recording a video is a summary and reflection, it requires more expressive skills than writing an article. The ability to express yourself is a universal skill that you need to move up, almost a requirement if you want to be in management. However, we have few opportunities to express ourselves in our work and life environment. If you can share your skills through video recording, it will not only help you to chat, but also practice your mind and language organization in front of the camera. This is a very good exercise.
In a word, it is the right way to build core competence, not just code, but constantly break through your own limitations.
This article is not talking about how to make money on the side business, but to earn “core competitiveness”, although this thing can not directly bring money, but it is not your confidence to resist risks?
I want to see more
This article first public number programmer success, there are core technology dry goods, there are also programmers of the workplace perception, interesting life. Please follow me for more good articles on front-end engineering and architecture.
In addition, I also set up a front-end wechat group for exchange and sharing, asking questions and answering questions. If you are also interested, welcome to add my wechat to pull you into the group ~