01. Naked midlife crisis

A few days ago, one of my friends (Moon Rain) added me to wechat and sent me a message:

Hello, thank you very much for your friend request through wechat. When I was reading the essence of the first issue of planet, I saw your article. As a technical person, I was very impressed with your struggle and ashamed of my unexamined life.

When I read the message, my face blushed with embarrassment, so I replied, “Lol, I’m a better word for unexamined than you are.”

Perhaps amused by my unintentional words, the moon rain relaxed and then replied to me with a long section of content, which I took a part for everyone to have a look.

Ha ha, you are joking. You show your worth by your actions. As for me, I always think a lot but do little. I started my blog in 2009, but I didn’t stick to it. Just like many other things, I gave up before I knew it. Now nearly 40, I feel in danger and have no confidence in the future.

His last words, like a sharp Swiss Army knife, cut right into my heart. Although MY age is still 1/4 away from 40, the sense of crisis always accompanies me and never abandons me.

There are two main sources of my crisis.

First, on the main business, the company’s project is slow to open the situation. If the new AD barrage doesn’t work, we might as well go outsourcing (but outsourcing isn’t easy).

Secondly, on the side business, although I can earn 2~5K per month by writing, it is still unstable (in the stage of farmers farming, they live by the weather). In the past two months, the official account received three advertisements, which seemed to drag down readers’ interest in reading. The number of articles read did not increase with the increase of readers.

To this end, I specially looked for the author of “Jiangnan a little rain” Songge chat. He advised me not to lose heart and gave me a great gift — more than 500GB of high-quality teaching videos, involving Java foundation, Web foundation, database, Java Advanced, Java distributed, microservices, big data, artificial intelligence, big front end, Python, etc., very rich. You can click on the menu “free video” of the official account to get it (classified).

The cup of bitter wine of the middle-aged

There is a popular saying on the Internet that the IT industry is a battlefield for young people. This statement sounds painful, but it is true.

First of all, the work intensity of programmers is very high, especially after the implementation of 996 work schedule in some shameless enterprises. More meetings, more business, longer hours, less breaks. I had no choice but to fish for a while.

People are not computers, after all, that can be revived with a reboot. After 30, the body starts to go downhill slowly.

Recently, IN order to write an article, I often stay up until two or three o ‘clock in the night. I have to get up at seven or eight o ‘clock the next day. However, I feel depressed all day long. Speaking of which, I have to nag a word, dear readers, while I still can write moving articles, to cherish, to read more ah!

Secondly, middle-aged people have their own families and it is difficult to take care of them if they work overtime for a long time.

Yesterday I went to a parents’ meeting. One parent said bitterly that her husband had worked overtime very hard in the past year. When he got home at night, his child had already fallen asleep and he had to leave early in the morning for fear of being late and having to deduct the money. What looks like a family of three is actually isolated from each other.

Moreover, the IT industry is changing so fast that middle-aged people don’t have any advantage. Experience, really, is nonsense. A lot of technology, before you become an expert, declines. Android is as bleak as it was a few years ago.

As for young people, they have plenty of physical strength and work overtime, which is regarded as learning experience. This is also the experience of many successful people, who always show off how much overtime they worked in those years. They only have two years of working time, but they just add three years of working experience by working overtime. But I don’t think it’s worth showing off. It’s a call for young people to give up their lives and indulge in overtime.

Last week, I had an interview with a company (go out for an occasional interview to see where YOU stand in the market). The interviewer was very nice and talked with me for over an hour, thinking I had a lot to offer. But when it came time to talk about salary, he said: “We this, no matter the new, or the old, should start from the grassroots.”

The subtext of this sentence is that although I am one of CSDN’s top 500 blog experts and have published a book “The Road to Web Full Stack Development Advancement”, which is second to none in Luoyang area, I have no competitive advantage. I still have to prove myself at the grass-roots level, and then I can be promoted and get higher salary.

Deplorable! I’ve worked so hard writing that I can’t put on a gorgeous coat when I’m looking for a job!

If I was young, of course, I could go to grassroots training ah, I would like to go, with the strength of the word, I like to speak with strength. But I’m middle-aged now, and the burden of family life is heavy. I can’t fight with young people with a basic salary. But then again, let’s keep going!

03, the middle-aged rise from the ashes

Look at a book that says this:

Compared with younger brains, middle-aged brains show a decline in performance in two areas: computational speed and attention. Other areas, such as pattern recognition, spatial visualization and logical reasoning, did not decline but actually improved.

In my case, the drop in concentration is the most obvious. When I was a teenager, I never felt sleepy reading a book from day to night, even a political book. Now, reading has become my best hypnotic, I can’t sleep at night, pick up a book, especially technical programming, within ten minutes, you are sure to yawn, tired.

Watching basketball friends should know that athletes over the age of 30, even if the veteran, like Carter 42 years old can also sign a contract with the Hawks, it is really countable ah.

Zhang Xiaolong: born in 1969, he became the head of wechat at the age of 41, but he has made hundreds of billions of contributions to Tencent.

Playing such chicken blood is really very boring, there is no a bit of universality. For Zhang Xiaolong, 40 years old is the starting point of his career, but for some programmers, it is already the end of their career.

Do middle-aged people deserve a crisis? You really should be honest about your midlife crisis.

In my case, it’s true that concentration and energy levels have declined, but I’m far more productive than I was before I was 30. It used to take a week or more to fix a bug. Now, my brain’s ability to make logical inferences helps me locate a problem quickly and solve it quickly.

It should be obvious to regular readers that the quality of my writing is much higher than before. I can assure you that my writing will get better and better as time goes on.

This ability to grow with age reminds me of two masters, Andrea Pirlo, the metrmetre of the Juventus midfield, and Jason Kidd, the mavericks’ commanding officer that year, who really get better and better with age, with a level of stability and judgment on the court that young players don’t have.

Some readers may be unconvinced and say: Pirlo and Kidd retired after all! Don’t they retire and work till they’re a hundred — it’s impossible!

A sense of crisis isn’t really a bad thing, it’s a warning that it’s time to think about the future. For programmers, design patterns are not yet mastered, so learn them. The algorithm is not sophisticated enough, quickly learn it; Concurrent programming is not easy, quickly learn it; Sideline is not yet, quickly think of a way!

If there’s a crisis and you don’t change it, you’re just sitting there waiting for young people to beat you to death on the beach.

Again, the best way to deal with a midlife crisis is not to go to a 21-day writing boot camp — if you have no grounding in writing and are not particularly interested in it, writing is not really your thing. Not all retired athletes go into coaching. You see, SHAq did a great job as a commentator.

04, the real crisis of the middle-aged

1) Short video addiction.

Because of the number limit, sometimes I have to take a bus to work (Luoyang has no subway). Oh, my God, that’s the kind of music you’d hear in a short video.

Most of those glued to their phones are middle-aged, their faces numb with no smile of satisfaction. I could see they were just killing time.

2) Be opinionated.

They think that society is too impetuous, people are too impetuous, young people are too impetuous, only their own to maintain a pure and kind heart. He can rattle off a host of objections to any proposal. He turns a deaf ear to any hot topics that happen on the Internet.

A college student joked in a group: wechat is too dehumanizing, historical articles can not be searched through the search engine, in addition, the author should continue to output.

This is what era, writing blog can be search engine search, the author worked hard to send an article, a second later was plagiarized by others, title casually change, search ranking higher than the original.

To know, this is a change very fast era, middle-aged people should embrace this change, should not teach Zhang Xiaolong to do products.

3) Keep your job.

Go out early and come home late every day, afraid of late deduction of wages, off work will affect performance. The boss is right about everything, afraid to make any suggestions of his own for fear of being fired. What the leader says is right, cautious, afraid of the leader wearing small shoes. Anyway, it was a good move to keep the job.

Before looking at ruan yifeng’s blog, there is a sentence of deep recognition.

Technological advances have allowed humans to live longer and healthier lives, but they have also made us less useful. In the future, everyone may have to choose their life twice: once when they graduate from college and look for a job, and once when they are 45 and unemployed.

Middle-aged people, because of the pressure of living, dare not easily change jobs, but there is no need to become submissive. The Qing Dynasty had long since died, and the iron rice bowl had long since disappeared. Five or six years of so-called “stable” jobs could be considered long.

Recently is not popular “sideline just need”, the middle-aged should have their own sideline.

Remember the reader moon rain at the beginning of this article? He recognized me because he was impressed by my sideline. If you want to know what I do on the side, check out the article “Should Programmers Outsource?” It’s written in great detail. It’s all practical.

05, finally

Thank you for your reading. It is not easy to be original. If you like it, please give a thumbs-up, which will be my strongest motivation for writing. If you think the article is helpful and interesting, please pay attention to the “Silent King ii” public account, thank you.

PS: secretly tell you, background reply keyword “2048”, you can get free “1W+ programmers receive advanced required reading data package”, hush.