There is no shore for turning back.
01
Wobbly, in the Internet industry for five years, silently looking back, where do you see the lights dim?
When entering the workplace, most programmers will think that they will be promoted and paid more if they study hard in the future. This idea is not wrong, but it is not comprehensive. After five years, whether you will continue to do technology and write code is the core issue.
When you first enter the workplace, you may think that working overtime can continuously improve your ability, and companies that can learn skills can accept even a low salary. However, after five years, you may think that working overtime is constantly squeezing your room for advancement, and low salary is the ceiling of your life.
The key point here is that most of what you know and think when you enter the workforce will not apply five years later.
The biggest pressure you face after five years of work is making choices: career ceiling, technical ceiling, salary ceiling, thirtieth ceiling.
How to face these problems is what most programmers are thinking about and struggling with. The only reference point for making a choice is to maximize benefits, which can be understood as a better promotion and salary increase in the workplace.
Five years, the biggest change is not work experience, ability accumulation, but mentality, clearly know that there is a huge gap between reality and ideal.
02
Looking back on my five years in the workplace, one of the most recognized words is: learn to adapt to changes and accumulate abilities.
What has changed is that the technical framework has been updated and iterated for five years, the development tools have changed, the company environment has changed, teammates have changed, and even the wanderings in different cities have happened. I want to put my body and soul together. There is a classic saying that the only constant is the change itself.
To accumulate is: problem solving ability, thinking way, broaden cognition.
This kind of description is hard to describe directly, which belongs to the category of personal cognition. Different people have different views, so we can only think from the perspective of popularity.
First of all, let’s talk about technology. Most of the white level employees hope to improve their technical ability and strive to achieve the level of architect. However, in the current Internet environment, it is still difficult to realize this idea.
If you look at the current situation, it is rare for a technical team of 20-30 people or 10-15 people to have an architect to manage the underlying framework.
There are a number of reasons for this, starting with the high cost of the architect, the environment architecture not requiring frequent upgrades, and perhaps, to put it bluntly, the framework being higher than the project lifecycle.
As a result, most of the business of most companies can be solved with most of the mature open source frameworks available, which leads to the role of architect often being replaced by project leaders or directly handled by higher-level developers, which is the reality.
This leads to the idea of choosing the right technical framework. That is, there are more talent in this area and more open source solutions to reduce the impact of technology on the company’s business development.
So why continue to learn and accumulate technical skills? Without this ability, programmers may not be able to stay in the job for five years. They need to constantly solve various problems in their work with profound accumulation of technology, and improve their cognitive boundaries to realize business needs with the breadth of technology, which is the fundamental guarantee for their physical safety.
This is why many programmers five years later experience a spike in stress. Another barrier to management is business thinking and awareness.
03
There’s really no need to be obsessed with the question of whether or not programmers should put their heart into the business, as long as the company is not purely technical, it needs to face the business.
Technology, operations, products, and management are all business oriented.
From the perspective of my career path, the biggest change in the past five years is my ability to solve business problems. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t know how to solve many business scenarios, but after a few years, I designed business solutions.
This is the fundamental reason why most programmers can get a raise when they change jobs in the first five years of their career. In the face of business scenarios, based on accumulated experience and existing open source tools, they can quickly provide reasonable solutions and implementation processes.
Five years on the job may not have the same level of technical clarity as a beginner, but you can avoid many potholes by writing programs and look at the business in great detail.
To solve the accumulation of business ability, the need for the breadth of technical vision is even greater. For example, in the early stage of the workplace, there is no way to deal with massive data, but after a few years of work, to see the technology stack of the data industry is really a vision problem of technology selection.
What is the measure of technical competence? From a common point of view: the architecture and code design of the system can adapt to the changing needs of the business.
Compared with the technology, the change of the business more frequent fast, senior engineer or architect is high salary, the characters on the one hand, able to adapt to the business of iteration, and in the workplace have certain forward-looking, will consider business logic changes under the condition of code reuse, such ability is the need to certain technical field and the precipitation of business thinking.
So in the workplace: business can be organized, code can be written clearly, the chances of getting an opportunity are higher.
04
Most people can have a smooth career by looking at technology and business from a rational perspective, but the balance and choice between the two are different at different stages.
When thinking about how to choose, we can refer to the logic of the 80/20 principle, that is, in any group of things, the most important only account for a small part, about 20%, and the other 80%, though the majority, is secondary, so it is also known as the 80/20 rule.
Personally, I really like this principle. Most people are not geniuses, so it’s hard to do more than one thing at a time, and focus on one thing at a time.
However, the simple 80-20 model may not be suitable for most people in the early stage of the career, because there is a lot to learn in the early stage, how to survive in the workplace: professional ability, workplace relations, social behavior, product design and so on.
, of course, not all these things will be deliberately learning by heart, but the principle of reasonable arrangement of the 226 or any other combination is more sensible, first of all, is a professional ability to focus on practice, can choose according to their interests and reasonable second to get to know one or two aspects, such as products, operations, operations, data, etc., after all three to five years later will continue to write the code is hard to say, It’s always safe to give yourself a chance.
At the beginning of my career, I basically thought about problems from a technical point of view, how to improve my coding ability quickly and how to stabilize my company is the primary goal. Therefore, I spent most of my time doing basic coding and learning norms. At this time, maybe 90% of my thoughts were on basic coding, while the other 10% would learn the environment architecture.
Up to a year or two, start development need to be independent is responsible for the module, the need to design the whole code, this business will enter the field of vision, to know the business relationship of upstream and downstream, learn to think how to design the code structure, to changes in the requirements under the condition of less code changes, this time may be put 20% of the state of mind in terms of business, 30% study architecture.
Three to five years this time, is to improve problem solving ability the fastest time, because programmers are basically at this stage in the development of core business links, such as trading, payment and settlement, intelligent business module, need to have a clear grasp for business as a whole, or dig a hole for himself, this phase of business flow a lot of thinking.
The more core the business line is, the more likely it is to break out various problems. If you do not pay attention to the details in daily work, the abnormal automatic messages and emails in the middle of the night are always easy to make people haggard.
Therefore, it is equally important to study technology to improve oneself and to cultivate one’s business cognition. I think the weight of the two is equal, but reasonable weight division needs to be made at the appropriate stage.
05
Based on technical ability and business thinking, I learned to make choices and survive in the workplace. These are the biggest experiences I have learned in the first five years of my career.
Both of these concepts, whether technical or business, are still big propositions and not easy to grasp, so learning to clarify the common modules of competence in both areas is key.
Whether technical or business, is impossible to completely copied from one company to another company, but can put a company technical framework, business solutions, and to another company, such as technology in the field of architecture, design, process, data management, business area of ways of thinking, logic, analysis and other products, These are the core competencies and are the requirements of most companies’ recruitment, so they are the ones that need to be accumulated in the work.
People’s energy is limited, and faced with the ceiling of 30, various events will come one after another, in the workplace, learn to arrange time properly and constantly improve the core ability, so as to ensure their competitiveness.
There may be no shore to look back on, but the ability to change boats or have a small raft is a big difference.
End