Advice from an old programmer: Don’t rely on technology for your whole life

I am doing it myself now, but I have been engaged in software development for many years before. When I think about myself, I feel that I want to say something to those friends who are new to JAVA/DOT. NET technology. I hope you can get some inspiration from our experience (maybe what I say is not good, you don’t agree, but don’t throw bricks at me for my sincerity).

1. In China, you must not think that learning technology can exchange for a stable life and high salary. You must not think that those who are engaged in market development and errands have no future.

I don't know if you know that a considerable number of software companies in China have pitifully small software development teams, some of which have only 1-3 people. They are not even a project team, but such a team has to undertake all the software development tasks of a software company. During the critical stages of software launch and development, team members need to work overtime day and night, and they also need to worry about the bugs found in the tests and the software module functions that cannot be submitted on time. Sometimes, if you are unlucky enough to join the on-site development team, you need to leave your hometown and say goodbye to your girlfriend to carry out closed development. In addition to coding, you usually eat and sleep (rich companies even hire a nanny to cook for you, so that you can save more time to devote to work, so that you can always rest when you are tired and work immediately when you are not tired)

What's more frightening is that the interpersonal relationships you come into contact with will be very monotonous. Apart from a limited number of technical personnel, you will hardly see people working in other industries or positions. Your circle of friends will be small and monotonous, and it may even destroy your original love (imagine that you have been doing on-site development in another place for more than two months, but have never met your girlfriend. Will your girlfriend grin at you?).

Maybe you get the so-called white-collar salary, but you lose the freedom to enjoy life. If you want to be a technician, especially a developer, I think you will soon understand how much you want to stay in one place for a long time, make some friends, and have more time to live.

Compared to our lives, relationships and work, friends who work in pre-sales and market development have much more time outside of work than we do. Sometimes their work time can even be balanced with their life time. Through market development, they can get to know people from all walks of life and make friends of all kinds. Frankly speaking, they have more opportunities to make money and develop than us, as long as they are as hardworking as we are. (There is a kind of hardworking ordinary person. If you give him a different job, he will immediately become a hardworking and outstanding person.)

2. When learning technology, never think that if you achieve technical excellence, you can become a 100% respected person.

Once, a person said this during an interview for a project manager: I only hire the most obedient people who follow my requirements. If they are obedient, I will hire them. If they are not obedient, I will not hire them no matter how good their skills are. This person was then given a trial opportunity, and if nothing unexpected happens, he will definitely be the successor to the next project manager.

Friends, do you know? No matter how strong your skills are, you can't spare time to study the Linux source code like others, or even write a Linux masterpiece to show your talent. What you need to do is to write code according to the requirements. The meaning of writing code is to have all the rules. If you write according to the rules, you will soon find that the code you wrote yesterday is very similar to the code you wrote today. After you have written code for a while, you will realize how important the technology of copying, pasting and so on is to you. (If you have not done real development for more than 1 year, don't refute me).

If you are lucky enough to hear the conversations of marketing personnel or leaders, you will vaguely feel that they all regard technical personnel as coding machines, and your value is not as important as you think. And within your team, you may be arguing with your colleagues over a technical issue, because he does not agree with you, and you do not agree with him. You both think you are right, and in fact, you are both right. The purpose of the argument is to prove that you are better and stronger than the other party in key situations. (In a project development, no one is willing to listen to others for a long time, and always wants to change positions and lead others.)

3. Don’t think that if I have good skills, I can start my own business and have the capital to start a business because I am a technician.

If you think so, you are totally wrong. You can do a survey and find that among non-technical people, few people know C# and JAVA, let alone appreciate whether your technology is good or not. In a word, technology is just a tool. People who are good at using this tool to work for others are often not good at using this tool to start their own business, because these are two concepts and the skills they train are completely different.

At the very beginning of your business, there may be ten thousand or one million issues worthy of our attention, such as your interpersonal relationships, your ability to handle interpersonal relationships, your understanding of social unwritten rules, whether you understand other people's hearts, whether you can say things that people like, and your planning and promotion of the services you provide, etc. However, you will find that technology is rarely included in these ten thousand or one million. If your business is close to success, you will tell yourself: Why should I do the technology myself? Can't I just hire someone? Only then will you truly understand the role of technology and the role of your previous technical staff.

summary

Based on the above discussion, I would like to advise those friends who are learning technology not to learn technology with the mentality of imperial examinations, and be almost obsessed with learning technology, wanting to master all the technologies in order to make themselves an authority and expert in the field of technology, so that when necessary or when they feel unhappy, they can go online and say that they are seniors to newbies.

Technology is just a tool, a tool for you to survive in a stage of your life. You can like it all your life, but you must not rely on it to survive all your life.

The only purpose of mastering technology is to find a job with it (if you don't want to regard technology as your second life), that is, to work. So when you are learning, don't do those so-called technical exercises or study those cap bubble algorithms and *** number algorithms. What is work?

It means making something for others to use, and when others use it, they can improve their work efficiency. Imagine, what is the point of doing 10,000 technical exercises? It will only make people feel sour. It is better to cultivate a more pragmatic attitude when learning. For example, study which software companies are currently hiring in the local market, how far you are from their requirements, and what specific things you should do to meet their requirements. After you analyze these, you will find that the contribution rate of technology to finding a successful job is not as high as you originally thought.

Whether you are learning technology to find a job or start a business, you must have a clear understanding of technology itself. BILL GATES will not appear in China, because China does not respect technical talents very much at present, and is still in the embarrassing situation of using software technical talents as talent machines. (If you don’t understand, one possibility is that you have only worked in technology and most of your friends are technical people. Another possibility is that you don’t have a job yet, but like to read Bill Gates’ biography).