High-paid, low-skilled programmers take half of the "merit" of the entrepreneurial bubble

[[152535]]

In September this year, Alibaba reduced the scale of campus recruitment and the salary was also lower than in previous years. Not only non-technical positions such as product and operation were affected, but even core development positions were not spared. There were even cases where students were given offers and then rejected, which gave fresh graduates a taste of "embracing change."

Communities full of programmers, such as v2ex and Zhihu, immediately began to denounce Alibaba. The programmers said that Alibaba's performance in this matter was extremely bad, and then they criticized Alibaba's HR system as usual, and finally ended with "Ali Pills".

Amidst the voices of condemnation, I thought of something else. Recalling the time when Alibaba went public in Hong Kong in 2008, when it was at its peak, Jack Ma called out the slogan "Dig deep holes and store up food." Jack Ma is a person who is very sensitive to trends. As smart as he is, he would not ask for a reduction in staff size without reason. Jack Ma was the first to do something that everyone wanted to do but didn't do - reduce the excessive salaries of practitioners, especially programmers, and burst the bubble of programmers' high salaries.

Irreplaceability leads to high salary?

It is no longer news that programmers are highly paid.

The "2015 Spring China Employer Demand and White-collar Talent Supply Report" released by Zhaopin.com in late April for the 2015 spring job search period showed that among the top ten high-paying industries, the Internet/e-commerce industry topped the list with a monthly salary of 8,626 yuan.

According to a survey report by 51CTO, the average annual salary of a programmer with one year of work experience is 108,000 yuan, the average salary of a programmer with two years of work experience is 167,000 yuan, and the annual salary of a programmer with three years of work experience can exceed 200,000 yuan.

According to the comments of ourcoders members, we know that French programmers, at the beginner stage, graduate students can earn about 30-35K Euros per year. At the intermediate stage, it is about 50K per year. At the advanced stage, it is about 80K, which is the price of CTO of an average company.

The salary level of Chinese programmers is close to that of French programmers, and it is close in absolute salary. Considering the cost of living, Chinese programmers will live a happier life.

There are reasons for high salaries. From the comments in the development community, we can see that programmers believe that although the salaries in the Internet industry are rising, there is indeed a bubble, but this bubble is mainly reflected in the salaries of product managers and operations staff. Programmers are the backbone of the Internet industry who are the few who insist on doing practical things, so they deserve to have high salaries. Envy programmers for their high salaries, u can u up, I am capable, so I can get so much money.

This makes sense at first glance. The well-known product manager Chunyin once said that most positions in the Internet industry, such as operations, products, and art, are not very unique. If talents in traditional industries are determined to change careers, they can adapt to these positions quickly. Programmers will not face such competition, because development still has a certain threshold compared to other positions. People from other industries who want to switch to programmers are much more difficult than the previous positions. If a product does not have an artist, the front-end programmer can take over first, and if there is no product manager, the project manager can temporarily do it. But without programmers, products cannot be born.

From a development perspective, programmers are indispensable. From an employment perspective, programmers are not easy to train. These two characteristics lead to high salaries for programmers.

It’s not just the salary that is in the bubble, it’s also the mindset

But I don't agree with most programmers.

If programmers' high salaries come from the uniqueness and difficulty of their work, then why are programmers being treated better today as programming becomes increasingly simplified?

It is an indisputable fact that the difficulty of programmers' work is constantly decreasing.

There is indeed a lot of work hidden behind a simple APP, such as various fool-proof designs, anti-misuse, error prompts, etc. These tasks were often done by programmers in the early years, but today with a high degree of division of labor, this part of the work is basically handed over to product dogs, and programmers can spend more time on coding and thinking about architecture, which is relatively easy.

With the continuous development of technology, the coding workload of programmers has been greatly reduced. If you want to develop an application, you can search on the Internet and find all kinds of basic modules. You can use them. User behavior monitoring, mobile front-end framework, social login, sharing, commenting, debugging, performance testing, etc. Even O2O complete solutions can allow developers to quickly develop an O2O application in a short time.

Most startups don’t have many technical problems to solve in the early stages, so they can achieve good optimization results by using cloud platforms. The work of programmers in this generation is already very easy, and it has been reduced many times compared to programmers in the past.

However, even at a time when development work is simpler than ever before, many domestic projects still have constant bugs and poor performance. For example, Renren.com has had many bugs since its birth and listing, and the early order changes of the Hungry Me app had to be synchronized in real time, resulting in slow response when the network was poor.

Even though they are both programmers, the treatment of programmers in software outsourcing companies is still very poor. In fact, according to the outsourcing workflow of Caicheng, a well-known collaborative software developer, there is not much difference between outsourcing work and Internet software development, and the difficulty is similar.

Programmers are not better able to solve problems because of their higher salaries. The treatment of programmers in outsourcing companies also indirectly proves that programmers are not paid high salaries just because their work is more technical. This logic cannot explain the low salaries of programmers in software service companies, nor can it explain the constant bugs in Renren and Hungry?

It is natural for programmers to have such thoughts, because in school education, teachers often instill in us a point of view that if you don't work hard, you will face many difficulties when you are looking for a job in the future, and then you can only stare at the top students who get seven or eight offers. Similar preaching runs through elementary school to university. Such education makes it easier for people to attribute their success to their own efforts.

In order to urge students to study hard, teachers will naturally link personal efforts with the final rewards, but real life is not linear, personal efforts are not the only factor affecting the final job search results, not even the most important factor. Objective factors such as industry and time point have a more important impact on the final job search results.

There are many students who major in computer science who don’t know anything, and they don’t have to worry about finding a job. At most, they can go to a training course and basically get a high salary after graduation. However, students majoring in mechanical engineering and students of liberal arts need to face a more difficult job season every year.

It is true that the big names are always big names and they should get high salaries, but the salary of fresh graduates from training courses can be as high as 8,000. Anyone can see that there is a lot of bubble in it.

These bubbles are not only driven by external forces, but also blown up by programmers themselves, because they constantly advocate the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the programmer profession. This voice will be greatly amplified in certain specific time periods, such as the bubble economy, and will then have an impact on real life.

When the bubble bursts

The profession of programmer has been around for a long time. It can be said that programmers have existed since the advent of computers and the software industry. Programmers appeared much earlier than UI designers, product managers, and operations specialists. In the early days, programmers often made fun of themselves, but now some people feel that they have become the chosen ones because their overall salaries have increased.

If you are really a child of destiny, perhaps your salary will not skyrocket, but will only maintain a high salary and high threshold status, just like the scientific researchers and research institute members of large enterprises.

The real driving force behind the increase in salaries for programmers in the Internet industry is the Internet industry market, or more directly, this wave of entrepreneurial bubbles. Now that the financing environment is good, startups are not short of money, and in order to attract talent, they can naturally offer high salaries. Startups are poaching people so fiercely that BAT has been poached to the point that they are in a dilemma of frantically recruiting interns to write code.

Driven by startups, the overall salary level of programmers has increased. Not only have the salaries of senior talents increased several times, but ordinary talents have also risen. Ordinary programmers who stayed in the original company found that the big guys around them had left, and they became supervisors, so they naturally got promoted and salary increases; startups found that one CTO was not enough and they had to find a few code farmers. What should they do? They still have to spend more money to hire a few skilled workers, after all, they are in a hurry to start work.

Founders who are not from a technical background don’t understand technology very well. They always think that their projects need very good talents. They recruited good programmers, but the bosses don’t understand technology and are not good at communicating about salary. They just know that other companies pay a lot, so they also ask for a higher price.

Not every company needs to do IOE like Alibaba, nor does every company need to delve into difficult neural networks and pattern recognition algorithms like Google. Most startup projects are relatively simple. In addition, most complex modules, such as pattern recognition, fuzzy search, and personalization, have corresponding SDKs opened by large companies. Wise entrepreneurs will not choose to reinvent the wheel at the beginning of their business, and the use of wheels itself has a lower technical content. Sometimes startups recruit experts but have no place for them to display their talents because the project itself does not have too many technical difficulties. *** Asking experts to do the work of adding, deleting, modifying, and checking is a waste of time and money.

Think about it, why did some programmers always call themselves code farmers? Isn't it because the work they usually do is not technically demanding and is always repetitive, so they call themselves code farmers? Some programmers with high salaries should really think about the difference between their current work and code farmers, whether they are irreplaceable, whether they are creative, and whether they can get high salaries now, but will they still be able to do so in the future?

Among programmers, there are few who make wheels and many who use them. Now the salary increase of those who use wheels is so exaggerated that anyone with a discerning eye can see that there is a lot of bubble. Perhaps because they are dazzled by the high salary, some people have forgotten what their treatment was like before this wave of entrepreneurship.

Programmers need to consider their core competitiveness. The boss cannot remain stupid forever. Until one day he finds that the front-end framework and cloud computing platform are mature, he can find a few mediocre programmers to do the job and pay them less, or even spend money to buy cloud platform website building services and APP construction services, and the job can be done. Then the programmers' salaries will definitely go down.

Even if the bosses have been acting stupidly, there are many other people. Countless people are jealous of the treatment in the Internet industry and are eager to sign up for a training course to learn some mobile development. This influx of people into the industry may not have much impact on the real big guys in the short term, but it will definitely have an impact on those programmers who have only been using wheels for three years, and the effect will be seen quickly.

We all have received computer science training in school, so we have to consider the difficulty of our current jobs. Inflated salaries cannot remain that high forever.

Looking back at what Jack Ma has done, I suddenly feel that he is a bit like the kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, who poked holes in something and was then criticized badly.