Ask yourself! 15 questions that IT technicians must think about

People in the industry call themselves programmers, losers and code farmers, and people outside the industry also often make fun of IT people. So, is it that IT people have no value, or that they have not carefully thought about their own value?

1. Are those who work in IT losers, code farmers, and programmers?

When people mention IT people, they always think of them as dull, unromantic, and focused on IT technology, and they are indifferent even if a sexy beauty lies next to them. Is this really the case? Although it cannot be completely denied that such a situation exists, is it a common characteristic of IT people? There are many such people in other industries, so why do people always talk about programmers? The following picture is a map of the distribution of losers that was circulated on the Internet in 2013 (the picture comes from 3dmgame.com), and the programmer industry ranks first.

In fact, the problem is not that the IT industry has these inherent labels, but the attitude of people in the industry towards themselves. Most people in the IT industry are very hard, and "9 to 5" is only heard of, but many IT people have never seen it. This is a fact that everyone knows. So, it is not ruled out that some programmers need to find fun in hardship to make the hard work more fun. This is of course understandable. Life cannot be executed like a program.

Because the IT industry is very hard and you can only deal with machines all day, programmers gradually don't want to talk to people or go out, and programmers often complain on social networks. "Programmer" is used to describe IT people who are dull and have low emotional intelligence; "code farmer" is used to describe programmers whose work is as hard as farmers and they don't make money; "diaosi" is a combination of the first two.

Therefore, there are two main reasons why programmers label themselves: one is to have fun, and the other is to complain. Why do people outside the industry also join in the fun? I remember many years ago, when I was still a hazy high school student, I especially admired programmers. In my mind, they were the elites of society. Other people also have a sense of mystery about the IT industry. At that time, if people wanted to program, they either had interest and talent, or graduated from a related major, otherwise it would be difficult to do it. But now the situation is different. Software development training institutions outside are recruiting students for junior high school and high school graduates. More and more people can get in touch with software development, and among those who enter this field, their abilities are uneven and their purposes are different. Some have developed very well, while others have not developed ideally. Therefore, in the impression of high-paying industries by people outside the industry, many people in the industry do not get high salaries; people outside the industry think this is an elite industry, while many people in the industry think they are about the same as bricklayers on the construction site.

Why do many programmers remain calm when faced with ridicule from outsiders? The reason is simple: if programmers take this kind of "ridicule" attitude towards themselves, they will not care about how others ridicule them, and may even welcome or resonate with them.

2. How do you view overtime at work and ensure your own health?

Overtime can be divided into active overtime and passive overtime.

Let's first talk about voluntary overtime. There are different motivations for voluntary overtime, which can often be divided into two categories. One is those who are passionate about their careers and willing to devote more time and energy to their careers. The other is those who cannot find a sense of accomplishment and happiness after returning home, so they might as well stay in the company, do some work, or play games for a while. Generally, leaders will not interfere with what employees do after get off work, and they can also save some electricity bills for air conditioning. Some companies also provide overtime subsidies, so they think it's good to stay in the company for a few more hours.

The reasons for passive overtime are not that simple. There are many reasons that may cause passive overtime, which may come from the company, leadership, team, individual and some irresistible factors.

In startups, due to frequent business changes, the company's decisions and directions will also change rapidly, which requires team members to spend more time to cope with these changes. Therefore, the normal eight-hour work system is generally not suitable for startups, unless the founding team is strong enough to ensure very good work efficiency, market insight and execution. Of course, in large companies, there are generally no frequent business changes, otherwise the company is on the verge of bankruptcy. In some domestic Internet giants, overtime has not only become commonplace, but sometimes it can be described as "abnormal". After graduation, a 985 college graduate A entered an Internet giant (in order to protect the privacy of relevant personnel or organizations, the names of specific personnel or organizations will not appear in this article as much as possible) to undertake development work. During the three-month probation period, he worked diligently and went home at around 24:00 every night. After the probation period, he passed the regularization assessment with excellent results. With his strong learning ability, A was very familiar with the business and technology of his project team at this time. He could complete the tasks assigned by the leader in advance and even took the initiative to improve the procedures of the project team. As work efficiency improved, A felt that it was not necessary to stay until 23:00 like other colleagues, so he gradually left earlier, 23:30, 23:00, 22:30, 22:00, 21:30. As time moved forward little by little, although he completed his work tasks with quality and quantity, he was labeled as "not fulfilling his duties" in the eyes of his leader, and his monthly assessment slipped from the initial A to C.

Overtime caused by the team is sometimes inevitable. This involves the division of labor and cooperation within the team. If overtime is often caused by collaboration between teams, it must be that the degree of coupling between team members' work is too high, or there may be serious problems with the technical architecture or team division of labor.

Overtime caused by individuals may be due to the fact that one does not accurately estimate the workload, or that one suffers from severe procrastination, or that one is not familiar enough with the technology. In fact, personal reasons are the easiest to solve, because one can easily find the crux of this type of overtime problem and prescribe the right remedy.

Other irresistible factors, including changes in demand and permanent damage to hard drives, will bring a lot of extra workload.

At present, most domestic IT technicians are forced to work overtime, and it is compulsory. Only a few companies provide overtime pay. Therefore, many technicians have only two choices: either adapt or leave. In a developing country like China, it is difficult to expect the authorities to strongly intervene in this phenomenon.

Not long ago, a news story about a 36-year-old IT man in Shenzhen who died suddenly on a toilet lid caused a sensation on the Internet. A programmer who graduated from Tsinghua University, after working overtime for a long time, finally died of physical overdraft. From the perspective of respecting life, career, company and customers are not as important as one's own life. If one can only choose between career and life and death, I believe that most people will choose to live. From the perspective of the so-called "XX is more important than life", if you can bear the consequences of long-term excessive overtime, or are willing to sacrifice your life for your career like the revolutionary martyrs, then no one can stop you.

#p#

3. How to balance work and family?

When I was attending a salon, a founder of a smart hardware company said to me: Programmers don't have a life at all, their life is work. As a founder with a technical background, it is understandable that he said this, but this statement is not necessarily correct. On the one hand, programmers need to win the strong support of their families. Without their support, programmers may encounter many difficulties on the way to their careers; on the other hand, you can imagine that if you are seriously ill, the person who stays by your bed every day to take care of you is the company leader or your family? After considering these, you may know what to do.

4. Do I have to use Google to search for information?

In many job advertisements, you may have seen many job requirements like "You must use Google to search for technical information. If you use Baidu, then you are not suitable for us." First of all, we know that Google's search engine is better than Baidu, and it locates resources for keywords more accurately. In theory, if you enter the same keyword, Google will match more accurately, which means that you can find the answer more quickly. So does the R&D team need to set rules for the use of tools, such as using Google search, using Linux operating system, and using mechanical keyboards... This reminds me of the story of "Smashing the Violin" in elementary school. Although cheap violins do not perform so well in some tones, as long as the performer's level is high enough, the audience will not realize how expensive the violin is. Back to the topic, for an information retrieval expert, he can use the worst search engine in the world to find content that cannot be found on Google. In other words, whether you can find the required results quickly does not depend on a specific search engine. Moreover, when you use Google and Baidu to search for the same Chinese keywords at the same time, the results presented are similar. Some people may say that Google's English search is better than Baidu's. Well, you can try it. The English search results are similar to those of Bing, Yahoo, etc., which are not blocked. Therefore, information retrieval is a kind of ability, which is not determined by the search tool.

5. How do technical experts treat newbies?

In a company (especially a large one), there are usually a lot of technical experts who are the core technical staff of the company and support the technical platform of the entire company. Those employees who can be called technical experts are generally easy-going and humble. They are particularly patient with questions from technical novices. However, there are also a few people with good technical skills who look down on newcomers in the workplace, especially for the mistakes made by novice programmers. They will point out the mistakes as loudly as possible, or even curse, to show the people around them how good their technology is. It can only be said that as an IT technician, such behavior is very immature. Masters or experts all started as novices. Today's novices may be tomorrow's experts. There is no need to ridicule newcomers in the workplace, which will only greatly reduce your charm in the eyes of your colleagues.

6. How do you view the IT contempt chain?

At the end of 2014, an article titled "The Contempt Chain of Software Engineers" was widely circulated in the IT industry. It mainly introduced the contempt chain in the IT industry from five aspects: programming language, tools, OS, hardware and workplace. Take the contempt chain of programming languages ​​as an example. Static languages ​​despise dynamic languages, combination languages ​​despise C, C despises C++, C++ despises Java and C#, Java and C# despise each other, and C# despises VB... Let's take a look at the historical ranking of programming languages ​​compiled by CSDN:

Java, C and C++ were widely used around 2002, but after 2014, all three declined, only C's decline was relatively small. PHP was widely used when it first came out around 2002, but it fell a lot in 2014. Python was less used around 2002, but it was also widely used in 2014... What do these changes show? Programming languages ​​are changing with each passing day. After all, they are tools. One of the obvious characteristics of programming languages ​​is that they learn from each other, which directly leads to many similarities in design ideas. Therefore, as long as you are proficient in one or two programming languages, the learning cost of most other languages ​​is very low. Therefore, the programming language you are proud of today may become unpopular or even disappear tomorrow. There is no need to despise people who use another unpopular language. Maybe the programming language he uses today will become the mainstream language tomorrow. Many programmers who have a programming language complex do not believe this sentence at all. They firmly believe that the language they use is the greatest in the world and will live a long life.

The same is true for other types of contempt. The technical staff engaged in operation and maintenance are not necessarily less capable than those engaged in development. Maybe a courier on the street used to be a programmer who is better than you. Social positions have their own division of labor. Positions in all walks of life are irreplaceable, otherwise these positions would disappear and there would be no chance of being despised. Maybe he won't do the job you do, and you won't do the job he does.

7. Why don’t you call yourself an engineer?

In China, very few programmers call themselves engineers. Among these people, some are worried that this label will bring too much pressure on them and that their abilities do not match it; or they hope that the outside world will regard them as ordinary programmers; there is also another type who hopes that the outside world will not call them "programmers" or "code farmers". They do not like being teased in this way, but they also do not want to be overestimated, so they prefer to keep a low profile.

8. How influential is salary in choosing a job?

Many job seekers in the IT industry currently have a creed: "How much work you do, how much money you get." If a company is willing to take more money, job seekers usually show subjective willingness to do more work. If there are two offers in front of you, offer 1 pays more, but you don't particularly like its work content, and offer 2's salary is only half of offer 1, but its work content is what you are good at and like. There are often such posts on the Internet, listing several offers and asking netizens to give suggestions. In fact, it is easy to deal with this situation. If what you need most at the moment is money, then decisively choose the one that pays more; if what you need most at the moment is a job you like, you will definitely choose the one you like. When choosing a job, choose what you need most, so that you will be more motivated to work. If you listen to the advice of those so-called experts (such as fresh graduates don't need to care about how much salary, as long as they can learn technology, etc. In fact, for fresh graduates, you can learn technology anywhere, it's just a matter of how much you learn), it will be difficult for you to be serious about your job. If you are currently short of money and have no interest in starting a business, then don't accept the low salary and big promises offered by a startup team, because joining the company will not benefit either the company or yourself.

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9. Programming language is not important, what is important is the design idea?

This is the advice that so-called technical experts give to novices, and teachers in schools also give such advice. When novices ask which language to learn, those so-called experts suggest that novices learn any language at random, and they can find a good job after mastering any language. Although this advice is not completely wrong, it is not completely correct either. Different languages ​​meet different business needs. For example, Java is more suitable for enterprise development, Php and Python are faster in small and medium-sized website development, and Objective-C is mainly used for IOS development... Moreover, different languages ​​have different characteristics, and the underlying implementation is usually not the same. This requires developers to choose programming languages ​​according to their favorite business fields and be quite familiar with the language they use.

10. Do you often impose your ideas on your colleagues?

A common phenomenon among programmers is that they always think their ideas are the best. Everyone has their own ideas, but some people like to express them, while others keep them to themselves. Allowing others to judge your ideas and objectively analyzing their opinions instead of imposing them rudely is a kind of personal charm.

11. How long can IT people work as technicians?

When I was in college, I often heard people say that IT people are young and can no longer write code after the age of 35. If you are still writing code at the age of 35, you will probably be no better than young people who have just graduated.

12. Whatever technology is popular or profitable, should you learn?

Hadoop technology was very popular before, and many companies offered sky-high salaries to recruit Hadoop technicians. But what about now? When Hadoop has cooled down, the salary for this position is not as attractive as before. Popular or profitable technologies are often short-lived, so learning the technology you like is the best way.

13. If one day computers no longer need human programming, what else can you do?

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, if machines can replace programmers in programming in the future, what else can programmers do? The development of computers and the Internet has eliminated many traditional jobs, but with the continuous development of technology, the position of programmer may also be eliminated one day. When IT companies around the world announce the abolition of manual programming, should programmers go home or change careers?

14. Business-driven or technology-driven

Currently, O2O is very popular in China. Strictly speaking, O2O companies are not considered Internet companies. O2O moves part of traditional industries from offline to online. For example, you used to go to restaurants to eat, but now you only need to place an order online and the restaurant will deliver the food to your home. Obviously, O2O is a business-driven company. In such a company, technology is only a support department for the business. Generally, complex technology is not used, but technical personnel are required to understand more online and offline businesses. Companies like Baidu are typical technology-driven companies. They use and research more advanced technologies, and there are many scientists in them. Therefore, if you want to have in-depth expertise in technology, it is definitely easier to do it in a technology-driven company. If you want to use simple technology to change traditional industries, business-driven O2O is what you are looking for.

15. How to define success

Many years after graduation, there are always people among classmates who are doing well and who is doing poorly. So what is the standard for good and bad? How much money one makes, whether one has bought a house in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or Shenzhen, how high one's position is, whether one works in BAT? Different people have different criteria for judging, but most people measure whether one is successful by money. But is the standard for success so simple? If we must give a definition of success, then success should be calculated like this:

Success (S) = (work happiness * work happiness weight + work salary * salary weight + … + life happiness × life happiness weight + family harmony * family harmony weight + …)/n

The s***ers here are the most successful people.

Original address: sanesee