I’m 36 years old, and it’s been almost ten years since I switched to Android from Java for two years. From the beginning, the technology has gone to management, and now I am still a management post, but I often take the initiative to get back to technology. People often ask me why and what is the secret. My answer is " Keep a young heart, a learning heart, keep thinking... "
In fact, to put it conscientiously, there are more programmers who have not entered the management post, and the ending is not as serious as reported on the Internet. Judging from the situation around me, the 35-year-old boundary is set for those who are older and unwilling. The people who study, or more generally speaking, are those who are "incapable"-people whose working years and ability do not match.
I have been working on technology, and of course I can continue to develop. There are even technical experts who are a few years older than me.
As for technology or management? I personally think it depends on what you want to choose. I also chose to go to the management post because of various anxiety back then, but later I discovered that anxiety also exists in the management post, even worse than the technical post . So I often take the initiative to engage in technology, even if I quit management one day, I still have technical hard currency.
After all, most companies don’t take over the airborne management, they prefer technical experts...
I was in charge of recruiting for a while and interviewed a lot of people. Among them, there were a few high P. After chatting with them, I had some different ideas and even some panic.
There is a candidate who has a good academic background and is doing a core project in a large first-line factory. Because the other party was at a higher level, I directly asked a few questions about the principles of the system, and the other party hesitated for a long time and didn't come back. Well, let me lower the standard and come to an application development problem. The other party said that they had done it before, but it took a long time and I forgot.
I asked a few more questions in a row, all of which were so, either not or I forgot. Later the candidate said that he is now leading the team and he does not need to do these things personally, so he can't remember.
Do you know what is the most important thing? This candidate is not a single case, but many. It can be said that more than half of the high-level candidates I interviewed were in this situation.
So when it comes to development, technology is fundamental. If the technology is lost, the foundation is lost, and the standing is unstable...
After all, a programmer is a technical post. This post has no direct relationship with whether it is a management post or whether it reaches middle age. What really affects the development of programmers is always the technical level.
The Internet workplace is cruel, and basically every level is a big test.
From minions to backbones, to managers, directors, VPs, SVPs, etc., every level will screen out a large number of people.
Mapped to a big factory like BAT, the promotion of each rank is more cruel than the college entrance examination.
If you get older, you are still just a grassroots employee.
So sorry, you may have to give way to younger and cheaper friends.
Many people today are anxious about changing careers at 35 and being unemployed at 40.
Unfortunately, the anxiety of many people will really become a reality.
Especially after the world has been reshaped by the epidemic, it has fallen into difficulties and chaos.
It may not be a simple thing to stay in this industry continuously!
So how do we break through the bottlenecks of workplace development?
How can we not go to the table, at least not so early?
My answer is to continuously improve thinking ability!
Experience without thinking is not experience.
If you can't keep thinking at work, and keep improving thinking ability.
Then you are likely to fall into the predicament of 1 year of working skills for 10 years.
When the warm water turns to boiling water, you may never be able to jump out again.
How do we improve our thinking ability? The following are my suggestions:
1. Adhere to independent thinking
It is human instinct to think conformity with the crowd, and most people are willing to do anything in order to avoid real thinking.
Every time in the Internet industry, there will be a so-called panacea like the Pinduoduo group buying system and the Qutoutiao incentive system.
Including previously fired private domain traffic, community fission, distribution system and so on.
Once these concepts become popular, there will be overwhelming analysis articles.
Many articles just analyze the fur without analyzing the essence.
The boss accidentally saw a so-called Xiongwen, and immediately ordered the team to investigate and study, and quickly implement it online.
The problem is that no one really analyzes whether these articles are written correctly, and whether the written products can be made by these methods.
Take Pinduoduo for example, the foundation of Pinduoduo's communication is WeChat. The birth of Pinduoduo coincides with the historical opportunity of sinking WeChat users and sinking consumption.
Pinduoduo incorporates several trends, which cannot be achieved by simply imitating.
And the business model of Pinduoduo is purely a matter of roi, Pinduoduo can be fun, simply copying this model may not be fun.
To see a phenomenon, you first need to question the phenomenon, rather than accept the phenomenon itself or the opinions of others.
After the questioning, the information is integrated and analyzed, starting from the questioning point to in-depth thinking and in-depth analysis.
In the end, I came to my own conclusion, which is an independent conclusion based on questioning and integrated analysis.
If you can't do this, copy and copy indiscriminately, the products you make will naturally not have good results.
If the workplace is not blessed with good work results, it must be more and more depreciated!
2. Avoid the three major thinking mistakes
The first big misunderstanding: treat "temporary thoughts" as "thinking".
Thinking has a routine and a process, not a "smart idea."
For example, when an architect is designing a framework, he is never just getting started.
It should start with business analysis, personnel analysis, technology selection, and team status.
And most architects must have strong enough abstract thinking, layered thinking, divide and conquer thinking, and evolutionary thinking.
However, when most people are faced with a problem to be solved, they often simply use temporary ideas as a solution.
At this time, if someone asks you: Why do you do this?
You may not be able to come up with more arguments to support your point of view.
Especially the leader of the team, let alone decide what to do or not to do with his head.
Decisiveness without wisdom as a prerequisite is just reckless.
The second biggest misunderstanding: confuse "hypothesis" and "conclusion".
For example, as a product manager, after analyzing the distribution system.
It may come to a conclusion similar to this: users love to take advantage.
Therefore, the distribution system is a way to quickly increase sales.
The whole logical deduction seems to be smooth, but if the premise "users love to take advantage" does not hold, the subsequent deduction will be meaningless.
This premise is actually a "hypothesis" before it is proved.
If the hypothesis is true, then the conclusion drawn is correct; if the hypothesis is distorted, then it is nonsense.
Whether your hypothesis is correct requires data collection and analysis and demonstration.
The third major misunderstanding: the difference between "phenomenon" and "cause" is not clear.
In many problems, there is often only one real cause, and the others are phenomena caused by this reason.
Sometimes, the phenomenon caused by the cause will trigger new changes. At this time, it depends on whether we can trace the source to find the most essential cause.
For example, the company's sales performance is poor. When investigating the reasons, it was found that the morale of the company's sales staff was low at work.
Then, we felt that we had found the reason for the poor performance, so various team building activities started.
But if the fundamental problem is poor product quality, is it useful to make sales team team building?
The low morale is probably just a phenomenon.
The real reason may be the failure to sell the product after hard work.
And the product cannot be sold because the design of the product itself may be faulty.
If you have a headache, you can only stay ill. Only when the essence of the problem is grasped can the right medicine be prescribed to cure the disease.
Many people in the workplace have fallen into these three misunderstandings.
what's the result? The boss explained what to do, did not do well, or led the team into a ditch accidentally.
Three, grasp the essence of the problem
The essence of thinking is to break the routine of thinking and discover the essential laws of things.
The way we solve the problem can be divided into six steps:
Step 1: Find the core of the problem
Before thinking, we must first clarify what the problem is and whether it has value.
Sometimes the problem itself may not be a problem.
If you immediately fall into the "solution domain" to find a solution to the problem, instead of thinking about the "problem domain" first, you are likely to go the same way, and naturally you will not be able to get a good work result.
Step 2: In-depth analysis of the problem
After you have grasped the core of the problem, you need to conduct an in-depth analysis of a problem.
Think about what resources you can mobilize, what information you have, and discover the essence of things.
At this time, previous experience, direct information collection, or feedback from others are all methods of in-depth analysis.
Step 3: Assuming different solutions
When a problem is considered to a certain depth, often you can find a solution.
But this is not enough. You also need to use brainstorming or other logical thinking techniques to find other more hypothetical solutions.
And this process must constantly try to break the stereotyped thinking.
Step 4: In-depth analysis and deduction of different hypotheses
Put the hypothetical solutions together, analyze and deduct them separately, and find out the important hypotheses that can really solve them.
This means that the more hypotheses you can enumerate, the more accurate the conclusions of the analysis will be.
Step 5: Check and verify, execute, and get results
The final step is to investigate and think deeply about the solution.
When your solution can be verified, you can get an executable result.
After you get the results, your hypothesis will be verified.
Step 6: Review and precipitation methodology
After the problem is solved, the results are obtained, the first five steps are reviewed and the methodology is precipitated.
This step is very critical, allowing you to get a greater cognitive improvement and provide experience support for analogy.
Take the example of improving product retention.
First of all, we need to analyze the current status of product retention.
Collect the average retention of products in the industry and the average retention of competing products.
Draw a conclusion: whether to focus on improving product retention.
Next we need to collect the reasons for the current low retention of the product.
Analysis methods include user research, data analysis, competitive product analysis, brainstorming and so on.
After analyzing the reasons for low retention, start to hypothesize various solutions.
Simplifying user paths, changing UI interaction, revealing product value points, and developing new functions are all solutions.
Separately analyze whether these solutions are currently the core key.
The last step is to start execution, use data to verify the results, and continue to review products to gain insights.
In fact, whether you are in technology, product, operations or other positions.
You can try to use these six steps to improve your thinking ability.
Let your daily work no longer be a simple habitual input and output.
Fourth, daily training is very important
The improvement of thinking ability firstly depends on the things within your scope of work.
In addition, you need to discover training opportunities.
For example, if you are a technical person, in addition to your own job growth, you need to read professional books or go to github to see the code written by other people.
Just looking at it is not enough, you need to think about how you can do it yourself, why the author should do this, find the essence of it, and study its principle.
How about making products? You can watch more competing products or other products.
Don't just look at what these products look like.
Think about the people these products face, and what you do if you do it for you.
Is there any room for improvement of these products?
If so, what do you do?
Even do deduction to predict the next improvement direction of these products.
Record your judgments and observe whether these products have made these changes over time.
Then verify your judgment.
To give another example: We usually see a lot of advertisements when we go to work on the subway or on the bus.
At this time, you can completely think about what people these advertisements face.
The good and the bad, and why.
What would you do if you came to the sword?
Making deductions in your head is a way to quickly improve your thinking ability.
If you can persist in such training in your own field, you will have strong problem-solving skills.
Final words
These are my four suggestions for improving thinking ability.
In summary, to master the ability of in-depth thinking, we need to insist on independent thinking, avoid the three major thinking misunderstandings, grasp the essence of the problem, and continue to adhere to daily thinking training.
Only when we truly have strong thinking ability can our career path become more and more smooth.
May each of us be a prosperous back wave, and after thousands of sails, we will return as a young man.
I hope that each of us can continue to grow and always strive to move forward.
In addition to thinking ability, solid technical ability is also enough to help everyone through the "watershed."
The Internet industry is an industry with very fast knowledge iteration. If you do not develop the habit of learning, other people will not stop and wait for you. In this way, you are equal to regressing!
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