Reprinted【COOLSHELL – COOLSHELL--The Development Road of Technicians】

Reprinted from Cool Shell –
The Development Road of CoolShell Technicians
December 28, 2016 Chen Hao commented 74 comments 49,525 people read
an article called "Program Algorithms and Life Choices" in 2012. I used algorithms to The analogy is how to make choices. To put it bluntly, it is how to calculate, but it does not say what directions programmers can develop. Therefore, even with these so-called methodologies, we may still be very entangled and at a loss about our own development, especially when people are 30 years old, this kind of hesitation and confusion will become more and more serious. Although I have written an article on "Coding Age and Programming Skills" before, there are still many technical people who are not confident that they can still do technical work when they are older. I guess that the biggest problem is that the current negative experiences of working in technical jobs (such as frequent overtime, being used as pawns or labor, etc.) make people completely lose hope and future, especially with As I get older, I feel less and less confident about the future.

At the same time, it was also because I was asked at the GIAC conference, what should I do if the programmer is old? At the end of the year, I also repeated the topic of personal development with a few friends in exchanges. More than half of my life, I have lived to the age of "no confusion". Naturally, I will often look back at everything and summarize it. Therefore, during and after the conversation, I also have some thoughts that I want to record. Because I myself am a person on this road, I can't talk about giving guidance to others. I am also a "lost in the world" who is also thinking about where I want to go every day. Besides, my experience and vision are very limited. Therefore, the following words and thoughts on personal development must be limited by my vision and experience. Additions and corrections are also welcome.

These things are not necessarily right, and they may not be all of them. I hope you can think about it at the end of the year and plan for next year.

An important stage and mark
Before

The primary task at this stage is to improve your learning ability and problem-solving ability. This is a very, very critical time period! This time period almost determines your future.


Before the age of 30, this time period should be the time period for people to learn and accumulate. This time period is the time period for studying hard. During this time, you must spend time on problem-solving skills. That said, the skill you must develop is that you can solve problems that most people can't. If you make brute force work overtime and work hard, you will definitely have no future when you are an old scalper. If you are unfortunate enough to stay in a place where you move bricks and are overwhelmed by the business every day, I suggest that you would rather let your project be postponed and be scolded by your boss, but also spend time trying to learn the basics and master some more skills (Many technologies are the same in thinking), and then have the opportunity to change their current situation. Because, compared to your personal future, it’s nothing to be scolded by your boss for project delays, and you won’t get bonuses for poor performance.

To sum up, before you are 30 years old and work for 5-7 years, you need to have:

efficient learning ability. This means - solid basic knowledge, analogy, easy reading of English documents, ability to find cutting-edge knowledge, ability to see the essence of problems and technologies, good reasoning, independent thinking.
Ability to solve problems. That means - you learn efficiently, you've seen a lot of scenarios, you've made or dealt with a lot of mistakes, and you're able to fight fires instead of fighting them.
If you have these two abilities, the phenomenon is - Leadership in the team or the people around you.

Leadership is not being a leader and a manager, but a characteristic that has the following two simple appearances:

helping people solve problems. Most of the people on the team or around you are asking, "What about this problem?" and it's always you who can stand up and tell everyone what to do about it?
be relied upon. Most of the people on the team or around you will come to you for your opinions and ideas when making critical decisions.
Once you have the characteristics of leadership between the age of 30, then you will enter a positive cycle:

Because of your strong learning ability, you will have more opportunities to solve difficult problems.
You have more opportunities to solve problems, you will learn more, and you will be stronger.
The above cycle, as long as it is repeated for a few years, will greatly increase the possibilities of your life.
[Note]

To achieve such characteristics, you need to find your own strengths and an environment that suits you. Just like the specialty of fish is to stay in the water, it is not reliable for fish to pursue the exciting life of land animals.
Generally speaking, people with such potential should appear in school. If you have not shown such potential in college, then you have to work harder at work (Note: The so-called redoubled effort is not to make you work overtime with brute force, but to make you learn more and grow, make brute force work hard It cannot make up for the defects in ability, thinking, and vision).
Leadership also has a range, for example, friends around you, team/part at work, within the circle, and the entire industry. The greater the scope of Leadership, the more selective your personal development will be. On the contrary, it is smaller.
If you have reached the age of 30, there is still no such feature. Then, it may be difficult for you to have such leadership in the future. And your personal development possibilities may not be many (sigh...)
Reading this, I have to say that if you have started to show your leadership, then you can talk about personal development, this article Subsequent content may also be meaningful to you.

Three Directions
of Personal Development Based on my short-sighted experience and vision, I can only see the following three general directions for the development of people (there may be overlap between them):

1) Working hard in the workplace

2) Going to experience Meaningful things

3) Pursue a free life

I have personally experienced these three directions to a greater or lesser extent, and I have seen many people around me go in these three directions relatively successfully. Maybe there are other directions, there is no way, now, my vision is so wide, so, I am here, I mainly talk about these three directions. Again, the premise that people are qualified to go in these three directions is that they already have the leadership qualities I mentioned above!

1. Development in the workplace Development
in the workplace should be the choice of the vast majority of people. By joining the company to achieve the development of life.

We can often see a lot of so-called "career planning", but most career planning is just something created by human resources, which is actually quite different from reality. In my life experience, I spent about 18 years in the company, in banks, small companies, large companies, private companies, foreign companies, traditional IT companies, Internet companies, and different companies have completely different gameplay and Culture, my experience is still rich, but it is not particularly successful. Here I only share some of my experiences in the workplace (not necessarily correct, for reference only).

1. Go

to top companies One of the purposes of going to top companies is to expand the scope of your leadership possibilities.

Because the gap between companies is not small, even if you are a backbone in a low-end company, you may be just an ordinary employee in a high-end company (just like the main force of the Chinese football team may not be selected in the Premier League). So, in the workplace, if you want to maximize your personal value, you must go to the top companies. Because there are very good working methods and scenarios in top companies, this is not something you can read or communicate with, but you must experience it yourself. Therefore, the skills and horizons mastered in top companies are usually much more than those in low-end companies.

In addition, the work levels of each company are aligned with each other. For example, Ali's P number corresponds to Baidu's T number. The positions of domestic first-tier companies are still comparable, but if compared with foreign first-tier companies, there is a gap, and the gap is still very large. For example, a senior engineer at Google or Facebook may correspond to Ali's P8/P9 or even higher.

Yes, for the workplace, if you are the backbone of a top company, then if you go to a low-end company, you have a great chance of becoming their executive and core. It’s like you have been working in Facebook for three or five years to become their technical backbone, then you have a very high probability of becoming an executive in BAT. Conversely, if you graduate and go to BAT to become a screw and spend your youth working overtime every day, the probability that you can become a BAT executive after ten years of work may be very low.

2. Go to a real startup

Going to top company and going to a startup don't sometimes conflict. However, what I want to say here is that a person with strong technical ability may be buried in a large company. Because after the successful business of large companies,

it will not be a problem for successful companies to recruit various senior technical talents, so one less of you is not much, and one of you is not much.
The entire technical system of a successful company has been completed, and Legacy has many problems, so there is not much room for you to play.
Successful companies are more likely to want a stable system. Stability will inevitably lead to conservatism, and conservatism will lead to reluctance to make progress.
Therefore, for middle and senior talents, the personal value that can be generated in large companies may be far less than those of entrepreneurial companies that are eager for talents, have no burdens, can perform to their fullest, and are relatively more flexible and free.

However, going to a start-up company requires careful selection and evaluation. There are many uncertain factors in a start-up company, and the factors of the founder are too great. Therefore, you need to carefully understand the founder and their business situation, and the ideas and concepts are similar. Work better together.

Many startup companies are not really startup companies. They have a lot of luck and drive to start a business, so they should be carefully screened. Because that's not a real startup.

3. Stages of career development

First of all, there is an indisputable fact - the whole society will give the most important work to this group of people in their 30s. That is to say, this group of people in their 30s is the backbone of what this society does.

So, this is an opportunity! If you have Leadership, you will be able to catch up with this opportunity in this time period - the company and leaders place their trust and high expectations on you, and hand over important teams and jobs to you.

Therefore, your 30 to 40 years old has become a career development period, that is, your career rise period. If you don't catch up by the age of 40, then your career will be like this, and there are very few people who are old enough.

In the rising stage of your career, you need more soft skills, such as:

the ability to lead the development of products and business the ability to
promote your favorite culture
project management ability - to achieve perfection in heavy tasks and tight schedules to
communicate and persuade others The ability to
resolve conflicts Ability to
manage and develop teams Ability to
solve emergencies contingency
... ...
In addition, you have to understand a few hard truths in the workplace:

you start to care and deal with complex personnel. Especially in large companies, a large number of people decide their heads on their butts, the interests are complicated, the goals are inconsistent, and everyone has different ideas in their hearts. This time is no longer talk is cheap, show me the code! Rather, code is cheap and talk is the matter. You need to spend a lot of time thinking and observing all kinds of people. It takes a lot of energy to juggle different people, not to spend time creating something of value.
You have to start learning to use all kinds of political tactics. Office politics is unavoidable. The bigger the company, the heavier it is. Since the day you started to become the front-line leader, you have become a role of "not a person inside and out", and you need to deal with subordinates and leaders, employees and the company. As your level gets higher and higher, you need to use more political means, you will learn to judge the times and stand in line, learn to cater to employees and leaders, learn to speak in the language of officials, learn to compromise from time to time, and learn to compromise. And exchange, learn to hold back, learn to express yourself at the right time, learn to be calm, learn to hide yourself, and even you will lose yourself, and start to learn some dark science, such as having to stab people in the back at the right time Knives...you could become someone you hate yourself.
Sounds really boring, so now you see why the executives seem so busy and tired and don't have time to pay attention to the details, because, They are more about coordinating the entire organization and system to operate, and they even have to deal with each other, all kinds of games, there is no way, this is a necessary thing in the workplace! Does it sound like humans are stupid? This is really impossible. If you don't want or don't have the ability to play with these things, then you need to go to companies that allow technologists to do tech with peace of mind. This kind of company, I have seen Microsoft, Google, Amazon or some startups have it. Large domestic companies also have career growth lines for technicians to grow, but to be honest, on the surface, it seems to be a promotion growth line for people to concentrate on technology, but it is actually a management position.

Therefore, there are two paths for technical personnel in the workplace - to become a person who concentrates on technology in a real technology company, or to become a professional manager.



2. The experience of pursuing life
Let me tell you three stories.

The first is that when I was in Ali, I saw a post on the Internet one day. A girl who made a product said that she was going to leave her job and go to France to learn baking and cooking. Art, attracted everyone's praise.
The second is the American boss of Amazon. He has to sign up for a training class every year to learn a skill, such as cooking, driving biplanes, DJing in nightclubs... and even going to Washington to learn to be a politician.
The third one was when I was working at Thomson Reuters, a colleague in the UK said one day that he had quit his job and that he and his wife were going to spend the rest of their lives traveling around the world. I asked him if he had enough money? He told me that the money was not enough. Their plan was to work while traveling, and then they would leave if they had enough money to get to the next stop. He also said that that kind of travel to another city on vacation is so boring, how can you be considered a good travel experience if you don't live there for a while? Well, can't argue with that.
I just think they live their lives so interestingly, and I admire them. Although the crossover is a bit fierce, why not?

Here, I want to say that it is also a good thing to pursue a life experience that is different from others. I personally feel that it is much more interesting than in the workplace. If you're tired of the workplace, why not pursue a different life experience? Even if you don't want to pursue a life experience with a relatively large span, then, in the technical circle, there are many valuable and interesting experiences that you can go to. People who pursue exciting, meaningful and distinctive experiences can actually be considered a kind of success in life, right?

If we only talk about technology, I personally see people who pursue experience, but there are two types of people who are actually very successful:

going to the birthplace of technological innovation to experience innovation. The innovation engine of various technologies of the computer Internet is basically in the United States. We have caught up with this era and have chosen the hottest industry in this era. So, why not go to the technology engine of this era to experience it? In the Silicon Valley Bay Area of ​​the United States, whether it is a large company or a start-up company, all kinds of innovations are bursting out. If you have the ability and opportunity, why not try hard to experience it? If you don't experience it, won't you feel that it is a regret to miss it when you are old?
To experience the development of the next hot technology. From IT, to the Internet, to the mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, to the future AI, VR, IoT..., the waves of technological innovation are coming one after another. Do you want to continue to move bricks there. Going down, do you want to ride the wave and go up to experience the wave, or do you want to be a person who goes with the flow?
Whether it is part-time work, starting a business, domestically or abroad, these are all forms, not content. The content is, have you experienced meaningful and valuable things with people who have ideas? Life is too short, and there are gaps. The greatest luck of our technicians is to be born in such an exciting era. So, why don't you pursue these cutting-edge exciting experiences?

3. Pursuing a free life
I believe that "freedom" is something that everyone wants to pursue in their hearts. "Life is precious, love is more expensive,..." (Haha)

But when it comes to freedom, most people think of "wealth freedom" or "financial freedom". In fact, it's not entirely like this. On the path of freedom, my personal experience tells me that, in fact, you will have many different types of freedom. Below, is my understanding of several levels of "freedom".

The first level of freedom - freedom of work. The first level of freedom of human beings is "work freedom". I am not saying that you can be very free in the workplace. Although there are special cases, they are not universal. The "work freedom" I'm talking about is -- you don't feel a crisis of unemployment. In other words, you have become a sought-after item in various companies. Not only do you not have to worry about finding a job, but you are not worried about finding a good job at all. Just imagine, if a job comes to you, on the one hand, you have the right to choose a job in the true sense, on the other hand, you don’t have to worry about work anymore, you can leave at any time and do what you want. . At this point, you have achieved "work freedom".

The second layer of freedom - skill freedom. Work freedom is good, but only if you still need to rely on the job opportunities offered by others. And skill freedom is that you can support yourself with your skills without having to work in a company. It is the so-called freelancer. There are many such people in the society. For example, some fitness and sports coaches, designers, translators, authors... These can be regarded as freelancers. As long as the programmer is not a professional Those who move bricks and have ideas have the potential to become freelancers. Think about it, the programming ability you have is actually a creative ability, that is, creativity, as long as you Make Something People Want (YC Entrepreneurship) slogan of the company), you can fully support yourself with your skills. If you make your own income through some automated things, or you make a software self-employed person on the app, or even make an open source software, the community will donate to you every month to make more money than you earn by working. More, then you really have the freedom of skills.

The third level of freedom - material freedom. I put financial freedom in another way. I personally think that, except for the special case of having a good father, if you want to have material freedom, in essence, you must learn to invest, investment is not necessarily your money, time is also a kind of wealth, young What's more, how do you invest your time and your youth? What kind of things and people are you going to invest your money in? There is a lot of risk in investing. But not taking risks in life may be the greatest adventure. There are many techniques in this world that you can't learn from reading books, but can only be learned in actual combat, such as swimming. Investing may also be one. Only people who really understand investing, or people who are very lucky, can achieve material freedom.

Pursuing a free life is actually a good choice on the road of personal development. Generally speaking, free people have good ability and no less money. Because they know how to invest.

That is to say, a person who has the ability to pursue freedom

not only has leadership and creativity (can also guide and get ahead of most people)
but also knows how to invest (knows that time and energy and money should be invested in Where)
(Note: I didn’t mention spiritual freedom here. To be honest, I don’t know what spiritual freedom is, because I haven’t seen it before and my vision is limited, so I won’t press it first, otherwise it’s really a chicken soup article)

Summary
Whether it is working hard in the workplace, pursuing wonderful experiences, or achieving freedom, I think it is a good direction for personal development.

They all overlap, for example:

companies where you can pursue those exciting experiences in the workplace.
Freedom can also be achieved by joining companies that have the potential to grow rapidly.
You can also achieve freedom in life by pursuing different experiences.
...
In short, the logic here is -

people who can plan their own personal development are usually people who have many opportunities and possibilities.
People with many opportunities and possibilities are usually leaders and people who like to take risks.
People with leadership who like to take risks are usually people with strong learning ability, active thinking, like tossing, and know how to "invest".
People with strong learning ability and active thinking, generally speaking, are people who like to read books, like practice and new things, are not afraid of difficulties and challenges, and use intelligence rather than brute force.
People who know how to "invest" usually focus more on future and long-term growth than on current KPIs, bonuses and promotions.


The illustration of the movie "Flying House "
comes from the movie "Flying House".
Finally, I wish everyone a Happy New Year and a great future in the coming year.

(End of the full text)




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