Source: Zhihu
In the past few years, employees who have seized the dividend period of the Internet industry and entered large factories can basically buy a house and take root in first-tier cities.
But looking back now, "forget about being graduated, escaping from the Internet, and lying flat..." has become the main theme of this industry. Many people are talking about moving to state-owned enterprises and foreign companies, and they have also lowered their salary expectations and switched to And pursue stability and balance.
Is the Internet industry really failing? What will happen to the computer profession in the future? Will it really become a "civil engineering major"?
An anonymous netizen wrote such an answer. I agree with it and want to share it with everyone.
I have studied computer science for 10 years and am still looking for a job. My dad has been working in civil engineering all his life and is also looking for a job. I don't think computers will become the next civil engineering.
As for whether you joined the Chinese army in 1949, I think the poster can take a longer-term view, that is, what career or thing do you want to do in this life? This article is equivalent to a memoir for your reference.
When I finished the college entrance examination in 2012, I was still very confused about choosing a major. I remember that the best major that year was finance, followed by architecture, civil engineering, and medicine. Biology and chemistry will be updated later.
But these scores were still higher than or about the same as those of computers. My dad told me to let me think on my own and learn anything.
My dad thought civil engineering would be a good career, but my college entrance examination performance was so bad that I couldn't get into any of the best civil engineering majors in the country.
What can an ignorant 18-year-old think about his professional choice? At that time, I could fill in 5 majors. The first ones I filled in were popular majors such as financial management, and the last one I filled in was computer science.
Why do you choose computer? Because I like to play games. I think those who study computer science should be able to program games, and I would also like that. Finally, finance is so popular, so I didn’t record the previous ones and transferred them to computers.
1. The golden decade of China’s Internet
From 11 and 12 years to the last one or two years, I would like to call it the golden decade of China’s Internet.
If you enter society just at the beginning of this golden decade, you may not realize that some of the excitement and craziness are only short-lived.
When I was an undergraduate, do you think everyone was thinking about where to work? No, many of our classmates are thinking about how to start a business. Those with technical pursuits are thinking about how to build wheels, or go abroad to study for Ph.D.s and engage in academics. Only those who are flat are thinking about finding a job after graduating from college.
Starting from the freshman year, VCs will come to the school to encourage people to start businesses. At that time, Didi and Kuaidi had not yet merged, and Meituan did not have food delivery. Answers with more than 100 likes on Zhihu were considered very popular, and short videos and live broadcasts did not even have the basic Internet speed.
You can make a prototype of an app, even if you don’t know how to make money later, you can still get investment. So some students actually started a business with a seed round.
There is even the exact words of a professional course teacher: "Those of you who are engaged in computers, when you were young, you just wanted to make millions and tens of millions in a few years, so that you can make enough money in this life." This shows how impetuous the atmosphere was at that time.
Is it hard to find a job? Can you imagine a company offering full-time jobs to sophomore students? Some students don't attend classes and go out to work, and only come to take exams and hand in homework.
I am considered a poor student because I kept making messy stuff in college and my average score was less than 80. Fortunately, I played a lot of games and was good at them (many games were in the top 10 in the region). I couldn't write the reverse chain in the interview, and I still joined a major game company after graduation.
For those of us who were employed when we graduated from undergraduate, the best jobs went to Google, Microsoft, WeChat headquarters, Alibaba’s core e-commerce business, Tencent as a product manager, or well-known PE, VC.
right! You read that right, the Internet is full of hot money, and investors also need to recruit people who understand some technology. What should I do if I don’t learn technology well? I can switch to a product manager or game planner, or else I can’t do operation and maintenance testing.
Anyway, you can find a job in the end. At that time, the lowest salary was to go to the headquarters of the four major banks to do development work, but they usually worked from 9 to 5 and were well-established.
After graduation, I worked in a game company for 1-2 years. I felt that all I was doing was reskinned games, which was far from my ideal game development, so I went to the United States to continue my studies.
At that time, after one year of working, a headhunter would call you and ask you to change jobs. This could be a bad decision in my life. After going abroad, I found that it was getting harder and harder to find a job, both in China and the United States, and interviews were getting harder and harder.
In the first year, you may generally take the test with medium difficulty questions, but in the second year, you may directly take the test with all hard questions. I finally found a job, but when the epidemic hit, the offer was canceled immediately.
I originally interviewed with a domestic company and made an offer, but when I looked at the salary, it was not much more than what the headhunter said before. If you return to China as a co-author, the two years of master's degree will be equivalent to studying in vain. So he refused to accept it and transferred to a PhD program to continue studying.
Even if you have a PhD, it is still difficult to find a job because there are fewer positions suitable for PhDs. In the interview, you will be asked about machine learning, you will be asked about thesis, you will be asked about your previous internship experience, and finally you will be asked about leetcode hard. Please, can I just interview for an internship? You must know that 8-6 years ago, interviews were only easy, and there were many people who changed majors and answered 50 questions to get into major American companies.
I also know a doctor who is much older than me. He said that around 10 years ago, if you went to the Amazon booth at the school job fair and submitted your resume, you could get an offer on the spot. It seems that the United States also had an era when the job market was very crazy.
In the final analysis, it is because the dividends of mobile Internet have disappeared. There isn’t that much business expansion, and there won’t be expansion every year. Salaries are still high, but the barriers to entry are also getting higher. There is a trend of gradual elitism.
It’s not surprising. A few years ago, it was already said that China’s Internet has entered its second half, which means that for us workers, it means that it has become more complicated.
2. Let’s talk about civil engineering
Next, let’s talk about civil engineering. It was the late 1980s when my dad worked. After graduating from college, he was assigned to a certain railway bureau. At that time, civil engineering was not the most popular field.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most popular thing was to do business overseas. At that time, many people came out of the system to do business.
My dad was timid at the time. My grandparents were both farmers and our family had no capital or connections. On the other hand, working in the railway system is also a hot topic. It basically costs nothing to see patients in railway hospitals, schools, railway primary schools, and eat in workplace canteens.
My dad said that he was afraid of hunger when he was a child. He felt that China would build many houses and many roads and bridges in the next few decades of reform and opening up, so he studied civil engineering just to ensure that he would be able to eat for a long time in the future.
What he said is correct. From the early 1990s to 2020, China has been overhauling infrastructure and housing. Until recently, real estate houses were really not selling very well, and enough high-speed rails and expressways have been built. But my dad didn't work for 30 years. He retired when he was in his 40s and took a temporary job in the workplace.
The most popular era for China's civil engineering industry should be from 2000 to around 2015, especially the 4 trillion yuan in 2008. At that time, many contractors and bosses in the building materials industry were really picking up money from the ground. But the entire golden age lasted almost ten years.
Let’s take my dad as an example. When I was in elementary school, my dad was dissatisfied with the lack of money provided by the railway system, so he went to a construction company in Shanghai to manage projects. Three years later, he actually bought a house in Shanghai with full payment.
In terms of the speed of buying a house, you could make more money from civil engineering back then than from the Internet now. After working for a few more years and buying two houses and a shop in a second-tier city, my dad quit his job.
Because he doesn't like civil engineering at all, he likes stock trading and growing vegetables. As a result, I haven’t made much money after so many years of stock trading. On the contrary, the civil engineering market was not going well, so the company he was affiliated with stopped supporting him, but he was not yet old enough to receive a pension, so he still had to find a company to pay social security.
So he started looking for a job again, probably because he was too idle. But no company wants him at all. Young people can't find jobs now. Who would want an old man who is almost 60 years old?
But there are also crazy times in the civil engineering job market. My dad’s original words were around 2010, “Any cat or dog can come to work.” As long as you study civil engineering, you can have a junior college degree.
Now that civil engineering has cooled down, to put it simply, domestic construction is almost done. There is also a wave of infrastructure construction in the United States, but after that wave, there is no longer a need for so many people, and now American civil engineers are not considered a high-income group.
So I have witnessed the golden age of two industries. Modern society develops and changes very rapidly. If an industry can make money, it can quickly become insolvent within 3 years. A whole cycle of 10 years may pass.
3. How is the computer?
So you ask whether you want to switch to a computer? I want to say do you like programming? Do you enjoy using your skills to solve problems? Not just because of making money, because the best days may be only those years, but you need to work for 40 years (according to the legal retirement age of 65).
Most people can't see into the future. When I said that I majored in computer science in 12 years ago, many elders said that your salary was about the same as the salary from a training class.
Who could have known that WeChat would become a national APP in just a few months in 2012, and that everyone would instantly enter the mobile Internet era? Who could have known that the wave would have passed in a few years?
So at this point in time, I think computers are only suitable for people who like it.
I think computers are still very employable, but it was too easy to find a job in the past few years. If you change your major, you can find a high-paying job after learning Java/Python for two days without any actual project experience.
How could the world always be so beautiful? But if you have a serious computer science degree and have done some serious projects or had internships during school, it shouldn't be difficult to find a job. The premise is not to apply for the algorithm position in the top big companies.
As for layoffs, don’t worry, if you really have skills, layoffs will never happen to you.
I used to make games with a team of more than a dozen people. A main programmer and an engine programmer (who looks over 40 years old and has half-grey hair) lead us, newcomers who have just graduated 1-2 years ago, to do development.
The whole group usually comes to these two if they have any problems. I believe that even if there are layoffs, both of them will not be laid off. Even if the company goes bankrupt, the headhunter will call the next day.
The cut will be people who only write simple business logic, can neither do architecture nor have enough technical depth in a certain area. Because the fungibility is too high.
In fact, even in the United States, FB will be laid off if they cannot be promoted to senior engineers within a few years. Amazon seems to fire the bottom 6% of employees every year, and in some companies it is as high as 10%.
Why do these companies dare to do this? Because these people are so replaceable, recruit and train graduates to do the same work as them.
4. Computer science is still one of the best majors
But learning computers and becoming a software engineer will still be one of the best jobs in the next few decades.
Although the last golden age has passed, the silver age is also good. Maybe the next round of technological revolution will come (metaverse, general AI, brain-computer interface, biological information, etc., there are too many, and they can all generate new dividends) and everyone will enter the golden age again.
At this time, the price/performance ratio of node volume CS is still relatively high. Basically, the only people whose salaries can compare with CS are investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, semiconductors, lawyers, and doctors, which may all be a bit behind.
Which one of the pharmaceutical companies, lawyers and doctors doesn’t want to graduate with a PhD? It is more difficult to get into medical school than other majors in the United States, and the scores in the Chinese Medical and Law College Entrance Examination are not low. The overall income in the semiconductor industry is still less than that of software engineers. And it’s also very difficult for people. To do experiments, they have to carry dozens of kilograms of oscilloscopes, solder boards for a whole day, and they also have to program and fix bugs.
As for investment banking, you must have graduated from a prestigious school, participated in various social activities, had multiple internships during your undergraduate period, or have connections at home and are not short of money. From my observation, you must even be handsome or relatively beautiful.
As for cs, you only need to complete a bachelor's degree/master's degree and answer questions in the interview. Earn more at the beginning of your career.
Doctors and lawyers will be more powerful in later years, but the same goes for computers. If you take the technical route, you can be employed not only until the age of 60, but also until the age of 45+. The income of chief engineers and senior scientists is no worse than that of chief physicians.
Furthermore, after working for many years, a large part of the income is investment income. These individual differences are greater than industry differences.
Finally, let’s talk about civil engineering. Why is civil engineering not good? Going to Africa costs hundreds of thousands a year.
In addition to striving for career (money), isn't it more important for people to strive for ideals?