The Internet market is declining, so start a “side job” to resist risks!

I was lucky enough to watch You Yuxi and You Da’s live broadcast a few days ago. They talked about a topic, how do front-end people, or the entire programmer group, do side jobs? In recent years, the Internet market has declined, and many people are thinking about whether to start a side job to resist risks.

This is not happening again. In the past two days, there has been another massive layoff on the Internet. After Alibaba "transports talents to society", JD.com held another "graduation ceremony", which made everyone panic. The attention on side hustles has escalated again.

Let’s talk today about programmers doing side jobs.

Why do programmers want to do side jobs?

I understand why today’s programmers have the idea of ​​​​doing a side job. The reasons are nothing more than two aspects.

First, the explosive period of the Internet has passed. In the past, programmers were small in number and could work without any worries if they knew some basic skills, and their salaries were very considerable. However, now with the influx of a large number of people, various prestigious universities and colleges have When academic qualifications are included in the involution, we suddenly find that there is no competitive advantage.

The second is the abnormal working atmosphere in the Internet development circle. Staying up late and working overtime is too serious and consumes vitality to catch up with progress. Especially for big companies, they give you a lot of money, but they all know the intensity of overdrafts. To put it bluntly, they are risking their lives in exchange for money.

In the past, everyone might just listen to this to laugh at themselves. As the news about programmers from major factories suddenly dying suddenly while working overtime continued to leak on Maimai, everyone began to panic. It turns out that compared to income, health is our lifelong wealth.

Of course, there is another reason. It is not just the career haze of programmers, but programmers are the first to bear the brunt, and that is the "35-year-old crisis".

Programmers are a profession that requires learning and creative abilities. The rule of not advancing or retreating is much greater than that of other industries. After 35, if you don’t really love this industry, you will find that the perseverance to study and study that you had in your 20s is no longer there. In addition, your physical condition is not as good as before and you can't handle overtime. How can you compete with the new boys in all aspects?

With all the above situations, coupled with the crazy anxiety-producing activities on the Internet, we suddenly have the worry that our salary will be cut at any time, we will be laid off at any time, we will be involved in involution at any time, and we may even die at any time. , began to think of a way out. Can't you do some side business? Can't start a business?

So if you post an article on "How programmers can start a side job" in the technology community today, the click-through rate will definitely double. The fundamental reason is that everyone is worried about the future.

What should I do if the volume doesn’t move? What to do if you have a 35-year-old crisis? Everyone wants to avoid risks, so they have to pay attention to side jobs.

What do you think of "Overtime" and "35 Years Crisis"?

These two phenomena are the main sources of programmer anxiety. They seem inevitable, but have you ever thought about the root cause?

Let’s take a deeper look at these two issues. In fact, what everyone is worried about is: “If this overtime situation continues until the age of 35, can I sustain it? When the competitiveness declines, will I be able to hold on? Will they be replaced by new people?"

But I want to say a misunderstanding, that is, junior high school-level programmers need to write a lot of code to improve their technical capabilities, and constantly invest time in learning, research, and broaden their horizons. But when high-level programmers, such as team leaders and architects, write less and less code.

For these people, they don’t need to work overtime to exert their value. They have their own core competitiveness and irreplaceability. Writing code also means writing some core and key code, and they spend more time focusing on technology. Selection and problem solving solutions. Therefore, a programmer's career will not always be accompanied by overtime work. When you have core competitiveness, your working style will be very free.

So what is core competitiveness? Let me say something that everyone will understand: your technical leader, a decision can increase the team's development efficiency by 10 times, or it may reduce the team's development efficiency by 10 times, and may not produce results in the end, even telling you this If it doesn’t work, you have to start over!

This is the core competitiveness! A programmer's core competitiveness is his technology selection and solution evaluation and judgment. This kind of competitiveness cannot be obtained by brushing up a bunch of algorithms, memorizing a bunch of eight-part essays, and learning a lot of interview skills. These things require you to develop the ability after several years of writing code, learning, trying, and thinking.

So, what we call “overtime involution” and “35-year-old crisis” can be viewed in two stages.

Within five years of working

If you are in the first five years of working, and you are energetic and have strong learning ability at this stage, you will be admitted. Taking advantage of the golden period of career advancement, spend a lot of time and energy on accumulation, keep adding, try your best to broaden your technical horizons, and make yourself a unique person. Only in this way can you accumulate to a height that others cannot surpass.

If you lie flat at this stage, you think that everyone is doing it anyway, and I don’t want to get involved. It’s good to catch fish in your free time every day at work. If this continues for a few years, except for becoming more proficient in business code, you will not make much progress in the depth and breadth of technology. When you find that the newcomers in the company are getting more and more powerful, and the technologies they bring are overwhelming for you, you suddenly realize that the crisis is really coming. Is it too late to reroll at this time?

I am not encouraging everyone to get involved in involution. On the contrary, I am very opposed to doing things that are meaningless and just self-consuming. But hard work and accumulation are never compulsory, let alone an excuse for not wanting to struggle. If it is really unavoidable, then it must be "valuable".

In fact, I encourage everyone to "roll outside" rather than roll inside. External involvement means that after you have accumulated a certain amount of experience in a certain field, you should try to get out of the current circle and explore the outside world.

For example, if you are a front-end programmer, even though your Title is "front-end", you can't just stay in the front-end circle all the time. As a programmer, as long as it involves program development, front-end and back-end product servers, you have to be exposed to it, so that your vision will become wider and you can see the problem from more angles, and your judgment and talent will get promoted.

Everyone always thinks that a front-end should specialize in js, and only when you are ready to develop into a full-stack will you touch the back-end. In fact, no, contact does not mean that you must do it. Understanding the whole can cultivate your overall view. For example, if you encounter a problem, you will only study it in the front-end area. Maybe this problem is only a line of code to deal with in the back-end, but you don't know, so you will waste a lot of time.

After working for five years

If you have been working for more than five years, and you haven’t done anything mentioned above, you will see that you are about to enter your third year, and you are still a first-line developer. , still has not formed core competitiveness. At this time, the 35-year-old crisis hits. You are facing the waves that are getting stronger than the last, and you are determined to catch up but it is obviously difficult. At this time, even if the boss will not lay you off, you will feel uneasy in your heart, fearing that you will suddenly lose your job one day.

But if you do all the above, after working for five years, you will probably lead a small team or become an architect. Regardless of whether you enter a big factory or not, you will always continue to exert your irreplaceability in one place.

You will assign the basic tasks of your work to your friends in the group, and you will overcome the structure and problems by yourself. In the long run, you will become more and more valuable, which is something that even the best fresh graduates cannot do at this time. Will you have a 35-year-old crisis? Of course not.

And I have a hunch that the programmer industry must be becoming more and more free. When you have outstanding abilities and skills, geography no longer limits you. You can choose a job anywhere, and you don’t have to stay in a certain company or city.

Perhaps one day you can rent a small house on the beach in Sanya, get up every morning and bask in the sun, turn on the computer, arrange your work for the day, then look at cutting-edge technology information, review your colleagues' codes, spend a few hours He solved the remaining problems within an hour, then continued to bask in the sun with squinting eyes.

It would be ideal to talk about these things. We still have to look forward to the future. But the core idea is that if you fail to accumulate and form your own core competitiveness within five years, then the 35-year-old crisis may not be far away from you. On the contrary, it is another situation.

How to start a side job

It is said above that the essence of programmers’ 35-year-old crisis is because they have no core competitiveness. Let’s go back to side hustle. How can side hustle help us resist the 35-year-old crisis?

Since the crisis comes from core competitiveness, the purpose of side business must be to help us improve our core competitiveness.

Everyone may also have a misunderstanding here, thinking that the purpose of doing a side job is to make money and open up a new way of income. This is not wrong, but do you think that a programmer with an annual salary of one million needs to do a side job?

People’s energy is limited. If your side business is not to help you consolidate your main business, but to divert part of the energy you invest in your main business, you may really make money, but in the long run It’s definitely not as much income as your continued improvement.

In addition to hard power, core competitiveness also includes these:

• Famous

• Word of mouth

• Help others

• Share skills

• Share ideas

No need for fame It is said that if you accumulate fame in any circle, your road will be much smoother; reputation refers to your ability to do things, whether you are reliable or not; helping others refers to your ability to lead others to grow together; sharing is the most important, your Any advantages, including technology and ideas, if you think they are valuable, then share them so that others can understand you in more aspects. This is another business card besides your resume.

If your goal in doing side business is to increase your soft power in the above aspects, OK, this is the best. You may not see returns in the short term in these areas, just for the effort you put in, but if you stick to it, it will definitely bring you unexpected surprises.

What are the specific ways to do side jobs? I think two are enough:

• Write an article

• Record a video

Write The article is really a very, very good way to summarize learning. People's listening and seeing abilities are innate, but reading and writing abilities need to be cultivated. For example, if you watch a technical video, you seem to have learned it after watching it. In ten minutes, you will be asked to write down the key information of this video. When you think about it, what was that just now? I can't seem to remember clearly. There are some things you think you have mastered, but when you are asked to write, you realize that maybe it was an illusion.

Writing articles will force you to recall and think. You cannot write without truly absorbing and digesting things. Therefore, insisting on writing will improve our thinking ability and ability to summarize. There are also important problems and solutions you encounter at work. If you don't write them down, you will probably forget them in a few months. When it's time to write your resume, you suddenly find that there seems to be nothing to write about. This is very uneconomical.

In addition, you can also publish your articles to the community, which will get a lot of feedback from readers. This will give you very positive encouragement, and will also help you check for omissions and fill in the gaps. At the same time, it will also Slowly build up your reputation and reputation.

But it will be more painful when I start writing an article. If I don’t write well, I still can’t hold it in. In fact, I am in the same state now. It takes a week to write an article. I always feel that it does not make sense after changing a sentence, and I always feel that the structural design is almost meaningless. But I can only bite the bullet and write. The more I write, the more I will get better at it.

As for recording videos, I only discovered the benefits of this recently, so I was a bit of an afterthought.

I have to admit that most of our programmers are homebodies, don’t like to talk, and have average expressive skills. Many people would rather write a few lines of code than say one more sentence. But think about it, if one day your technology is very powerful and you want to share your experience with others, if you can't express the key points in a concise way and make others understand, will this become your fault? Shortcoming?

Although recording a video is also about summarizing and thinking, it requires higher expression skills than writing an article. Expression ability is a universal ability for you to move up, and it is almost necessary if you want to become a manager. However, there are very few opportunities for expression in our working and living environment. If you can try to share your skills by recording a video, you can chat about it and practice your mentality and language organization when facing the camera. This is very good. of exercise.

In short, building core competitiveness, not just code, but constantly breaking through your own limitations is the right way.

The side business discussed in this article does not talk about how to make money, but about earning "core competitiveness". Although this thing cannot directly bring money, it is not the confidence for you to resist risks?

Original address: https://juejin.cn/post/7080694504914681864

Author: Yang Chenggong

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