Under the big layoffs, how do programmers do "side jobs"?

The source of this article is the success of the official account programmer

Hello everyone, my name is Yang Chenggong.

A few days ago, I was fortunate enough to watch You Yuxi Youda's live broadcast. They talked about a topic, which is how the current 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 business to protect against risks.

This is not going to happen again. In the past two days, the Internet has been laid off again. Following Ali's "transporting talents to the society", JD.com held a "graduation ceremony" again, and the whole group was panicking. The attention of the sideline has been upgraded again.

So today, let's talk 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 hustle, for two reasons.

First, the outbreak period of the Internet has passed. In the past, programmers were small in size, and they could work without worrying about basic skills. The salary was also very considerable. We suddenly found that there was no competitive advantage.

The second is the abnormal working atmosphere in the Internet development circle. Staying up late and working overtime is too serious, consuming vitality to catch up with the progress. Especially in big factories, they give a lot of money, but they understand the intensity of overdrafts. The worst thing to say is that they exchange their lives for money.

In the past, everyone might just laugh at themselves when they heard this. With the news of the sudden death of programmers in large factories working overtime, everyone began to panic. It turns out that health is our lifelong wealth compared to income.

Of course, there is another reason, not only the professional haze of programmers, but the programmers who bear the brunt, and that is the "35-year-old crisis".

Programmers are a profession that strives for learning ability and creativity. The rule of not advancing or retreating is far greater than that of other industries. After 35, if you don't really love this industry, then you will find that the perseverance to study and study in your 20s is gone. In addition, the physical condition is not as good as before, and you can't handle overtime. How do you fight with the new boys in all aspects?

All of the above, coupled with the frenzied anxiety created on the Internet, we suddenly have the fear that our salary will be cut at any time, we will be fired at any time, we will be involved in involution at any time, and we may even die at any time, and we start to think about the way back. . Can't you get a side job? Can't start a business?

So if you post an article in the tech community today on "How Programmers Do Side Jobs", the click-through rate will double. The fundamental reason is that everyone is worried about the future.

What should I do if I can't roll? What to do in the face of 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 involution" and "35-year-old crisis"?

These two phenomena are the main source of programmer anxiety. It seems inevitable, but have you ever wondered what the root cause is?

Let’s take a deeper look at these two questions. In fact, what everyone is worried about is: “If this overtime state continues until the age of 35, will I be able to hold on? When the competitiveness declines, will I be replaced by newcomers?”

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 ability, and constantly invest time in learning, research, and broaden their horizons. But when it comes to high-level programmers, such as leaders with teams, architects, writing code must be less and less.

For these people, they do not need to work overtime to exert their value. They have their own core competitiveness and irreplaceability. Writing code is also the key to writing some core codes, and they spend more time focusing on technology selection and problem solving. plan. Therefore, the career of a programmer will not always be accompanied by overtime. When you have core competitiveness, your work style will be very free.

What is the core competitiveness? Let me say a word, everyone will definitely understand: your technical leader, a decision can increase the development efficiency of the team by 10 times, or reduce the development efficiency of the team by 10 times , and may not produce results in the end, and even tell you this No need to do it all over again!

This is the core competitiveness! A programmer's evaluation and judgment of technology selection and solutions are his core competitiveness. This kind of competitiveness is not something you can get by brushing a bunch of algorithms, memorizing a bunch of eight-legged essays, and learning a lot of interview skills. These things are abilities that you need to develop after a lot of years of coding + learning + trying + thinking .

Therefore, our so-called "overtime involution" and "35-year-old crisis" are scored in two stages.

within five years

If you are in the first five years of work, and you have high energy and strong learning ability at this stage, you will need to roll. Taking advantage of the golden period of career advancement, I spend a lot of time and energy on accumulation, constantly adding, and try my best to broaden my technical horizons and make myself a unique person. In this way, you can accumulate to a height that no one else can surpass.

If you are lying flat at this stage, you think that everyone is rolling anyway, and I don’t want to participate in it. It’s good to catch a fish every day in my spare time at work. This lasts for a few years, except that you are proficient in business code, you have not made 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 technology they bring overwhelms you, you suddenly realize that the crisis is really coming. Is it too late to re-roll it at this time?

I am not encouraging people to introvert, on the contrary, I am very opposed to doing things that are meaningless and self-consuming. But hard work and accumulation will never be a roll, nor an excuse for not wanting to struggle. If the roll is really unavoidable, it must be "the value of the roll".

In fact, I encourage everyone to "roll out" rather than inbound. Outward roll means that when you have accumulated a certain amount of experience in a certain field, you should try to jump 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 keep spinning 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 contact, so that your vision will become wider, and you will see problems from more angles. be promoted.

Everyone always thinks that a front-end should specialize in js, and only when you are ready to develop to the 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 can only study it in the front-end category. Maybe this problem is only a line of code in the back-end, but you don't know it, so it will waste a lot of time.

After five years

If you have been working for more than five years, and you have not done what I said above, seeing that you are almost in the third year, you are still developing in the front line, and you still have not formed your core competitiveness. At this time, the 35-year-old crisis strikes. In the face of a wave that is stronger than the next wave, you have the intention 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, and you are afraid that you will suddenly lose your job one day.

But if you do all the above, after five years of work, you will probably lead a small team or become an architect. Regardless of whether you have entered a big factory or not, you will always continue to play your irreplaceable role in one place.

You will assign the basic tasks of the work to the small partners in the group, and solve the structure and problems by yourself. In the long run, you will become more and more valuable. This is something that even the most powerful freshmen can't do. At this time, you will have a crisis of 35 years old. ? Naturally not.

And I have a hunch that the programmer industry must be more and more free. When you are outstanding in ability and technology, the region can no longer limit you, you can choose to work anywhere, and you do not have to stay in a certain company or a certain city.

Maybe one day you can rent a small house by the sea in Sanya, get up every morning to bask in the sun, turn on your computer, arrange your work for today, then look at cutting-edge technology information, review your colleagues’ code, and spend a few hours solving the rest. puzzle, then squinted and continued to bask in the sun.

It is ideal to talk about these things, but we still have to look forward to the future. But the core idea is that if you don't do a good job of accumulation within five years and form your own core competitiveness, then the 35-year-old crisis may not be far away from you. On the contrary, it is another situation.

How to do a side business

As mentioned above, the essence of the 35-year-old crisis of programmers is because there is no core competitiveness. Going back to doing a side business, how can a side business help us resist the 35-year-old crisis?

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

Everyone here will also have a misunderstanding, thinking that the purpose of doing a side business is to make money and open up a new income channel. This can't be wrong, but you think, does a programmer with an annual salary of one million need a side job?

Human energy is limited. If your side business is not to help you consolidate your main business, but to take away part of the energy you put into your main business, you may really make money, but in the long run, you will definitely not continue to improve. more income.

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

• fame
• word of mouth
• helping others
• share technology
• share ideas

Needless to say, fame, if you accumulate fame in any circle, the road will be much smoother; word-of-mouth means that your ability to do things is not reliable; helping others is whether you have the ability to drive others to grow together; sharing is the most important thing, Your arbitrary strengths, including skills and ideas, if you think are valuable, share them so others can learn more about you. This is another business card besides your resume.

If the goal of your side business is to increase the soft power of the above aspects, OK, this is the best. These aspects may not see returns in the short term, just pay, but stick to it, it will definitely bring you unexpected surprises.

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

• write an essay
• record video

Writing articles is really a very, very good way of learning and summarizing. People's ability to listen and see is innate, but the ability to read and write needs to be cultivated. For example, if you watch a technical video, you seem to have learned it after watching it. Ten minutes later, I will let you write the key information of this video. When you think about it, what happened just now? I can't seem to remember. There are some things that you think you have mastered, but when you are asked to write, you realize that it may be an illusion.

Writing an article will force you to recall and think, you can't write something without really absorbing and digesting it. Therefore, insisting on writing will improve our thinking ability and ability to summarize and generalize. There are also important problems and solutions you encountered in your work. If you don’t write them down, you will probably forget them in a few months. When I was about to write a resume, I suddenly found that there seemed to be nothing to write, which was very uneconomical.

In addition, you can also publish your own articles to the community, and you will get feedback from many readers. This will give you very positive encouragement, and it will also help you check and fill in the gaps, and will gradually accumulate your reputation. and fame.

However, it will be more painful to start writing articles. If you write poorly, you will not be able to hold back. In fact, I am also in this state now. I have to write an article for a week. I always feel that it is not smooth to change a sentence, and I always feel that the structural design is almost meaningless. However, I can only bite the bullet and write, I will always be handy if I write more.

As for the video recording, I only recently discovered the benefits of this thing, and it's a bit of an afterthought.

I have to admit that most of our programmers are resident, do not like to talk, and have average expressive ability. Many people prefer to write a few lines of code rather than say a word. But you think, if one day your technology is very good, you will share your experience with others, if you can't express the key points very concisely and let others understand, is this yours? Short board?

Although video recording is also a summary and thinking, it requires higher expression ability than writing an article. The ability to express is a general ability for you to go up, and it is almost necessary if you want to become a management team. However, we have very few opportunities to express in our work and living environment. If you can try to share your skills by recording video, you can chat and practice the mentality and language organization facing the camera, which is very good. exercise.

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

This article is not talking about how to make money as a side business, but to earn "core competitiveness". Although this thing cannot directly bring money, why is it not your confidence to resist risks?

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