Today, I had dinner with the leaders of the former unit and discussed the topic of mid-life crisis and future development. It has to be said that sometimes one person’s idea is unavoidably one-sided, but more than one person can communicate with each other to broaden their ideas.

The state of the respective units

Qingdao IT industry situation is more and more serious, this has become our consensus. Whether it’s a 50% layoff in an acoustic company’s division, mandatory overtime, counting overtime hours, or the fact that recruitment has been slow, Qingdao is no longer the preferred destination for young people fleeing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Especially after housing prices climbed close to Hangzhou, Qingdao has lost one of its last chips to attract young programmers. Programmers face the midlife crisis problem, in our 80, 70 after the body of the more urgent and serious.

For those of us who have settled down and have children, it has become the most helpless option to change the development of a city once again. After all, no one wants to lose their children’s childhood. So what should we do?

About programmers taking private jobs

Programmers taking private jobs is one of the ways to make quick, short-term profits. But this thing itself has many disadvantages.

  • First of all, the short-term benefits are not stable, and the amount is not enough to change your life. If you lose your job, taking private work will not help you maintain your current standard of living.
  • Secondly, faced with customers’ urgent time requirements and frequently changing demands, they instinctively want to solve problems in the most familiar, simplest and fastest way. Even though they realize that this method or component can be repackaged in a more elegant way in the development process, they still don’t want to do it. So a private work down just will already skilled skills honing more skilled, can not get technical progress;
  • Third, it takes up time that should be used for in-depth study.
  • Fourthly, the nature of private work leads to little accumulation of resources. If you can meet a customer who can cooperate with you for a long time, you will be very lucky.

How to Overcome a midlife crisis

After a night of discussion, we agreed that there were two ways to get through a midlife crisis. You might think entrepreneurship is one of them, but for most of the average programmer, entrepreneurship is too big a word.

One way to face reality is to:

Delve deeply in one direction

At the time of writing this article, Tencent has just released its watershed Era: 16 Future Trends report. In the future, the report says, big companies will be driven by momentum, while small companies will be driven by expertise. I think the latter sentence is still valid for individuals.

At present, mastering a few commonly used frameworks will lead to good jobs, which will become harder in the future. The more you learn low-cost skills, the more awkward it is to teach your apprentices to starve to death. After all, a graduate three years can skilled work, why will you work for more than ten years is several times your salary? This is precisely the fact that the programmer industry has failed to grasp that resources are easily replaceable.

And delve deeply into a certain direction and have some results, I think we are not difficult to experience the college entrance examination, graduate students thousands of troops and horses through the single-plank bridge test, the key is “adhere to”, but is the most difficult thing nowadays. How can you have the energy to study when you’re working late at 9:00 a.m. and have to stay up late to babysit your kids? But if you do, you will become irreplaceable.

The other way is:

Have a viable project and work to make it happen

Some time ago, the American TV series Silicon Valley was popular among programmers, and we all wish we could be like the hero, who founded a company, developed and expanded by the genius compression algorithm. Perhaps this is the end result that we programmers look forward to most! In fact, when we look back, everyone should have had a eureka moment, a good idea, but it only became an idea due to the lack of resources in various aspects. Maybe it’s an app, a website or a smart product.

Start today and make it happen. One of the books in the Fan Deng Book Club says that it is not his faults that limit a person, but his strengths. Don’t limit yourself to the fact that I’m just a Java developer and I’m just a product manager. Think of yourself as your OWN CEO. Go out there, talk to colleagues, talk to friends, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them, talk to them. Maybe that’s how you start your first team?

I think in the future, personal products and projects with the spirit of craftsmanship will be more and more easily found and liked by the public.

The end of the

In fact, we also discussed the projects we are interested in, but because it involves the privacy of friends, I will not share with you here. I hope that those of you who are like me, starting today, you can choose your own path and stick to it.

In the face of a midlife crisis, the worst fear is not efforts without results, but only anxiety, but no action.