In “Programmers, never compete for a job with the later wave” said: limited by the increasing secular pressure, external drive effectiveness diminishing, physiological decline and other reasons, with young people in the same level of competition has no advantage, your advantage in mind, cognition and experience.

If you want to avoid being left on the beach by the later wave, you must stimulate your internal driving force, build differentiated advantages, complement the advantages of the young people, do things that are beneficial to the young people, break out of the stock game, and create an incremental future. So how do we build our differentiating advantage?

We all like mountaineering and feel the feeling of “being at the top of the mountain and having a view of the small mountains”. Our career and life are also like climbing mountains. But if everyone is on the same mountain and everyone is trying to get to the top along the path, you can imagine how crowded it would be, and people would be pushed off the cliff at every turn.

There are countless perilous peaks under the heaven, and everyone has his own sacred mountain. In terms of creating increments, you and I can actually climb different mountains, there’s no need for all of us to be crowded together. Next, veteran brother will talk about the construction of differentiation advantage from horizontal and vertical dimensions:

  • Horizontal: Find your own mountain, focus on vertical niches, and collaborate with others.
  • Vertical dimension: Climb to the top of your own sacred mountain and stand on a higher position to complement others.

Horizontal dimension differentiation

Just like the lion is the king of the African grassland, the tiger is the king of the Asian forest, they live in different regions, ecology, there is no direct competition with each other. Bees have queens, ant colonies have queens, there are countless ecological communities in nature. Looking for sacred mountain is the process of clarifying personal positioning.

Focus on the most suitable for their own vertical segmentation of the field, deep cultivation, continuous improvement, in this field to achieve the head. Ten years grind a sword, accumulated time to build a moat. Everyone’s time and energy are limited, and the more vertical the segmentation, the better the chance of incubating a small and beautiful business.

To build differentiation in the horizontal dimension, you can choose your industry, business, company, position, etc., or select a specific region, technology stack, etc. This is the process of self-recognition itself, can not be achieved overnight, can only rely on constant exploration and iteration.

In addition to the selection of work, I will also use this method in the positioning of the public number. Programmers are the user groups I am most familiar with. Career planning, job interviews, public speaking and architecture design are the areas I have accumulated the most experience and confidence in helping others.

In addition, the positioning of the public account is also constantly adjusted, initially used to record my experience of doing technical preaching, and then slowly adjusted to the positioning of enabling program life.

Vertical dimension differentiation

Start from the bottom up and work your way up the technology pipeline so you don’t have to compete with young people for jobs. In chronological order, you can divide a programmer’s career into three stages:

  • Achieve personal excellence around the age of 30, build a professional skill tree, transition to technical expert, architecture expert, project or grassroots management positions. The main challenge of this stage is to become familiar with the use of various technologies and to grasp the stable underlying principles, methodologies and thinking from them.
  • Be an excellent team member around the age of 35, and lead the team to achieve excellence by virtue of my professional experience, team management skills and non-authority influence. The main challenge at this stage is to deepen understanding of human nature and build personal non-authority influence while improving management skills.
  • Around the age of 40, from the inside to the outside, from technical thinking to users or products thinking, close to users and customers, help them achieve excellence. The main challenge of this stage is to export influence in the industry, to have the ability to directly serve customers, and to master the initiative of career.

This is the advanced route to build differentiation advantage in the horizontal dimension, 360 lines, line out of the champion. At the beginning, human only had the division of labor such as hunting and gathering, but now there are thousands of occupations. The division of labor is constantly refined, the cooperation is gradually closer, and the exploration of each subdivision is also more and more in-depth.

Writing here, I think of the lines in the movie The Grandmaster: Practicing martial arts can be divided into three stages: see yourself, see heaven and earth, and see all living beings. Among them, “seeing oneself” is to find the sacred mountain, clear personal positioning; “See heaven and earth” is to achieve personal excellence through hard work to the top; “Seeing people” is to help the team, users or customers achieve excellence, which is an effective strategy for us programmers to overcome age disadvantages.

IT veteran brother will continue to share experience related to career planning, job application, public speaking and transformation and upgrading, to empower the life of the program. If you want to gain more energy, please scan the code to pay attention to: “IT veteran brother”!