You may have heard of Scott. Yes, he’s me. He turned 31 earlier this year and is running out of time for his second year.

He spent the first nine of 10 good years of programming:

  • From the age of 23 to 26, he spent time in Ali, from the beginning to career confusion
  • 27 to 29 years old, he spent in entrepreneurship, from the blood to the closing of the money
  • Between the ages of 30 and 31, he spent his time on the side dish, from transition to setting a course

It took 4 years to realize the independent side of programming, 3 years to prove the weakness of entrepreneurial ability, and another 2 years to determine my career path. All the way through twists and turns, except for the conclusion made in the late stage of entrepreneurial death – “4 years in front of the dog, 2 years IN CTO”. I’ve never done an annual review for myself, so I’m going to do an annual section for myself and put it under a microscope.

The way he sees himself

He may be a diligent person in your eyes, but not in his eyes.

For example, two light bulbs in the living room were broken. It took him two months to replace one of them until yesterday, and he bought a new full-length mirror, which has not been installed for four weeks. Today is two days before 2020. The list goes on and on.

Although he is easy to procrastinate, he is impatient with details, such as the keyboard in the study/bedside/dining table/car door/coat pocket/bag… The good thing is that you never have to worry about tissues when you’re playing with him.

Although so entangled with the details, he is also a decision on the super man of impulse, decided to exercise to lose weight, for example, breath is the coach of the 20000 class, the results for the past four months, just go to 10 times, such as decision under the driver’s test, breath to buy the most expensive and most quickly according to automatic transmission channel, the results for the past three years, Just finished the line below the lecture, soon to expire…

There were so many of them that even after he turned 30, he didn’t get much better, that’s how he saw himself.

What he did right

In the past 12 months of 2019, he has done a great job, skipping the business itself and focusing on what he sees in technology, teams and communities.

Technically achieve the goal

Technically, he focuses on the two general directions of technology stack convergence and link quality this year.

The so-called technology stack normalization means PC/H5 uses a set of technology stack base, from engineering skeleton, business template, scaffolding, componentization, test environment integration to construction and issuing commands, etc. After one year of intermittent construction, the current Highway supporting system has been released. Normalized processes like Hi test/Hi dev/Hi deploy make collaboration before, during and after development great.

In addition, the ReactNative engineering framework Brick for APP is similar to the routine of Highway, including the egg-based secondary encapsulation framework Cross for Node service, which has been implemented into specific businesses. The whole big goal has been achieved in 2019 in advance. Laying the foundation for engineering exploration in 2020 is a good start.

The so-called link quality is a collaborative tool and decision-making system for cross-end and cross-stack full-link automation, behavior and abnormal monitoring and tracking. All the places where people may make mistakes are fully instrumentalized. For example, it can achieve one-click packaging and compression, release and deployment of specific branches in specific environments. For example, burying point monitoring, feature recognition, issue creation and destruction, alarm push, and end-user behavior of APP/PC/H5/ small program /Node can provide a more intuitive and convenient way for stakeholders and principals involved in business to quickly evaluate online operation quality and product usage and track and optimize. As for the construction of monitoring system, there is an article from 0 to 1:60 days rapid Self-research – Building front-end buried Point Monitoring System.

Those two things, when you look back, are making the right decisions, getting results that exceed expectations, and then looking at the team part.

Achieve goals as a team

In terms of the team, this year he focuses on talent upgrading and management awareness improvement, the former for the organization and the latter for himself.

So-called talent, is the formation of the team echelon ability, all graduated from this year’s front end, to the technical experts, to the team’s technical manager, from the number and capacity of health is formed on the echelon structure, in order to achieve such results, you need to do choose) leave open to people, for the team to do, for transfers-will process on rectifying the rhythm, the results on checking the precipitation, the entire balance scales, Supporting all kinds of hardware and software incentive and guidance.

With the right person, the most difficult is to choose and open, also is the people in and out, which is the recruitment and selection, of course, also have the loss of talent, the whole market, a senior recruitment is very difficult, this is the problems must be solved as a team head, in this, he formed the effective recruitment methodology in 1 year recruitment cycle, Added 10 front-end engineers to the team, including 5 senior engineers and above, which is a lot for a small startup company.

Under the assessment mechanism of the whole company, students cannot meet the demand of team force performance ranking, some performance C (performance does not meet the expectations), or even stop, even fired optimization, these tough decisions must be management, must also bear the negative effect and cost, this is essentially a psychology, fortunately this Scott came over his shoulder, Not only did he get through it, he also got some new management sensibilities:

  • In the strong assessment system, managers do not have clear and clear requirements for children’s shoes in the process, which will only harm children’s shoes in the end
  • In the rapid growth of the team, managers do not take the initiative to optimize students who do not meet expectations, which will ultimately harm the team
  • Whether it’s voluntary attrition or passive obsoletion, managers can help by introducing new opportunities to students and helping them on their way out

By the end of 2019, the talent team of the whole year will gradually adjust to a new level, and the ability structure will become healthier and healthier. Only in this way can the whole team achieve greater results in the tough battle in 2020, and all students will have a bigger share of the company cake. All students in xiaocai success and growth experience to become a better job-hopping gold plating material.

Carelessly talked so much on management, shows that he reached, this year’s goal is have these comprehension, on Dec. 21 to shenzhen GMTC share “the road to the management of small and medium-sized front-end TL team, to gain the audience a lot of feedback about the technical management of professional course, below the industry observation will do it again.

In a word, in terms of team management, his management consciousness has undergone real qualitative change and corresponding deformation. In the ninth year of his work, in addition to technical ability, he has developed a new ability – management ability.

Achieve goals in the community

Community here, there are two main team goals: team booklet and community influence, the community goal of front-end management group, and the personal goal of early chat paid community.

The team technology booklet was a project that was planned and launched at the end of 2018. Since the start of 2019, all the students in the whole team have contributed 30 to 40 articles on the growth of the front-end team: More than 1300 copies of “How to Build an Excellent Front-end Team” have been sold, and the influence of the community has been amplified. At the same time, more than 10,000 yuan has been allocated, all of which has been included in the construction fund of the team. Several large group construction projects have been carried out, including the rafting trip to Anji and the motorcycle trip to the mountains.

Community Influence is a team project that has been going on for more than 2 years. Through various community participation of team members (in the name of Song Xiaocai), mainly in the form of technical conferences and blog posts (also included in the pamphlet above), the front team of Song Xiaocai has been exposed. In addition to attending the conference, the community articles were mainly published on the two platforms of Nuggets and Yuque, among which Yuque’s “The Front end of Selling Vegetables” has received more than 1100 attention, and the effect is very pleasing.

Front management group, is an experimental project lasted five months, its direct purpose is to build a platform, attract more front end community managers point of learning from each other collision, potential purpose is deposited some premium content, output to the whole community of potential managers to inspire learning, has built a 450 people so far, the front end of the management group Precipitated nearly 50 management opinion articles, see “front-end management communication group”, has more than 400 attention, very popular with engineers.

As for the paid community, some students may have paid attention to Scott’s moments and noticed that a front-end early chat (also known as Scott Bragg Group) experiment was launched at the beginning of 19th. The background is that many front-end students were confused and took a detour in the early stage of their career in recent years. They often consulted on wechat to obtain some experiential guidance. So I started this experimental project. Every morning on my way to work, I talked with dozens of classmates for an hour to solve my professional doubts.

Run down the first half year, and to find more and more of his classmates, and the problem is becoming more and more fragmented, depth of both energy and can reply, he has had a lot of bottlenecks, after all, in a few words of view can influence a person’s technology growth probability is too low, must be the depth of the small-scale one-to-one observation and tracking, and so he commercial in early September to chat, By way of mass concentration of paid community, there is a binding in WeChat small groups of students of vocational problems counselling response, supporting guidance also precipitated a lot of tools, methods, and documentation, ran three to four months, his experience more structured and more efficient to help a lot of students, in the community depth contribute their own experience in this way, Let more students benefit, or a sense of accomplishment.

To sum it all up, the results don’t matter. What matters is that 2019 actually gained the following capabilities:

  • Ability to plan and advance general direction technical decisions
  • The growth front end team has the ability to recruit, train and eliminate people
  • The operational ability to set up ideas and precipitate content for specific groups of engineers
  • Ability to quickly build personal/team impact in the community

And the ability of the four major items, there are projects for the depth of practice and prove, and precipitated the mature style (routine), the ability or experience should be applicable to all the front end of the technical team, especially for engineer person, now also didn’t want to use what form convey these capabilities and routines for the front end of the senior engineer group, To help them make better technology decisions, improve management, expand community influence, and monetize influence/knowledge and capabilities, this topic will be explored in 2020.

What kind of things he screwed up

Annual summary is a kind of reversion, and the purpose of reversion is to put the ability to precipitation out of reuse, and then the failure experience is summed up to avoid step on the pit, do good, there must be done bad, that year to do what it is, in fact, quite many, pick a few big impact.

High potential loss of backbone

19 years in March and April and July and August, and developed the technology backbone, have been dug to ali, to the Scott is still filled with mixed feelings, on the one hand, very happy, your training method path, cultivate good students can directly into the ali company further gold-plated cultivation, on the one hand, very sorry, No longer able to work with outstanding students, however interpreted, the loss of high potential must be a management accident.

Put aside the factors of the entire industry environment and the organizational environment of the company, as well as the factors of employees’ own career planning, there must be reasons for managers themselves. I summarize them as follows:

  • After the high potential and the backbone grow up, the proportion of their energy input starts to decrease (think it is enough to train them, can let them play by themselves).
  • When the student was in charge, he failed to take the initiative to inquire and respond to his demands, and empowered him to give full play to his talents in a larger technical and business field
  • As a leader, they are too focused on management planning and neglect technical guidance and discussion (i.e. they fail to continue to learn technical lessons from managers)

To sum up, one is loose in performance evaluation (resulting in lack of sense of purpose), one is mismatched in authorization strength (resulting in limited play space), and one is lack of guidance and assistance (resulting in fuzzy learning objects), which are easy to be neglected by managers.

Actually above affect the object is not only the backbone of high potential, for ordinary students especially newcomers, too, so will also cause due to probation period or the requirements of the early strength is not clear, process, rewards and punishments rules on binding is not enough, eventually the new students to adapt to the team and stop, or probation period can’t meet the inspection without confirmation, Even if the annual performance is at the bottom and the company is eliminated from optimization, in fact, these are the problems of the managers, and ultimately pay the bill, not only the affected individuals, but also the entire company organization (after all, the budget and manpower have been spent).

As a manager, do not castrate their own management responsibilities because of the number of people, in this layer of people, management is no small matter, any one of the growth of a problem, any one of the students was eliminated is a big thing, remember to remember.

Body maintenance failure

Although called the fitness class, bought a lot of fitness equipment, but its own procrastination, energy distribution and lifestyle have taken a toll on their health, that it was not until December medical exposure, from head to foot from outside to inside is full of health problems (including when I knock down these words, the head is dizzy, doubt yourself high blood pressure, going to check again tomorrow). These are very serious signals, representing a serious lack of awareness and ability to maintain health, and the final cost is huge, even affecting work and family. After adulthood, health is no longer a matter of one’s own, and health is the performance of being responsible for everyone around us, which cannot be avoided.

He observed the industry

No matter how many things we have done or failed to do, 2020 is about to start. We need to embrace the next 12 months with new vision and expectations. It is the next 12 months that are truly important and worthy of being cherished.

Before we talk about expectations, let’s talk about Scott’s observations. These conclusions are mainly based on past experience and continuous observation of major policies and industry environment, such as RCEP/ Belt and Road/Greater Bay Area strategy/China-Japan-ROK FTA… For example, there are a lot of interesting numbers on smes:

The 12th report of the fourth National Economic Census series – Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises as an Important Force driving Economic Development: By the end of 2018, among all the small, medium and micro enterprises in China, there were 910,000 information transmission, software and information technology service enterprises, an increase of 693,000 compared with the end of 2013, an increase of 319.4%, equivalent to a full three times…

Behind all say climate cold, cold to optimize the structure of the company’s profits have a lot of methods, which will be used is the information of effective integration to mention authors, a company needs to be based on the interface of various management systems, whether ERP/CRM/TMS, both traditional companies and Internet companies, with the tools of the Internet needs to be doing fine.

Front-end career dividends continue to expand

The so-called career bonus, which involves less effort and greater rewards than similar industries, is still true in the early stages of 2020.

Through the development of smes above, we can see that small, medium and micro Internet companies have tripled in the past six years, while the corresponding number of Internet employees has less than doubled. We can imagine how strong the demand for engineers will be, especially for front-end engineers. After all, the toB management system is still very early and chaotic at various access stages. Once the company has a technical team, the system level construction and maintenance will inevitably require the intervention of front-end engineers.

So many immature small and medium-sized companies, from the top design to the waist and leg of organization system, layer upon layer is likely to be a problem, so the development of the economical, more and more engineers, there will be more and more group leader (ability is not qualified) so that all managers appear to efficient operation of team, which will create more levels not neat and chaos the front end of the ecological management, These confusion does not represent the bottleneck of career development in the front end, but the opportunity brought by the continuous strides of the whole industry.

From this point, it’s tough for all the front end of the engineer, is all good, means that there are numerous opportunities waiting for you, on the other hand, it is also a challenge, because too many small and medium-sized micro are lack of health technology of soil, synergy mode and organization guarantee, in the face of positive and challenges, as the front-end engineer in micro, small and medium enterprises, we it’s time to review, to cognitive, Reseeing, reunderstanding and replanning our technical careers, repositioning our capabilities, and reshaping our professional values.

Which front ends are the most competitive

The bonuses mentioned above are relative to the profession and not applicable to all front-end engineers. First of all, they are not applicable to junior front-end engineers who have been working for two or three years (not yet able to work on their own). There are 40 front-end engineers competing for one position (according to the check box). The real bonus objects are senior front-end engineers, front-end technical experts, front-end architects and front-end managers.

The scarcest people in the market are the front end managers. The front end managers are scarcest than the people who manage them. That’s Scott’s observation. It’s surprising. He happy about his front the boss is not (good is not good at technology, understand don’t understand management, can bring people, can cultivate, whether there are internal and external influence), believes that the conclusion will be able to gain a foothold, excellent qualified managers even if the market is not scarce, believe that there won’t be so many students professional confusion, slowing growth, do not happy.

My judgment is that, in 2020, there will be a big wave of tenacious vitality have cash flow can be profitable company to survive (like hangzhou river, for example), they will be rapid growth, the subsequent will have many high order front post release, whether do infrastructure, or complex technical specialist, will take the front end of the team manager, Will be the most popular object, but the result must be a lot of high-level positions vacant for a long time, because in the supply and demand of this market, these senior front-end practitioners are usually in large factories, or have taken some key positions in excellent start-up companies, the real flow of a very small number of talents.

What technology stack as for the front end of the students is the most popular, my answer is the most has the ability to learn the front end of the most popular, the root cause is the front-end development fast enough, learning ability and the ability to carry out my study plan is the core competitiveness, as to grasp the forefront front technology of the students want to make a question mark is the most popular here, to see how the depth of the master, Because in the micro the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies, foreseeable a year or two, it is difficult to have cutting-edge technology of ground soil (such as Serverless/WebAssembly…). But these cutting-edge technical solutions still need our front end to maintain attention and follow up.

The recruitment difficulty of large and small factories intensifies

Corresponding to the demand of senior talent, is the size of the factory for the talented person’s competition trend, which account for large advantage, the trust industry talents is becoming more and more predictable cash, more not easily attracted by the entrepreneurial ideal pie, giant siphon effect more and more obvious, using squeeze wages and benefits and platform advantage, constantly siphon of small and medium-sized companies, a senior talents to join, High-level jobs and small and medium-sized companies are constantly expanding, big and small factory, especially small plant and the speed of the small factory race each other many a index, is of high quality talents for speed, cash and space to grow up in the factory, the greater the competitiveness for talents, the more the very inspects the influence of the small factory technical director.

The figure above shows the statistics of 340 technical directors’ teams in the front-end management group. It is found that in the HC submitted by 176 directors, experts account for 28%, equivalent to 3 technical experts for every 10 people recruited. Obviously, there are not so many technical experts in the market.

No matter whether the recruitment is influenced or not, the recruitment ability will become the core ability of the head of the front-end team, which directly leads to the bottleneck of the technical team construction speed behind the company’s business development.

Whether it is Vue/React/Angular, or the basic tool r&d capability tends to be full stack, the faster and deeper the children’s shoes run in single field and cross field, the greater the choice space in the market, and enterprises are paying more and more attention to the cycle of technology investment to generate value and r&d human efficiency. So business/learning ability, management ability will be examining their very important indicators, asymmetry between the two sides will also lead to small plant more and more difficult to retain good talent (giant siphon + its organization and technology, insufficient soil), and intermediate candidates more and more easy to choose the wrong team (into the pit after a few months found unfavorable to growth began to have a job-hopping motivation), This situation is due to an extreme shortage of middle and front end management talent and will not be resolved anytime soon.

His expectations for next year

The above briefly talked about the observation of the front-end industry, and then talked about his expectation for next year, that is, what flags still want to set up.

Team capability is further optimized

Currently in Scott’s first is still his pride, and also is the team, the team has been forming, but also need to further develop and optimize, from man’s consciousness, ability and the team continued effort on growth environment, let classmates will bring more team with team, do the architecture students will fall to the ground technical idea, make students more decision-making and judgment of the business, Let everyone in this part of the career of xiao CAI, career planning to draw a lane.

More straightforward is that more students grow and get promoted, and those who can’t keep up with the development of the team will be further optimized and eliminated. The goal is to make song Xiaocai’s big front-end team strong enough, no matter how big it is.

Front-end engineering takes shape

Run more than 2 years of tools to come to an end in 2020, began to customized for B, stability and maintainability, rapid iteration, such as demand, do engineering considerations, synergy through further, before and after the r&d online tracking more automated, behind the strong matching business shape and size are needed to be cost-effective.

Give more energy to the community

Output capacity there are many ways, not limited to, technical pamphlets, participate in and organize technology conference, build technology exchange platform, and even further paid about pay community, early with the public welfare altruistic attitude, this more than 9 years experience and the ability to translate into more instructive and easier to understand the methodology and the knowledge system, to coexist with more people, And helping push it when it matters is one of the most challenging things to do in 2020.

Here, let’s mention the Flag of the 2020 Front-end Early Chat Conference: 12 front-end technology seminars will be held in Hangzhou in succession, and the topics of the whole year will be arranged here: 2020 Topic market, the first of which will be held in the Internet Town on January 11, 2020.the front-end to Management, and the corresponding warehouse is: Front end early chat conference.

Let your hair grow and your body grow

In the past two years, due to health problems, I have been writing code with my bald head. I hope I can practice my body in 2020, and then leave my hair back after I take care of my body. In order to offset the troubles of my bald head in the past two years, I plan to leave my hair long this time.

Get your driver’s license and buy a Mustang

I have been talking about mustang for several years, but I haven’t got the driver’s license, nor have I prepared the purchase budget. I hope I can get the first car I like in my life in 2020 through my own efforts. After all, how can I drive without a driver’s license?

Try running a serious internal tweet group

After years of entrepreneurship and programming, more and more believe in one thing, choose the right industry is very important, it is very important to select the right company, choose the right team is very important, more important than they are chosen to the boss, I combed the deep intersection with me every a second-tier cities of the front end of the big in the factory boss’s HC team technology, push people some good friends to them, Both sides benefit, let the right person meet the right technical boss, let the right person meet the technical team I believe in and trust, and officially launch this test project in 2020, so that my social relations become more valuable.

Make more city friends

19 years went to Taiwan, Australia, Beijing, wuhan, Shanghai, shenzhen, met a lot of friends, have a plenty of entrepreneurs, have a plenty of engineers, by their local Internet environment, the front-end engineer community present situation, the engineer work life has a lot to see and feel a lot from their life blood of a good ideal, I hope I can visit more cities in 2020, such as Chengdu, Xi ‘an, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Japan…. And so on, to experience more life, to see more scenery, to store more memories.

It is the first time to make an annual summary and set so many flags, I don’t know whether there are more or less, but it depends on the practice in the next 12 months. I look forward to the summary after 12 months, in addition to completing the task, I can give myself more surprises.

Finally, in response to the title of this article, do you think Scott, who is about to turn 32, has made it?

At least 32 years old Flag has been established, concluded, in the next 50 weeks, all rely on execution, with all colleagues!