Every year of life is important.
Every year I want to gain some different experience.
The me now,
compared to the me three years after graduation,
more accepts a fact:
“In the narrow sense, I’m also an adult.”

A broad-sense adult
might be someone over eighteen.
A narrow-sense adult
is someone who thinks like an adult,
lives like an adult,
and considers themselves an adult.

Of course, this has that
“some people died at 20 but weren’t buried until 60” chuunibyou feeling.
So please let me look up at the stars,
and talk about some down-to-earth thoughts
about the future.

Life

College-era imaginings of the future were rather casual,
thinking I might open a satellite base in Shanghai later,
or perhaps physically jump the firewall,
or return to Guangdong entering the “parents alive, don’t travel far, if traveling have direction” state.

But as the years of adult life accumulated,
the appeal of physically jumping the firewall gradually dropped.
On one hand, I feel my motherland is pretty warm,
on the other, after getting used to it,
I don’t really feel the network environment is that inconvenient.

Returning to Guangdong, I could indeed “with parents alive, not travel far,”
but Mia would “with parents alive, far, gotta travel home”…
I used to think the “locals preferred” in dating conditions was unscientific,
but now I also understand where this thinking comes from.

By current thinking,
I’ll probably live in the very comfortable city of Shanghai.
I don’t value climate, transportation, opportunities much.
What I love is big cities’ population dividends technological radiation and “gentleman careful when alone” city culture.
Technological radiation means civilian tech first spreads from big cities.
“Gentleman careful when alone” means Shanghai really pays attention to rules,
it’s not personal-favors-first.

Though by my whim-driven, tinkering-prone personality,
in the future going to Chengdu to live with pandas,
going to Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia,
moving to Cologne, Germany are also undetermined possibilities.

Career

Where to live may be undetermined,
but what to work I’m clear on:
do things that let technology exert influence.

Excluding the relatively unlikely business-background HRBP=>HRD career path,
career choices that let technology exert influence are roughly:

  • Expert path: create value through deep expertise in some field, representative positions like senior engineer, architect
  • Manager path: manage projects with software engineering methods, representative positions like project manager, tech lead
  • Capital path: contribute via technology as equity stake, and participate in company-level operations and management, representative positions like technical VP, CTO

Expert path has high floor, not-low ceiling, and many opportunities.
A friend told me his job-hopping strategy:
pick C-round/D-round unicorn companies,
one or two years company goes public, four or five years options cash out,
repeating like this, both training at big companies and getting substantial pay.
Large-scale companies often train and use dragon-slaying techniques,
and as tech skill rises,
in the future experts/scientists like Linus/Donald-Knuth will surely emerge in abundance.

Manager path leans more engineering-direction, more deeply bound to the company, and has more influence at same level.
In some sense,
the software industry is like a fusion of painter and factory.
It both emphasizes inspiration, design, and motivation,
and emphasizes management science and planning.
A good manager can, on the basis of management, cost, collaboration,
ensure the stunning quality of the final product.
Like Zhang Xiaolong, Lei Jun, ultimately crowned with “product manager” laurels.

Capital path has fewer opportunities and higher risks,
but a person’s most valuable thing is their dreams.
Taking this path,
there are those who reached Pinduoduo CEO Chen Lei,
and there are those who started at Eleme’s early days but ultimately left dejectedly, Ye Feng.
More are those whose names got swallowed by the world,
they can only write on their next interview resume:
“Last job: entrepreneurship (failed).”

By my current age and skill points,
all three directions are completely possible to try.
Expert (pure tech) path can happily write code,
Manager (more management) path can complete more perfect products,
and Capital path can bring the beauty of technology to more humans.

Industry

These five years working in the tech industry,
besides a pile of universal praises,
I feel two qualities of this industry very deeply:
lifelong learning, extreme division of labor.

Lifelong learning on the positive side
is taking every piece of knowledge seriously,
always studying earnestly like a fifteen-year-old student.
On the negative side,
it’s that tech people, once they slack off,
will be surpassed by classmates fresh out of school.

Software tech is like standing on the shoulders of the giant on the shoulders of the giant on the shoulders of the giant to gaze outward, generation after generation.
Some of the application-layer tech popular in the current generation
will settle into underlying tech for later generations,
while another part will disappear in generational shifts.

So excellent freshly-graduated classmates,
because they’re young, have much time to learn current tech.
Whether salary or skill,
they can easily surpass slacking tech people.

Those expecting to accumulate career capital via work tenure, work experience,
often have difficulty surviving in the tech industry.

The meaning of extreme division of labor
is essentially “software engineers are the workers of the information age.”
(As an aside, this is also why class theory is so popular in recent software industry zeitgeist.)

This metaphor’s original meaning is helpless self-mockery from tech industry workers,
but it leads to one extension:
the tech industry (specifically programmers) lacks traditional-sense social value.

In life,
a doctor friend can give you health advice;
a lawyer friend can give you legal advice;
a salesperson friend introduces you to friends he met at work, doctors and lawyers among them;
but the programmer’s work is only the monthly salary.

So programmers who see this
actively interact with people,
maintain stable, positive social relationships.
But there are also many programmers
who when a friend asks “can you help me write a mini program,”
can only answer: “I’m backend, can’t do frontend.”

And the two industry traits of lifelong learning and extreme division of labor
are two points unavoidable when considering “fifty healthy working years, a lifetime of happy living.”
Some friends plan to save enough money to retire early at 35,
others have planned to switch industries when older,
to participate in building local life service industries (here meaning delivering takeout).

Value

Because of thinking about the future,
people think about their value:
life’s value, work’s value, existence’s value.

Zaihui’s (the company I’m at) vision is “make the food business easier.”
I’ve also written some articles about my work.
From a value perspective, the main deficiencies are two:

One is in the mature service industry of food and beverage,
the role technology can play has already been explored a lot.
Compared to one more small feature,
one timely response from customer service can make merchants and consumers feel more secure.

Two is though the food and beverage industry is high-frequency, big-market, opportunity-rich,
it doesn’t often “change people’s fate.”
Industries that “change fate”
are called the “New Three Big Mountains”:
housing, healthcare, education.
Precisely because of these industries’ foundational and crucial nature,
the national government has set many regulation policies.

If one day in the future,
I prepare to go out and entrepreneur stir something up,
I might first think about
how to find my value among these three mountains.

But before then,
let me first wander in the ocean of code :)

Dream

When humans consider real-world problems, it’s easy to forget dreams;
but when looking up at dreams, real-world problems all seem unimportant.

In my self-intro, I previously wrote:

My dream is world peace, that all good people can be happy,
and to become a very awesome person.

Now I have a more concrete description, called:

My dream is:
world peace,
the people I love and who love me can all be happy,
I want to become a gentle strong person.

Sometimes language is really magical.
Dreaming is easy, thinking is easy,
but having a dream feels not that easy.

Even in this descending order from large to small,
the seemingly simplest line
“I want to become a gentle strong person” is not simple either.

good-strong

Adult life isn’t like student life,
which has clear nodes like midterms, finals, winter break, summer break to make you self-reflect.
Many people gradually live by inertia.
And living by inertia makes it hard to “correct what you have, encourage where you don’t.”

The wind made pigs fly,
but pigs can’t think they can really fly.
In my own saying,
it’s called Stay Awake;
and in the movie 《Schindler’s List》’s metaphor,
it’d be said this way:

“You can easily execute people in a concentration camp, but that’s not power.
Real power is when you have a knife at someone’s throat and can say: ‘I pardon you.’
That’s real power.”

Closing

Writing to here,
《Five Years After Graduation》 split into four parts because of my insufficient writing skill is finally done.
Compared to two years ago’s 《Three Years After Graduation》,
the author’s cuteness seems to have dropped (x

The next piece in this series
will probably be two, three,
or even five years from now’s “Ten Years After Graduation.”

Or maybe, you reading this,
might actually be coming back via the inline hyperlinks five years from now?
Hehe.

So lastly, wishing you good health, see you again if fate permits!

(End)