The Internet industry is also “civil”?

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Source: wechat official account: Jiubian has been authorized to reprint

I wrote an article in the early stage, which said that the civil engineering industry has a clear evolution process.

Unlike the current civil engineering, which means “cattle and horses” and “running away with buckets”, at the beginning of the 21st century, the income of people on the construction site was not low. At that time, there were many projects with sufficient funds, and the bonus of one project might be equal to the total income of others in one year.

But at least in the last five or six years (the turning point is generally considered to be 2015), there has been no change in income. Not only the people on the construction site, but also the entire industrial chain, including the design. You can search the “Design Institute” on the Internet. Basically, they are complaining. If you don’t understand the situation, you think they have suffered much injustice.

The main reason is that with the development of the country, society has changed, and it is no longer an era of great development and construction. Ten years ago, a manager was able to get 20W, and even some junior college students went to the design institute to draw drawings. They could earn more than 100000 a year, and their income was far higher than the average social level. They could buy a car and a house in the city. Although they could not live for a few days, at least they could balance their minds and explain their hardships.

The key is that the promotion is very fast, that is, to be the chief engineer in three years, to be the project manager in seven years, and to add income. The admission score of University civil engineering is the highest in almost all majors.

However, after so many years, the price and house price have changed, and the income is still 20W, or even can’t be earned. There is no advantage in this income. Besides, there are long-term overtime and personal life is missing.

What is more frightening is that compared with other people, the same university went to the Internet and went to the construction site. Who is more tearful. Even if it is an ordinary job, the same school, for so many years, the income is not much less than you. People can at least stay with their family members, which leads to psychological imbalance and confusion.

Moreover, with the reduction of infrastructure in developed areas, new projects are getting farther and farther away, the places are getting more and more remote, and it is more and more difficult to go home. If I go abroad, I can even go home once every two or three years. By the end of this year, the civil engineering majors in various colleges and universities have basically met with cold weather, and some have simply been dissatisfied. This is also related to the persistent efforts of civil engineers to pour bitter water everywhere. Based on the principle of “persuading one to retreat and saving one’s life”, as long as someone asks, it is a deep hatred and a deep sin. Finally, civil engineering has been completely turned into an industry that everyone hides from.

This year, the situation has finally improved somewhat. However, it is not that civil engineering has caught up with the Internet, but that the Internet has become civil engineering. I also talked about the reasons before. The Internet industry is very different from other industries.

Other industries pursue profits. If we build factories, hire workers, start production, and eliminate costs, we will make profits.

However, the Internet is different. What it wants is not profit. What it needs is monopoly. Therefore, all companies are frantically expanding into each other’s territory. Moreover, everyone is like a bug. The company has a lot of strange projects, hoping that if one project is successful, it can form a wave of dimension reduction attacks on other companies.

And unlike the manufacturing industry, the main body of the manufacturing industry is actually machinery. People are used to cooperate with machines. In the words of some local bosses, people and lubricants are no different. However, there is no hardware in the Internet industry (cloud servers and office space are not included in the total cost), and the main expenditure is to constantly pull the code.

In this case, the competition for computer talents has also entered the white heat. Today, the monthly salary of 30000 in most other industries is very impressive, but in large Internet companies, it is necessary to hire a new employee. Moreover, many Internet companies look at making money. In fact, almost all the money they earn is invested in hiring more computer talents, and they even want to attract investment to pay employees. This may be a rare phenomenon in the business sector where employees collect the wool of capitalists.

Like the European powers in the middle and later period of World War I, the Internet giants borrowed money to fight trench warfare on the front line for only one purpose. After the opponent’s blood was exhausted, they asked the other party to pay compensation for their huge war expenses. Big factories also follow this logic. After spending countless money, they hope to completely overthrow all their competitors and occupy all the markets, and earn money back. That will require more employees and more resources. This arms race has led to the increase of employees’ wages in circles.

However, the situation has obviously changed in the past two years.

With the country’s anti-monopoly and economic slowdown of Internet enterprises, the whole logic of the Internet industry has changed.

The most obvious one is that everyone has begun to give up the “monopoly dream” and no longer seek monopoly. Since there is no monopoly, there is no need to fight a war of attrition with the opponents on the front line, and they find themselves really stupid. Why should they hire so many programmers and pay so high salaries to programmers?

Since we are not prepared to expand, many “embedded” projects are unnecessary. Companies are constantly screening out various waste projects and cutting them. That is to say, some projects are meaningless, but the product manager is good at talking and constantly brainwashing the company to keep the project going. In the article of president Ren the day before yesterday, he said “don’t tell stories to deceive the company”, which is what he said. It may seem strange to all of us. Can we still do this?

This is very normal. Generally, large-scale recruitment is carried out in large factories, and then at the end of the year, a group of people are driven away by performance. After years of tossing and turning, most of those who can work in large factories for more than five or six years have unique skills. Some are super skilled, some are eloquent, and some are good at managing the expectations of leaders. It is normal for a group of people to cheat money by telling stories.

However, in the past two years, we have entered a state of contraction. No matter how eloquent we are, we can not bear the fact that we are not making money. No matter how strong your project is, it will be cut if we can not provide food for the company. This is also what president Ren said in his article, “from focusing on expansion to focusing on cash flow”. Whether or not the company’s projects can continue to operate, it no longer depends on ppt. Instead, it is based on the ability to make money. With this ruler, a large number of projects immediately show their original shape.

Next, we are faced with massive layoffs, and the projects are gone. What are you doing in the company?

Therefore, we continued to review, leaving behind those with strong technical ability and those with strong deception ability, and cleaning up all the others. In the past two years, big factories have suffered a lot. This is basically the background. Moreover, it may not have reached the worst stage. After all, no one said that wages can only be raised but not lowered. After “passing the cold air to everyone”, there may be a wave of wage cuts.

As for the deception ability, some friends may not understand it. Do you think it’s a special ability? It’s complicated to say. Let’s say a few more words. Once the company’s scale exceeds the scale of “3000 people”, your career trajectory will obviously show the following characteristics:

In the early stage, we should look at technology, in the middle stage, we should look at relations, and in the later stage, we should look at mountains.

That is to say, whether you can stand out when you first join the company depends mainly on your technical ability. If your technical ability is not good, it will be difficult for you to survive the first three years.

After working for three or four years, you should have a good relationship with a certain leader and become his confidant. He has important things to do for you, and he will take you with him when he is promoted. After all, after becoming a leader, Mao will not be able to work any more. There are few people working under him, and it is basically difficult to do anything.

After working for more than ten years, if you enter the middle level, you will have a clear mountain situation. Your life situation may be strongly related to a leader at the top. He is very strong. He can win resources and good projects and distribute them to the people under him. The people under him will be distributed layer by layer. After working for a year, everyone will eat meat together. The leaders at the top were marginalized and could not win good projects. They were all rotten and oil-free. The people at the bottom were unlucky and worked hard for a year. The final bonus might be a box of apples for each person, which was unlucky for eight years. However, don’t worry too much. Next year may be even worse. Poor efficiency will lead to the loss of backbone. Without backbone who can fight hard, even if leaders win large projects, they will not be able to do it, and the more mixed they are, the more frustrated they will be.

Do you think I can change the mountain? It’s not impossible, but every leader and his younger brother have a trust relationship that has been run through for many years. If you want to join others, they don’t want you. Even if you pass away, you are still an outsider or a marginal person. You are allowed to do ordinary work, but not called for in small circle meetings. At the end of the year, people’s direct line will divide the meat and give you a bone. This is probably the operation mode.

Therefore, in a large company, many times you join a certain department and follow a certain leader, and the future may be almost the same. Those cutting-edge departments have big leaders to take care of them. They have many resources and good projects, and they are easy to make contributions. Every year, they set up several new projects. Every time a new project is launched, some old employees will become small leaders, which breaks the dilemma of climbing the ladder of seniority.

It was not obvious when I first joined. After a few years, I was very far away from people in other marginal departments. It is probably because of this that many large factories do not tell you which department they are when recruiting. After all, what should you do if you know that you want to go to the unlucky department and run away directly? When you report, you will not run away with sunk costs.

In addition, the software industry has the problem of “upside down”, that is, the income of new employees is higher than that of old employees, which is rare in most industries. It is mainly because the large factories face a small number of university computer related graduates at the time of recruitment every year. The market price is soaring every year, so it is not upside down.

By saying so much, I mean that as the expansion of the traditional Internet stops, the number of computer talents in the market will be greatly reduced. The marginal demand determines the price. When the market has sufficient human resources, the price will naturally not be raised.

But will it be “civil”?

Obviously not.

Civil engineering has boundaries. For example, it is impossible to build ten Beijing Shanghai high-speed railways, or to demolish the city and rebuild it every ten years. It will naturally slow down at a certain time.

As I said before, most countries have a 20-30-year centralized construction period. The United States, Germany, and even Japan and South Korea have been engaged in large-scale infrastructure construction, but once this period of time has passed, the food will be stopped immediately.

Because the competition is more and more fierce, the number of profitable projects is less and less, and more and more remote, the construction teams in various countries are rapidly aging and inefficient. I went to the construction site to read the article on civil engineering at the weekend. As expected, the workers are too old, and many of them are over 60 years old (now the state says that people over 60 will not be allowed to go to the construction site in the future). And as it becomes more and more formal, it will inevitably lead to lower and lower efficiency.

But there is no such problem in the computer industry. The industry originally renovates the Beijing Shanghai high-speed railway every few years. For example, the apps in your mobile phones seem to have changed little, but they are basically completely rewritten every four or five years to meet new needs. Moreover, unlike civil engineering, it has almost no entity. Theoretically, the expansion space is infinite. Moreover, in the software industry, there is a saying more and more, “software devours the world”. Everything we live now may be changed beyond recognition by software.

The most obvious one is that most of the factories are still using manpower. I asked a boss before whether he had considered building an automatic chemical plant or a complete robot. He said that it is not possible for the time being, because only those enterprises that have not changed much in the long-term production of things, such as cars and computers, can use robots. These enterprises often change according to customer orders. At this time, robots are too stupid to compare with people. Workers can only train for a few days. However, if the robot arm needs to be reprogrammed and debugged, it can not catch up with the progress.

However, he also had a premonition that this kind of thing was almost inevitable. Sooner or later, all the mechanical arms would be replaced and the workers would serve the mechanical arms. By then, there would not be many workers and a lot of money could be saved. As long as money could be saved, someone might do it.

The same is true in other fields. Automobiles, home furnishings and entertainment all need large-scale software and hardware transformation. After the transformation, new demands will be found. Continue to transform. Think about how much life has changed in the past 100 years. However, many highways in the United States are still built in 1929. It can be said that software is the real sea of stars.

This also means that the software industry was born to sell advertisements in the past, and will gradually integrate with various entities and become more and more intelligent in the future. For example, in recent years, many code farmers have gone to the new energy vehicle industry to do car machine related coding.

In other words, in the next few years, computers may not earn as much as they did in the previous two years, but they will continue to generate a huge number of jobs. In Kevin Kelly’s words, the more you use software, the more you need it.

There is also a problem. In other industries, talent stratification is not as serious as in the software field. What do you mean? It is very difficult for you to do the work of ten people on the construction site. However, in the computer and other scientific fields, after in-depth training and experience, this ceiling may be raised to 1000 people per person. This may be a bit daunting. But think about it. In most industries, there is very little room for each person to rise. Are you looking forward to joining an industry with a high ceiling?

As for how to become a master, it depends mainly on yourself and also on chance. When you study, do you really study and raise your hands-on ability to the level you should reach? This may confuse you. Is there anyone who is not serious? Of course, a few years ago, as a technical director, I went to the university to recruit. At the beginning, I was the first round of interviewers, and then I was promoted to the second and third rounds. You can find that even in many 985 / 211 graduates, who have studied computer for four years, do not even have basic programming skills. Don’t think it is strange. This is the reality. The reality is that you can surpass most people with a little snack.

Most people are not completely careless. Maybe they are busy here today and go to other places tomorrow. The bear breaks the stick and can’t do anything.

This is also related to our intuitive mistakes. We generally think that growth is like this:

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After sticking to it for a period of time and finding no effect, they give up. In fact, almost all of their growth is non-linear and explosive. That is, they are unknown in the early stage. Suddenly, there is an exponential explosion. Most people are forced to give up when they are not in school. They are forced to make a breakthrough when they are at work. However, they are slower than others. In fact, they may be slow in everything because when no one looks at them, I can never reach that turning point:

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When you get to work, you have to dare to take responsibility and challenge, and learn to laugh more. The most important ability in the software industry is cooperation.

Many people are “wrong step by step, wrong step by step”. When they were in college, their foundation was not solid, their programming ability was poor, and they were very frustrated after they started working, and then they promoted others without mentioning you. Poor mentality, slow growth, missed opportunities for key projects, and increasingly marginalized.

Of course, the most important point is whether you have a sense of pleasure in doing this. Many times, we say “talent”, which may actually be that kind of pleasure. Some people do something, they are not smarter than others, but they are very happy. Even if they have no talent, they can reach a high level. If he is smart and cool to work, that is the life of the open. The high-level technical backbones of big factories are all such people. On the other hand, if you go to work like going to a grave, well, admit it, we are just ordinary people, continue to muddle along, otherwise what else can you do. As for whether we will always follow the technical line or the “mountain line” of management in the future, that will be left to us. We will naturally understand it at that time.

Many small partners may struggle with the 35 year old problem. This problem is not a technical problem, nor is it an industry problem, but a social problem. In addition to civil servants, who can only get in and out of the industry, as long as other industries involve competition for posts and our country’s over abundant human resources, naturally there will be “waves behind beat waves ahead”. However, the key is to lower expectations. Everyone has his own life, and there is no need to be too demanding.

At the end of the article, I would like to sum up a few sentences.

1. The era of high wages in the past few years has ended, and there will be high wages in the future, but it will not be as violent as in the past few years;

2. Next is a broader world. The software world is as big as the imagination is;

3. If you want to do this industry, you must be solid at every step. This industry is still upward, but it does not mean that everyone can live well. In fact, this industry strictly abides by the “28 February law”;

4. In the past and in the future, computers were the most friendly majors for the poor.

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