Personal struggle is indeed important, but it must also be in line with the course of history.

I have met many programmers engaged in software development industry, and sometimes join in daily discussion on web community, especially the Chinese Twitter Community, which is influxed with many China internet sector practitioners from tencent, bytedance, baidu and other powerhouses. And I involved their programming life debates for some times.

The Internet industry in China can be regarded as a special working field stand at "tuyere", namely investment hotspot for decade (2012-2022), which is the high-speed business expansion term for many internet based entrepreneurs, Alibaba, JingDong and so forth.

It increasingly brought up the requirements on computer professionals. Many grads majored in computer relations have caught up their "epoch bonus", what follows they have been in place of civil engineering, which forboded the end of the era of big infrastructure. Computer-relevant major became the hot cake amidst many others.

Undoubtedly the computer science and software development are some of the high-salary jobs, these grads, as programmers, could earn more reimbursement than peers, lead a decent live than rather peers. Before long they by and large would step into elated middle-income class.

The decade about from 2012-2022, could be the Golden Age for China Internet. And follow-up, the high-speed business expansion with high-salary made them lose themselves in a illusion. Of course, I can understand, for vested interests they are tend to exaggerate prospect, take optimistic attitudes to it, thereby being hard to make them calm down when facing of things related to their interest.

History would prove that flourish is ultimately ephemeral.

Disparate from America, the senior capitalism-based states experienced the processing of becoming a industrial country and financial power, China is still a country with a traditional human resource base. After the COVID-19 pandemic, industrial upgrading is a long way off. This means China's business development still relies on the most important factor: human resource, rather than capital appreciation. Also it was named as "Population Bonus". So it's not difficult to understand why the 996 is rampant in China, and the government always turned an blind eye to violations on labor laws. We all know the productive relationships determine the productivity. China internet industry is essentially affiliated with reality industries. That is to say the internet is on reality industry's service. The primary industry and secondary industry accounted for 40% and 53% respectively as far. In other words, the Internet industry shares weal and woe with the secondary and tertiary industries. If they encounter a recession, the internet industry must be the first to be hit and the most severely damaged.

I also take suspicious attitudes to China's internet business whether they are belonged to the New Productivity or not. Charlie Munger has remarked on Alibaba: I since thought Alibaba is a high-tech corporation but as result I found it a damn retailer. Internet industry powerhouses are essentially "sweatshops". As I know, most of internet business are overlapping in form of CRUD. The "three high" people are glad to talking about, high concurrence, high performance, high availability, they are essentially competing for the existing market. So, what we see is that programmer interviews are moving to a weirdly abnormal direction. As the saying "Interview: building rockets, work: screwing screws". Programmers should pass the stringent and multi-rounds exams, more and more question seemed to be out of practice for real works and became a pure-intellectual games. They always take the diction "If you don't do it, there are plenty of people who will." if you express against this phenomenon.

Indeed, if you watch for the industry structures will find that China's industries were like the pipelines and they are working for pump out productions.

I have ran for an interview for Java Backend Developer. The interviewer asked me some questions about Java developments. Firstly he asked me some rudiments but sequentially he put some strangle questions, for example, how to optimize the JVM underlying architecture?

Chinese programmers may be the most diligently painstaking around the world. For most of them involuntarily research and do cramming in monstrous Leetcode algorithms, just to do stereotyped questions in interviews to get the highest score and to struggle for offer. Even so in such rat race they can not get rid of being doomed to be laid off at 35 years-old.

Imagine that although you are enough excellent, can you entirely assure that you won't be disused in future especially now, at the term of economical recession?

After all human's brain has its limitations for study to adapt the high-speed iterating knowledge and experience. The software development industry is renowned for high-speed technology progress, some development frameworks, libraries, their version iteration is so fast that a new version is released every three days with plenty of features and changes added. Furthermore these technology stacks also have their inter-competitions. It's usual that one of a distinguish technology stack replace others and be in vouge.

Under the capitalism and liberalism market system every labors should have awareness of being a "Tool Man", the programmer is not exception. But the worst thing is, after the layoff, programmers plumb into the dilemma that they have no other ability except coding. People often dub programmers as "Migrant Farmer Workers" with joke. As the case it were, the only difference between farmer workers and programmers is that former is physical labor, and the latter is mental labor. And they also will be devalued according to wary over time. Just as a worn tools with wear and tears. That is not a joke but a serious fact. The programmers currently are de facto "tools" for objectify from travail labors. You have to remember that you actually have nothing except your so-called programming knowledge.

When I came up with this opinion on Tweet, I encountered many rejects. It doesn't a matter. The history will soon prove the correctness.

As I so often meet the debates from programmers, on twitter trolls, such as meaningless trivial problems like "React vs. Vue", "Should I wrap braces?", for these reason they always branch out many denominations and fight each other.

The epoch belonged to programmers now is approaching to afterglows, where do we go from here? 😔

Above all and finally, here are my sharing knowledge:

• Contrive the power or capital while you are young rather than money barely. And timely aware the importance of power and capital.
• Do not bury yourself into coding and technology. Do not get out of touch with society. Notice that you are living as a person rather than personification of technologies.
• Study English. Not only it provides a fundamental skill for migration aboard and oversea business, but also enough unlocks information connected with the world. With proficient English ability you could read most of above 90% information around the world.
• Explore something side occupations or vocations. Knowingly the primary jobs for subsistence and side jobs for improving life quality.