Written on New Year’s Eve, this is a rough summary of the events and reflections from the past half of 2024.

Job Hunting Experience

After leaving my position, I spent the first few months in the job market as a matter of habit. I brushed up on my knowledge through problem-solving and review of basic concepts, and attended interviews at ByteDance, foreign companies, and small startups. I went through interviews with three different teams at ByteDance, generally making it to the middle or later stages. Overall, about half of the interviewers seemed to recognize my potential while the other half did not. This made me realize that the capabilities within ByteDance’s teams are also uneven. I also interviewed for remote positions at two foreign companies. One of them didn’t go well in the final round, and I felt the interview process was quite unprofessional, probably due to their being a startup with an inconsistent team. The other one didn’t make it past the second round. Their technical skills were impressive, and I was convinced that I was outmatched. Additionally, I interviewed at a small startup. They seemed to have a system in place, but I soon discovered that it was more about deception and manipulation. They had some absurd ideas like not providing social insurance and housing fund, asking candidates to take risks and even invest in the company. I communicated with their technical team under the pretext of having a chat, and found that they were actually quite pragmatic but rather naive, seemingly falling for such tactics. They said they would contact me later but ended up blocking me, which gave me a glimpse into the complexity of the recruitment environment. I also reached out to a few cross-industry internet positions, but there was no follow-up. Eventually, I stopped looking at job postings.

To be honest, the interview process was emotionally complex. On one hand, there was the anxiety of the interviews themselves. On the other hand, I was dissatisfied with the 996 work culture and didn’t want to join another company with such a working pattern. It felt like being in a dilemma. At that time, I was only confused by my emotions and didn’t understand the reasons behind them.

New Understanding of Work

After several months of learning, I came to understand the reasons behind my internal conflicts and complexities.

Firstly, work itself has its limitations. Since occupations are based on division of labor, the value one can produce is confined to that specific job role. Being restricted by job design and lacking complete information on the business model, the output value is inherently limited. Some organizations encourage individuals to go beyond their positions to demonstrate their value. However, this is destined to have a low success rate and can easily lead to distorted actions without even realizing it.

Secondly, there is a lack of leverage in work. Work is essentially about trading time for money, with no leverage involved. Many products can make a profit by selling multiple copies due to the decreasing marginal cost. But as an employee, you only receive a single salary.

Moreover, contemporary work lacks long-term security. It is said that work as we know it was born in the industrial age. Before industrialization, people lived in a self-sufficient agrarian economy with little factory work. After industrialization, large-scale production led to the emergence of a working class and job specialization. At that time, there were indeed more comprehensive company benefits. However, in today’s internet age, although the working model has been continued, company benefits have become less stable. In other words, work, which seems to be the most common way of earning a stable income, actually has many flaws that are worth paying attention to.

I believe that the ideal job to join is one with a positive-sum and ecological model. Positive-sum means that everyone works together to get things done, rather than being trapped in a zero-sum game of performance and competition. Ecological refers to everyone performing their own roles and being able to form a business closed loop. I have experienced some teams in the past, and now I can finally describe them as positive-sum and ecological teams. In such an environment, although work appears to be just a salary without leverage, the process of mutual cooperation and positive-sum efforts can bring satisfaction in terms of products, capabilities, and emotions. There is also the opportunity to grow the pie in a positive-sum manner. If anyone is fortunate enough to join this trend and team, please cherish it and give full play to your potential. Even if you end up with nothing in the end, life is a process, and having this experience is invaluable.

New Understanding of Technology

As a technical professional, one’s capabilities and career trajectory can often be misdirected under a specialized job role, making it challenging to achieve sustained and substantial development. After I left my previous position and surveyed numerous similar roles in the market, I realized that the technologies we utilized in-house were not widely adopted in the broader market. Conversely, the technologies that were popular in the market were not implemented within our company. Ironically, we spent considerable time on phased optimizations and repeatedly patching certain technical issues, when in fact, these issues had already been effectively resolved by the popular market technologies, which had even integrated the solutions into their frameworks. It’s both ridiculous and lamentable that many people in the company used these subpar, market-lagging technologies to report to their bosses, thereby securing profits and promotions. Instead of being utilized to create better products and pursue more advanced productivity, technology had degenerated into a tool for show and appeasement.

After the division of labor, there is also a certain degree of spiritual misleading for technical practitioners. Boring university education, stereotyped job interviews and screwing jobs in factories make people feel that technology is very monotonous, boring, and related to internal competition and overtime. But in fact, the true technical connotation has nothing to do with these negative factors.

So what is real technology, and the ability, spirit, and even culture of technical people? I watched a lot of videos and interviews of technical experts, and also read some hacker and open source history. The ones that had a deep impact on me were Apple’s Wozniak and Linux’s Levis. Their understanding of technology was very simple, for fun or value. I think simplicity is the best way, and I can use this to wash away my previous misunderstandings about technology, and as a standard for learning technology for a long time.

One-person Company

Since it is difficult to find a suitable job and jobs themselves have limitations, is there a better way to participate in society and earn income?

Through some channels, I learned that a one-person company is indeed good from a logical point of view. It runs a closed business loop by itself, fully realizes its value, and has free time. The greater endorsement comes from “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, who mentioned the earning dimensions of several quadrants of ESBI. In fact, a one-person company is the B-type earning method he recommends, with better space and leverage.

But considering my own abilities, I feel that the threshold for implementation is actually quite high, because not only does it require excellent technical capabilities to improve productivity and reduce costs, it also requires complete product design, marketing promotion and operational capabilities.

Independent Development

Is there a compromise? Perhaps independent development is more suitable for stage transformation.

The book “Rich Dad” says that independent developers make money in the S quadrant, which means that although it is better than the E-type employee model and can get a relatively complete individual value, it is also a life of hard work, because the individual’s time and energy are limited after all. But in fact, I read books such as “Going it Alone”, “Freelancer Survival Guide”, “Personal Brand Building: From 0 to 1 Low-Cost Entrepreneurship”, and “One-Person Company”, and found that individual workers are not that stupid. Of course, they don’t want to be hard-working. In fact, they will transform in the later stage. Some make products, and some start small companies. In fact, all roads lead to Rome.

The biggest difference between independent developers and employees is that they can face market demand directly, actively improve production technology, and obtain compound interest by accumulating customers and solutions; while in the employee model, the partners and production processes are often determined, and individuals have no freedom of choice and cannot accumulate compound interest.

Just do it. Since the domestic market is too competitive, let’s look at the international market. I plan to make money with upwork. There are two main things to learn first. One is to be familiar with popular technologies and some cases on the market, and the other is to get used to learning and communicating in English. It seems harder than finding a job, but in fact, whether it is technical cases or English, they can accumulate compound interest. It’s hard at first and easy later. This is why I changed to a bilingual blog.

I also took a rough look. In fact, the competition on upwork is quite fierce. But my goal is not to be the best group of people. I think it’s enough to outperform the average group of people. Rowling, who wrote Harry Potter, also said that if you experience failure because of timidity, your life is a failure by default. Summarize experience for success and lessons for failure. Perseverance should be rewarding.

The Road Of Investment

This was something I thought of before the New Year. Since the timeline for personal companies and independent development is relatively long, is there any way to earn some income? I thought of investing. Because in terms of revenue, you need to give full play to your abilities and resources, and after you come out, you can get some funds. The “Rich Dad Poor Dad” series also gave me some inspiration.

So I went to Hong Kong to apply for a card and officially started investing to make some money, hoping to give myself more room financially. Although it has been a few months, I have learned a lot. At first, I invested in stocks recommended by several friends in the US stock market. I made money that month and felt that making money was quite easy. But the good times didn’t last long. After a month, it started to fall and lose money. I started to continue learning and found that this type of stock is actually leveraged, that is, the bull market is naturally good, but the bear market is very difficult to make up. In terms of operation, I also spent five figures to buy a lesson. Because I learned about the method of making money without money in the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad Stock Investment from Beginner to Mastery”, but I didn’t understand it at the time. Suddenly one day, there was a very negative news, and I suddenly understood that it was called shorting. I thought the news was very negative and I should take advantage of it, so I raised all the funds to short. It was very coincidental that the Chinese and American heads of state had a phone call at that time, which brought greater benefits, so the stocks I shorted and sold rose straight after the opening. From panic to closing positions in batches, I ended up losing 5 figures, which taught me a solid lesson. I didn’t make money in the first place, and I ended up losing more.

If you don’t understand, continue to learn. After reading books like “Investing Like Buffett”, plus the lessons learned last time, I learned that first of all, you still have to have a correct mentality in operation, don’t be emotional, think rationally, and be self-disciplined and disciplined. Secondly, when selecting stocks, you still have to pay attention to the basics, choose good companies, make money you understand, and try not to short, leverage, fluctuate, or speculate. Because good companies will naturally bring many good opportunities, and grow with good companies. Short-term and volatile, the news brought by leverage is indeed enviable and attractive, but it is best not to touch money you don’t understand. Maybe I will grasp some opportunities or make some speculations within the rational range when I understand more in the future, but don’t rush at this stage, take your time, it will be faster.

After another month, I have almost recovered my previous losses due to value investment. I hope this is a good start.

Full-time Babysitting

Plans can’t keep up with changes. Due to some family reasons and twists and turns, I need to take care of my baby full-time for a period of time. I have to eat, drink, defecate, play, and basically can’t rest for 12 hours. Time has become very fragmented, so fragmented that I can’t support independent development. Even writing this blog was written intermittently during the noise of the baby.

In the scattered time, you can read books on your mobile phone. During this period, there are two books that impressed me the most. One is “Navarre’s Treasure Book”. He mentioned that we should accept the status quo and not fight. We should accept the status quo first and face the problem directly before solving the problem. Another one is “The Meaning of Life”. The book records the experience of people in the concentration camp, who were naked and lost all their identities and property, on the most basic life and death line. He wrote that no matter what environment a person is in, he actually has the freedom to choose his own behavior and will.

During this period without my own time, I also experienced several emotional ups and downs. At first, I was not used to the side effects of my previous work, because for a long time, I would feel a mixture of shame, guilt and fear when I was not working. Later, it came from the discomfort of not being able to realize myself, and the discomfort of wanting to do some work but not having the conditions; now I try to accept the status quo, be calm, and accept that life is originally a process from nothing to nothing. In fact, the meaning is given by oneself. Work is meaningful, and taking care of children is actually meaningful. The time of companionship is actually decreasing day by day. Do a good job of accompanying every day, which is much better than meaningless work and internal consumption.

I am in pain and have no time, but I also accept the value of the time I spend taking care of children now. Maybe when the child is older and goes to kindergarten, I will have more personal time.

If I summarize it in one sentence, I think the current stage is: Accept The Status Quo, Know Myself, And Love Life.