As a programmer, both value-added and improved expressiveness must ultimately achieve a certain degree of scarcity in a certain environment. Such a talent has value. Scarcity is also influenced by the power of two dimensions: one is your own efforts; the other is the changes in the big environment and the adaptation to such changes.
What can scarcity bring to you?Since scarcity has such a huge impact on individuals, what kind of impact can scarcity bring to a person? Let's look at a simple example: there was a story like this in Japan. A person is responsible for the maintenance of a large system in a telecom company. Although his income is high, he is not satisfied with his salary development after a long time, so he finally chooses to leave. As a result, as soon as he left, the large system immediately ran. In desperation, the telecommunications company had to hire the man at a higher salary. To achieve this goal, the telecom company, whether in the position or in the position, is bound to provide conditions that make this person unable to refuse. This is a typical example of scarcity. A large system must be used because it is associated with a large user group. At the same time, the maintenance of this system cannot be done by this person, which makes the scarcity of this person very prominent. This is actually very interesting, because here it is actually not good software that makes a person's value and scarcity. This is not very good, but it is not uncommon for such situations. From the market point of view, it does not focus on whether the internal logic of a program is clear or whether there are enough annotations. It only focuses on whether the program can operate well. Therefore, junk code in use has great value, that is to say, commercial considerations have a greater impact on scarcity. To prevent the above text from being misinterpreted, I would like to add a note here. The above is not a road worth imitating. Because for the above-mentioned person, in fact his value is bound to a specific system, this will cause almost no mobility, which will limit the achievement of a person, this poses great risks in the future.
Ways to Improve scarcityIn order to improve your scarcity, we usually need to do two jobs at the same time: first, improve yourself, and first, adapt to the current situation. It is easy to understand that improving yourself can make yourself scarce. However, if you do not adapt to the current situation, it is easy to make this scarcity impossible. Those proficient in DOS programming in 2013 are undoubtedly scarce, but this may not necessarily produce value. Below we will explain the scarcity from the above two aspects.
1. Rush to the value heights in the program worldMr. Buffett, the investment guru, said a widely spread saying: some companies have towering moat, and fierce crocodiles, pirates and sharks are guarding the river. This is the company you should invest in. This sentence describes the external image of the high value. For enterprises, moat can be a lot of things: difficult technology (** aircraft), hard-to-Crack user viscosity (qq), exclusive resources (CNPC) and unique corporate culture (Apple. Moat gives enterprises an irreplaceable value. From the supply perspective, this is the scarcity of creating their own value: without it, you have no more options. This is the high value. When an enterprise is above this, it is relatively safe. As a result, large companies will eventually try to dominate an order and ecosystem, and only such large companies can control scarcity. This applies to individuals. Scarcity itself can have many sources, either from time or height. The scarcity of opportunity is more like an accident. It is easy to break and often does not have long-term value. Compared with a person's life, this is not a powerful support. For example, Erlang may be relatively scarce, but the pure language barrier is not as high as possible. If there is a huge demand, the world can have millions of Erlang programmers in a month. When a person manages his or her scarcity, he must find a place Where crocodiles, pirates, and sharks guard him. Of course, it is difficult for you to put the crocodile and so on, which is different from the Enterprise. At this point, the management direction is different from the choices that programmers in the technical direction face and the measures they need to take.
For programmers in the technical direction, there are two ways to go to the above value heights:First, expand horizontally to a certain height. For example, the combination of programming languages, (financial) business logic, foreign languages, and network knowledge can become a Highland where a person in programming languages may not be as good as a genius programmer, the business logic may not be as good as the Bank staff, and the foreign language may not be as good as the full-time translation. However, every heavy filtering will lead to a high level of competition in the highlands and eventually a scarcity. First, a thorough and expert Road. Some jobs may not need to expand the area wide, such as TTS and OCR algorithms. Some people or even programming languages may not be familiar with it, but they can indeed be experts in some areas. This is also a high value. In this direction, once it reaches a certain level, it is not beyond the accumulation of a single pure number. For example, it is silly to think that 100 or more mediocre scientists are equivalent to Einstein. Regardless of the direction, you will eventually achieve this effect: You can complete a very commercial thing, and most people may be confused about it. For example:
- I can develop a mobile phone, because I know both software and hardware, and if I develop a good product. Now, if you are really a good guy, you can solve the hammer problem.
- I can increase the OCR recognition rate by 1%.
- I can build millions of concurrent websites.
- I can lead the team to handle the entire banking system.
In this case, it is best not to use a technical point of view. For example, I am good at Java, I will use PHP, I know the TCP/IP protocol, and so on. This is not to say that there is no value, but that this perspective is a bit low-end. Only when one thing can be done can it be directly linked to commercial interests, and there can be real scarcity.
For managers, there seems to be only one way to go to the above value heights:Efforts should be made to make memorable achievements. This score can be either a product or a certain performance. Today, I believe everyone will think of Zhang Xiaolong. This is because it attracted 0.2 billion million users in less than two years and has a good reputation. It is a miracle. There is a typical trap about the value Highlands: Without complexity, the experience of a company is often mistaken for the value highlands, but it is not, as long as the environment is relatively open, such things can often be cracked in a short time. For example, a company may define its own processes, many of which are vague, and new people may face challenges everywhere. It is easy to misunderstand that the process itself has a high value, but in fact this is caused by imperfect processes and is an accident in a specific scenario. This does lead to scarcity, but it is basically not mobile, and most of the time it may not be a good choice.
Is demand development a high value?In agile organizations, programmers tend to be very close to their needs, but in traditional development methods, there is often a gap between their needs and programmers. If you want to develop programs, you may not need to write programs.
Is demand development a high value?Many pure programmers may think that document work alone is not technical and can be written by anyone. Therefore, they may think that this is not a high value. But from the perspective of business value, when a person understands the business of a certain industry (better technology), this is really a high value. This can be used as an analogy: ** is it valuable to ** only use platforms and ** sell things? Of course there is value. ** 11/11 of the sales volume is more than 10 billion higher than that of Black Friday in the United States. How can this problem be of no value. Why is ** valuable? In the eyes of end customers, there are ** and ** various ** first, which monopolizes the entrance, so ** is more valuable. The relationship between requirements and development is similar. When a person needs a product, in the eyes of outsiders, the demand of the person represents the product and the contribution of the programmer can be seen through the product. External personnel need developers before programmers. One of the most challenging practices is that demand developers take the lead in the entire project, and all others work under the leadership of demand developers. At this time, it makes no sense to get the best. For example, some people may think that there is a product without a programmer. This is just as meaningless as arguing that there is no store. In reality, of course, both of them have value. Here we only discuss whether this is a high value.
2. walking in front of or inside the technology tideIn the IT world, the sky is changing, and every change will actually lead to the rise of a technology or the decline of a technology. When wps97 was developed for a long time, Baidu encyclopedia described it as: Windows has many new things that we are not familiar with yet, and Microsoft has upgraded. Many technical materials are hard to find. Microsoft is familiar with windows, and we have to start from scratch, which leads to wps97 dystocia. If wps97 can be launched in 1995, it will directly compete with word6.0, and word6.0 will certainly be unavailable. This vividly describes the scarcity caused by the rise of a new technology. From the aspect, we can also see what kind of desire enterprises have for high-end windows developers in the 95th year. This scarcity is caused by technological changes behind the industry cycle. Today, with the help of the search engine, the first-entry programmers can also solve most windows programming problems.
In the face of this technology trend, a more appropriate way is to embrace new technologies based on reality.Based on reality, you can consider the mobility of your skills, the possibility of separation between practice and learning, select a new technology that you think is promising, and invest time. However, there is a trap. Many people may think of new programming languages when it comes to new technologies. However, programming languages are too basic and their barriers are too low, which is not a big enough consideration area. If the angle of view is limited to this scale, there will be too many things to see, but it is not easy to focus. At this time, we need to enlarge the units we consider, the term tech stack is often used in English to describe this technology group. For example, lamp (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PERL/PHP/Python) can be a consideration unit, Windows Programming + ASP. net can also be a consideration unit, and big data processing can also be a consideration unit. If we look back for ten years, we will find that the first PC Client program is flourishing, the next is the rise of the Internet, and the next is the flourishing of mobile clients. Undoubtedly, mobile clients and the Internet are more attractive than traditional PC clients. In the cloud era, the two sets of tech stack with distinct barriers are a series of technologies based on closed source (mainly provided by Microsoft) and a series of open source-based technologies. In this case, if the tech stack technology gradually gains advantages, there will undoubtedly be good scarcity for people who have accumulated in the corresponding tech stack. Although there seems to be no obvious difference between the two, I personally think that open-source tech stack will gradually gain advantages in the future. On Quora (quora.com) and high scalability (highscalability.com), we can find the technical architecture of most emerging foreign websites with a market value of over $1 billion, such as Flickr, Pinterest, instagram, etc. If you carefully read these technical architectures, you will find that they all have one thing in common: they are built based on open-source technologies. There is a certain degree of inevitability behind the same choice. Open-source tech stack is almost the only choice when you want customization and do not want to pay high costs. Especially when open-source technologies have more and more successful instances, this advantage is becoming more and more obvious. If you have to choose between the client (IOS, Android, winrt) and the Internet, I personally think the Internet is more advantageous than the client.
Risks associated with technical fluctuations
Many people will say that Microsoft has almost done nothing in the 10 years from 2002 to 2012, and will also talk about the stock. If we bought Microsoft shares 10 years ago, we can only earn 30 ~ 40%, and more than three times that of Apple stocks. My personal thoughts are occasionally divergent, but I don't only think of this. If Microsoft loses 10 more years, it's not just Microsoft, but also companies and individuals tied to Microsoft, including many senior windows programmers. In the PC world, Microsoft is undoubtedly the Overlord, but if the PC era has passed, if this Overlord cannot be transformed successfully, then it will undoubtedly be buried. At that time, countless people who spent half their lives on the Microsoft platform were still there. Where should they go? The rise of the technology tide will make many people in the tide known as dazzling stars, and a wave of tide will also take away the halo of some people with it. The difference is that the former is vigorous, while the latter is silent and silent. In this situation, we can only keep pace with the times.
Check your scarcityIt is very difficult to check your scarcity from the perspective of social needs, because the various types of data are always very lacking. But there is a simple way to quickly let a person recognize his scarcity: Assuming that a graduate is studying hard, how long can he replace your job? For example, a graduate can replace you in a year or two if he is nearly 30 years old. scarcity is inevitable. On the contrary, it takes five years for a graduate to have your technical skills even if they work very hard. At the same time, if they do not have a specific chance, they cannot replace you, so even if you are 30 years old, your scarcity will be very good. The opportunity here can refer to some special practical opportunities.
If you want to compare the system to assess your scarcity, consider the following in sequence:
Are the technologies that I have mastered about to become obsolete?
The tide of technology always regularly removes various technologies, and the targets for elimination at different time points are also different. Some of them are not completely eliminated, but at least they are no longer as brilliant as they were in the past. If we look back at the boundaries of 2013 for 10 years, such technologies include Flash, MFC, and Delphi. To maintain the sensitivity to technical trends, it is critical to regularly read others' architectures. Of course, outdated technologies may not only refer to general technologies, but also to old systems that may be replaced by new solutions. For example, many companies have used Lotus Notes for knowledge management, but few have used such systems. How many people will have their skills? This point should be taken into consideration from the company's perspective, rather than the individual's perspective, as described above. Simply using a language or framework is not scarce. For example, simply using Asp.net to develop web pages does not have high technical barriers, however, the database design has a considerable degree of understanding, can better use load balancing, cache and other means to ensure the system performance can make their scarcity level. (Reproduced from: HTML5 China)
