Original link: http://catcoding.me/p/new-journey/
Due to family reasons, I decided to go back to Shenzhen for permanent residence. On the eve of New Year’s Day in 2023, I sent things back to Shenzhen one after another. After New Year’s Day, I boarded the train heading south in the morning light. I wasn’t sure I would leave at the time, but I found a suitable job, so I left Microsoft in April.
During the two years of working at Suzhou Microsoft, I met a very good team and colleagues, and I was really reluctant to leave. Microsoft is very big, and the working atmosphere of each department may be somewhat different. What I have learned during the two years of working in Suzhou:
Technology , there are very few companies in the world that can use technology to serve such a large number and scale of enterprise users. I remember reading a detailed accident report last time, which said that it affected billions of users. It is rare to write such a bug. experienced. The working atmosphere at Microsoft is very good, and it is very comfortable to stay in it as a technical person. Working in a large organization spends a lot of time communicating, how to advance projects, and how to reach consensus with colleagues. These are very important and the most difficult. On the other hand, it is also a rare experience to maintain and develop a project with a history of 20 years. During the few months I joined the company, I basically looked at the code, which greatly improved my resilience in programming. On the other hand, working on such a large project always feels like dancing in shackles. It is difficult to modify the code on a large scale. Many times, the code is good or bad, and everything is focused on stability.
Tolerance is Microsoft’s corporate culture. There are people from various backgrounds in the company, and the Leader will mostly follow the ideas of the employees themselves. If an employee makes a mistake, it is likely to be a problem with the organization and process, not the person, so when doing accident analysis, we are discussing the matter as it stands. Maybe it’s also because I’m getting older, and I’m more tolerant and calm towards many people and things.
Life , life in Suzhou is very comfortable, and it feels relatively light. There are fewer people on the streets at eight or nine in the evening. I live in an industrial park in Suzhou, where the population density is much smaller than that of Shenzhen. I often go to lakes and parks on weekends to play. In the past two years, I drove around and walked around. I like to go to Taihu Lake, Dushu Lake, Yangcheng Lake, and Eslite Bookstore. The scenery is very good. I don’t know many people outside of work, but I also have friends who I don’t want to part with. Once I saw a family of three having dinner in the sunset by Jinji Lake. The girl in my family was about the same age as my eldest daughter, and they kept two ducklings as pets. I was attracted by this harmonious picture. Unexpectedly, my daughter was also attracted by the two ducks. Then we walked and played together and left contact information. We often make appointments on weekends to walk the baby and chat. In the past two years, my social circle has been smaller, but I have more time for myself to find something I want to do. I usually spend a lot of time taking care of my second daughter, and playing with her is the best kind of rest.
Therefore, in the past two years, I have been satisfied no matter from the perspective of life or work. In 2020, I took a lot of courage to leave the company and city where I worked for six years, and now I have a lot of courage to change. One of the most important points is the consideration of parents. During the two years I stayed in another city, I met my parents less than ten times. The Tail End article uses brutal and intuitive data to make this point: Living in the same place as the people you love matters.
Aside from some unchangeable family reasons, what other changes would I want? From another perspective, life is a game that cannot be paused or rolled back, but it must have an end. Under these basic constraints, some people will choose to play one script all the time, while others will choose to play more scripts. In my resume, I think it was not enough to explore and try when I was young, so now I want to take advantage of the stage where I am not too old to toss, and I want to try if I want to change. I still have curiosity.
In addition, about how to live this life well, the inspiring point of view for me is Li Tianran’s How to Live a Life into N Lives , this video is worth watching. The most important thing is to do subtraction, get out of the comfort zone, and keep improving. This is not about how much money to make, but since we probably can’t control the length, how can we expand from the thickness.
Success is to constantly achieve your ideal life state. My ideal life state is more free, and I can have enough time and energy to spend with my family, technology and open source, so full-time remote is more suitable for me. When I felt that I might leave Microsoft in the future, I started to pay attention to some job opportunities with this expectation.
But when I just returned to Shenzhen, my family was hospitalized due to some unexpected problems, so I was very busy these few months. Parents are old and sick, and children are young. It is not easy for anyone to reach this stage. The most impressive time was when I drove to deliver meals to my family, but because I was so tired, I lost my mind for a while while waiting for the traffic lights, but I actually fell asleep, and the driver next door came down and knocked on my car window, and I suddenly woke up. I fell asleep for a few seconds, but when I woke up, it seemed like I had been asleep for a long time.
This stage is quite difficult. Fortunately, the results are good at this stage. Although the medical treatment in Shenzhen is not as good as that of cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, there are also some experienced and good doctors who have traveled in many places and can find reliable ones for common diseases. doctor.
In addition, there are not many job opportunities this year, and even fewer under the expectations I listed above. I collected a list of remote jobs before, and many companies basically stopped hiring this year. Fortunately, I found a job that I am quite satisfied with, which is to do blockchain and Rust-related development in Cryptape. I know that the blockchain industry is now a mixed bag, and many people are not optimistic about it. I think there are many new things to try. Secret Ape is also one of the few companies in China. It is exploring new things and giving employees a lot of freedom. Almost all employees in the company work remotely, and all codes are open source. The internal atmosphere is very good for a month.
This time it took me a long time to make a decision, especially because my family didn’t quite understand why I became more radical in middle age. As an older technical person, it is not easy to change to a reliable job in China, but I have not yet reached the retirement age. I don’t have that much motivation to follow the established rank route in a company, but I still have the motivation to write code, improve my programming skills, and make progress in the open source world.
Microsoft is a respectable and conscientious company. This nearly 50-year-old company has once again seized the wind of history. When I was saying goodbye to the group, I said that maybe this is not a good time to leave the company, it feels like the rocket is going to launch and I am going to come down. Years later, looking back at my choices, will it appear that I was stupidly deviated from the general trend. It is possible, but what is more important is that people should be self-consistent. It is good to pursue your ideal life at each stage. My current life is almost exactly the same as expected.
During this period of time, I had some gray hairs on my temples, and I felt that time was passing by faster, but fortunately, I was not defeated by life. The difficulties I encountered were not special, but most people will face them in this life. I am pessimistic by nature, and this kind of personality is easy to accept reality in the face of difficulties.
The above is a summary of some changes in the past six months.
This article is transferred from: http://catcoding.me/p/new-journey/
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.