入职2个多月杂感

开年中会，再加上最近看的一些文章，以及自己对现状和过去一段时间经历的反省，在这里做个小结，给自己定下几个习惯，让习惯成就理想。



1、要有钻研的精神。每天都要坚持读书，可以把书按章节分，或者按专题分，每天计划分配一章等，然后每周末做一个总结，梳理成wiki，然后再做成ppt（我现在觉得最后做成ppt这个环节非常重要，是自己从知识消化者到知识布道者的转变，是知识内化的关键）。



2、把心放在重要的事情上。不要因为环境而落寞了自己。要懂得激发自己的野性，自信，进而充分发挥自己的创造力，一步一步走好。不要因为头的评价或安排，而埋没了自己。另外，要锻炼自己全方面的能力，不要局限于公司的框架和基础，要自己善于从头开始架构，对于这一点，自己在git上做个项目，是个很好的锻炼。



3、坚持是一件很重要的事情，坚持读书，坚持锻炼，下周开逐步增大锻炼强度，良好的身体是奋斗的本钱。除此之外，要逐步克服自己不好的地方，比如不要太敏感，要个性一点，自信一点，这样才能进一步激发潜力，发挥创造力。有人已经赢在起跑线上了，自己不要给自己消极的暗示，否则差距越来越大。



推荐一篇非常有用的文章：https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/231d7499a75

转载如下：

Programmer’s dilemma
Recently I interviewed tens of candidates for a kernel programmer’s position. These candidates are from big, good companies, which are famous for chips or embedded OS/systems. Many of them claimed they have at least 10 years on-job experience on kernel. Their resumes look fairly shiny — all kinds of related projects, buzz words and awards…

But most of them cannot answer a really basic question: When we call the standard malloc function, what happens in kernel?

Don’t be astonished. When I ask one of the candidate to write a simple LRU cache framework based on glib hash functions, he firstly claimed he had never used glib — that’s what I expected — I showed the glib hash api page and explained the APIs to him in detail, then after almost an hour he wrote only a few lines of messy code.

I don’t know if the situation is similar in other countries, but in China, or more specifically, in Beijing, this is reality. “Senior” programmers who worked for big, famous foreign companies for years cannot justify themselves in simple, fundamental problems.


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Why did this happen?

The more I think about it, the more I believe it is caused not only by themselves but also by the companies they worked for. These companies usually provide stable stack of code, which has no significant changes for years. The technologies around the code wraps up people’s skills, so that they just need to follow the existing path, rather than to be creative. If you happened to work for such kind of code for a long period and did not reach to the outer world a lot, one day you will find yourself to be in a pathetic position — they called you “EXPERT” inside the team or company, yet you cannot find an equally good job in the market unfortunately.

This is so called “Expert Trap”. From day to day, we programmers dreamed of being an expert inside the team/company; however, when that day really comes we trapped ourselves. The more we dig into existing code, the deeper we trapped into it. We gradually lose our ability to write complete projects from scratch, because the existing code is so stable (so big/so profitable). What’s the worse, if our major work is just to maintain the existing code with little feature development, after a while, no matter how much code we’ve read and studies, we will find we cannot write code — even if the problem is as simple as a graduate school assignment. This is the programmer’s dilemma: we make our living by coding, but the big companies who fed us tend to destroy our ability to make a living.


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How to get away from this dilemma?

For personal —

First of all, Do your own personal projects. You need to “sharpen your saw” continuously. If the job itself cannot help you do so, pick up the problems you want to concur and conquer it in your personal time. By doing so, most likely you will learn new things. If you publish your personal projects, say in github, you may get chances to know people who may pull you away from your existing position.

Do not stay in a same team for more than two years. Force yourself to move around, even if in the same organization, same company, you will face new challenges and new technologies. Try to do job interviews every 18 months. You don’t need to change your job, but you can see what does the market require and how you fit into it.

For team/company —

Give pressures and challenges to the employees. Rotate the jobs, let the “experts” have chance to broaden their skills. Start new projects, feed the warriors with battles.

Hold hackathon periodically. This will help to build a culture that embrace innovation and creation. People will be motivated by their peers — “gee, that bustard can write such a beautiful framework for 24 hours, I gotta work hard”.