写在“金三银四”之际的一些话Notes on China's 'Golden March, Silver April' Hiring Season

"Find a quiet afternoon, and write down on paper—clearly and honestly—the life you want and the dreams you absolutely have to make real."

A Word Up Front

The thing that's struck me most lately is this: China's demographic structure, both today and in the years ahead, along with the severe population problems that come with it, is starting to make its mark on the hiring and job markets.

What follows are experiences, lessons, impressions, and thoughts from the past year up to now, offered for your reference and discussion. It's just one person's view.

On Switching Jobs

1. Eighty percent of people have a career plan that is essentially "fake." Eighty percent or more only look at the here and now. Put another way: they count in years, not in decades.

2. A career plan doesn't mean spelling out exactly what you'll be doing in which year down the road—that's all but impossible. I use two dimensions to judge:

a. Ask yourself often: "Does what I'm doing right now bring me closer to the life I want?"

b. Do I (or does the other person) have rational ambition?

3. Women need career planning more than men do (which doesn't mean men don't need it), because women face more obstacles in the workplace, and the ceiling arrives earlier.

4. The more senior you get, the harder it is to move—and the less you need to. When you're an associate, an HR rep, a junior product manager, that's the best time to change jobs. Once you become a VP or MD, an HR director, a COO, a team leader, both you and your employer raise your expectations, and the employer's demands on you climb higher too: package, cost, ability, age, trust—and your own pride and ego.

Years of experience only prove you've done certain things; they don't prove you can take on more challenging ones. At the same time, years of experience mean a higher hiring cost for the company. From a cost standpoint, hiring someone with ten years of experience costs far more than hiring someone with five. And from the business side's point of view, a younger person with five years of experience is easier to develop, more open to new things, and better able to withstand heavier pressure.

On Pay

5. Many people get to the final stage of an interview and start talking money—some bring it up right at the start. There are a few misconceptions here:

(1) Everyone negotiating an offer wants to squeeze out a little more—turn 8,000 into 10,000, turn 15,000 into 18,000. I'm no exception; it's human nature. But the core thing you need to understand is this:

a. When it comes to pay, a job seeker has very little say and very little bargaining power. It's not a matter of getting whatever we ask for. Whether you end up with 10,000 or 8,000, that number is the combined result of your ability, experience, and every other factor at this stage of your career—it's the "fair market price," always. If you never contributed anything to your former employer or built up a track record, you have even less leverage. If you genuinely made the company money, the boss will surely see your value; and once your value has a brand attached to it in the market, you'll gain a sliver of bargaining power.

b. Another two or three thousand won't set you financially free, so when choosing between offers, weighing the other factors is far more practical. If you don't like the job and have no passion for it, no amount of money will keep you happy for long.

c. High pay versus low pay isn't measured by your current income—it's measured by the sum of your lifetime earnings.

(2) There's a way to ruin you, and it's called paying you an absurd salary. This happens most often when a startup is poaching talent, though it happens at other times too: when an industry catches fire, both demand and packages in that industry rise with the tide. Some company expands at breakneck speed and throws crazy money around to lure people in. Someone earning 18k gets poached for 40k, feels great—and four months later gets laid off, then spends the better part of a year idle at home, because he'll only accept a salary no lower than (in fact he only looks at anything higher than) 40k. But the price is there; the market isn't. Nine months of unemployment later, he takes a job at 20k, and stays miserable, dragging through the work. He grumbles to colleagues: I used to make X, and now look at what I make. He grinds through a few months, then quits again—off to hunt for that 40k job.

Reader, beware of pits like this.

(3) The salary you want isn't something you demand from others. The best and most stable job is one where you contribute value to others.

On Choices

6. (I wrote about this last year.) When many people go out to eat, they pore over reviews and dishes, carefully comparing the differences and their own preferences. Most people buying electronics read countless reviews, drilling down until they understand every spec. Plenty of people planning a trip consult guides, working out the transport for each city in detail.

Yet when it comes to a genuinely major life decision—choosing a job, changing jobs—the most common approach is to ask a few "friends" around them what they're doing and how it feels. In reality, many of those friends have only ever done their own narrow slice of work and simply aren't equipped to answer the question, let alone offer any foresight or judgment. Some folks even take their cues from media coverage of which jobs are hottest and how much they pay.

(Figure in original.)

7. Life, freedom, dignity, love, money—how would you rank them?

8. Every working person should realize early on that a career has to move beyond the goal of "promotions and raises" as soon as possible. The more you treat "promotions and raises" as your greatest pursuit, the further you drift from personal freedom. If you keep selling off the one resource life gives you—time—cheaply, in exchange for living expenses, your fate will look just like your parents' generation's.

9. Is a young person's greatest asset their body? No. A young person's greatest asset is time. Today we may know nothing, but we can learn anything; youth is the peak of your optionality. The road of career choices only narrows over time—you grow pickier about jobs, and jobs grow pickier about you. Compared with the responsibilities you'll shoulder in middle age and the constraints of family, the cost of youth really is just money. Rather than stretch out the front line, mass your firepower and strike hard.

10. Accepting reality is extremely difficult, because reality so often fails to match our expectations. But reality's power lies precisely in this: it exists and exerts its influence regardless of our "expectations." If you can accept reality, and actively embrace it—however "cruel" it looks—you'll gain boundless strength. Do otherwise, and you're bound to get slapped in the face eventually. In a word: "seek truth from facts" is the way, and also the hardest thing to do.

11. There's a phenomenon in the investing world: people feel they don't yet have enough marquee deals under their belt, so they want to wait a bit longer. But the bug in this logic is that your failure to land good deals may not be your personal failing—sometimes it's a matter of the firm's internal machinery and other factors. If you've had no deal experience at this firm so far, why would opportunity appear later, once the winner-take-all effect concentrates even more tightly at the top? By then the bar will be nothing like it is now.

12. Be open-minded. Don't fixate on Sequoia—plenty of other dollar funds are formidable too. And don't fixate only on finance and the primary market; there are many ways to make money, and it doesn't have to be investing. The world is vast; broaden your horizons.

On Starting a Company

13. We live in a society where the medium is socialized and the social is mediatized. Your choices and your environment can make you feel that everyone around you is a rock star, all "Forbes 30 Under 30."

More and more people are starting companies, or planning to. But entrepreneurship suits most people poorly—or at least isn't right for them as founder or number two. The people genuinely cut out for it need two qualities at once: deep thinking and fierce execution.

Anyone who thinks deeply must have an extremely strong capacity to learn, since one essence of entrepreneurship is constant learning. Broken down, a deep thinker is someone whose words startle you yet whose logic holds together. Or split it into two kinds of thinking power:

a. Rational logic: a knack for finding the fundamental laws of business, technology, and so on, then using leverage to move the variables and amplify the effect.

b. Reading human nature: a far rarer ability, requiring accumulation and life experience across many dimensions. Built on wide reading and constant reflection, it means seeing through to the demands—even the subconscious ones—of every stakeholder in the game.

Fierce execution isn't just moving fast; it's achieving the maximum goal in the shortest time at the least cost. This kind of strong execution ultimately reflects a person's boldness, decisiveness, and willingness to bear risk. Concretely, it shows up in two ways:

a. Bold but meticulous: a great general is always a "gambler"—the more cautious and hesitant you are, the less willing you are to bet big on your own judgment. But boldness without care is courage without a plan.

b. Results-oriented: in a startup, the goal decides everything; the process doesn't matter; the result really is life or death.

I once read a description of the personality traits best suited to entrepreneurship, roughly these words: intense, high-energy, confident, optimistic, decisive, risk-taking, logical, concentrated, highly self-disciplined, driven by a fierce hunger to succeed, unempathic (that is, insensitive to others' emotions), and—usually—the kind of workaholic who abandons home and family for the work.

On Cognition

14. All your life, you pay for your level of understanding. Everything you keep doing and choosing is, at bottom, a process of raising that understanding—from the big decisions (which career, which industry, when to switch jobs, whether to start a company) down to the small ones (where to buy something for the best value, where's the most comfortable place to travel). All of it is a choice made on the basis of differences in understanding, and so all your life you pay for your understanding.

15. Don't fear information "overload." Instead, raise your own bandwidth, sharpen the effectiveness of your "filter," and keep expanding your storage and your compute. When most people hit a compute meltdown, their first instinct isn't to upgrade the operating system and the algorithm—it's to throttle the CPU's clock speed.

I used to worry a great deal about information overload. But as I've grown over these past few years, I've gradually stopped worrying about it. Instead, I've put my attention on raising bandwidth (how much information I can take in at once), the filter (the ability to find good content), storage (methods for storing high-value information), and compute (learning and applying high-value information quickly). Put plainly, it's fundamentally your own problem: strengthen yourself, and everything grows strong.

16. At the same time, cultivate a mindset that isn't afraid of missing out. The reason many people feel the pressure of information overload is that they don't want to miss anything of value. Have some faith: you won't miss anything truly high-value, because the high-value information relevant to you will keep resurfacing on its own. What you need is to develop your discernment and judgment amid the greater flood of information.

On Ego and Job-Hopping

17. Character determines fate. In Chinese, character (性格) splits into "nature" (性) and "capacity" (格): nature determines your lot in life, capacity determines your fortune. What is nature? Those with a fiery temperament leave early; those gentle and mild tend to live long. What is capacity? A person of large capacity can accommodate all kinds of people. That's why Liu Bang could get things done—he gathered around him all sorts of odd characters, Han Xin, Zhang Liang, and the rest, and these people brought him no end of fortune. So character determines fate.

Junior people generally have bigger egos than senior ones. Practitioners in finance—especially in the handful of roles at the top of its pyramid and its "food chain"—carry bigger egos than people in other industries. This ego shows up in two ways:

a. Thinking you're a big deal because you're at Company X.

b. Thinking that because you're at Company X now, you can surely move to Company Y.

Over the past year or so, I've met all kinds of people obsessed with Sequoia:

a. "For Sequoia, I'll give up my package."

b. "I'd be willing to join Sequoia as an analyst."

c. "I only look at opportunities at top-tier funds."

d. "It's Sequoia or nothing."

You know what? The moment those words leave your mouth, I know you and Sequoia aren't meant to be. The four lines above roughly fall into two categories: first, your experience and ability simply aren't qualified yet; second, if you really were that good, you'd already be in the game at Sequoia.

Those who keep insisting they only look at top funds, that they must join a top dollar fund—the right move is to go out into the market and talk, and see whether you can even land a single interview. Practice is the sole criterion of truth. This market is transparent and fair enough for that.

Or ask yourself one question: for the role you're applying to, where's the difference between someone who does it well and someone who does it at the very top—and where do you sit?

18. Both employers and candidates suffer from a mysteriously overconfident "first-person effect" in hiring and job-hunting. The first-person effect is the flip side of the third-person effect: when assessing positive information, you believe it affects you more than it does others. Two classic examples: the employer believes that a candidate matching its persona and its requirements actually exists out there; and the candidate—especially the candidate in finance—is mysteriously overconfident about which top company he can land at, convinced he can get into whichever firm or institution he pleases.

There's an obvious difference here, though: the employer sits in a buyer's market. In theory it can hire according to its own "obsession." If it can't find someone right now, it can keep stretching the search out—two years, three years, longer—and if all else fails, cancel the role in the end. But a job seeker can't do that, and has no room to bargain. Searching for a year, even half a year, is grueling.

On Socializing

19. For modern people, the ties and connections between one person and another are far too fragile. There's one thing and one thing only: WeChat.

20. WeChat's greatest and most brilliant achievement is that it can give users the powerful illusion of "I have many friends / I have many useful social ties / many people care about how I feel." When you use WeChat and Moments heavily and often, this feeling seems fully real. The connections look tight, and there's even a feeling of kindred spirits with nothing they can't talk about. As long as you keep pouring yourself into the logic of this world and flawlessly playing by its rules, you'll find the "facts" really do bear it out. Only when you decide to walk away from the whole game do you discover that everything you had gradually vanishes.

After I stopped using Moments, I began to feel it clearly: the vast majority of "friends" who'd once ended up "together" with me for one reason or another had gone missing. Apart from a rare few old friends, "reaching out to each other" essentially ceased to exist. And precisely because WeChat holds the status of basic infrastructure, once you have no WeChat contact with someone, you have no formal connection with them at all. Doesn't that sound a little chilling the more you think about it?

If you don't use WeChat's core feature—Moments—at all, and you happen not to have had any exchange with someone recently? I can guarantee that, unless there's some "benefit" tying you together in real life, there's at least a 90% chance this friend ceases to exist from then on. Don't believe me? Try it: go three whole months without Moments and without initiating much conversation, and after three months tally up how many people—setting aside colleagues, classmates, relatives, close friends, and others whose relationship runs mainly on offline contact—still reach out to you.

To sum up, a "WeChat friend" is nothing to boast about. Ninety percent of people won't exchange more than three rounds of private messages with you after adding you. If you rarely post to Moments, more than seven in ten (classmates and colleagues aside) won't remember you six months later.

21. Ninety-nine percent of the content in "WeChat group chats" will have no real impact on your life, yet many people spend an order of magnitude more than that 1% of their time on it.

On Enterprise (2B)

22. There's actually a lot I want to gripe about when it comes to 2B, and it boils down to three requirements, plus my sense that 2B is more of a false prosperity:

a. Male

b. STEM background

c. From within the industry

These requirements are basically the hiring logic of the dollar-fund circle that made its name investing in consumer internet (TMT). Firms' "preference" for these three points has reached almost pathological levels: if you're not EE or CS, they won't even look.

Handing a deal to someone with a technical background who understands nothing about business, commerce, or entrepreneurship may carry more risk than handing it to someone who doesn't understand the technology but does understand management, business, and the soft side of human relationships. Many people from technical backgrounds, R&D especially, tend to think rigidly. Someone from a technical or industry background who's had some commercial experience is the safer bet.

Looking at things too technically makes it easy to kill a project. A project's success is a composite thing; you can't attribute it to technology alone. Same with hiring: I don't see that a male STEM background necessarily has any significant edge over a non-male, non-STEM one—though hard tech is another matter. A pure-technical EE/CS undergrad won't necessarily understand a deal either; every industry is a world unto itself. Only insiders truly grasp the deep algorithmic layer; all you need is to understand the documents a company gives its clients—and then understand where the industry is headed.

Sometimes I think: rather than everyone benchmarking their returns against Sequoia, they should study how Sequoia hires.

A Final Word

23. Most young people are short-sighted (I once was too)—generally, whichever pays the highest wage is the one they pick, as if that's where the value is greatest. But it's not like that at all. In fact, if the most precious years of your youth buy back nothing but that money, then that's the lowest-value return there is.

Experience is valuable precisely because it can only deliver its greatest value when attached to a person. So experience travels with you—which is to say, it lives only in you, and no one can take it from you. Others can take your money, but not your experience. Yet not all experience is equal. Break it down and it includes techniques and skills. And how valuable those techniques and skills are is closely tied to the industry.

In a thriving, rising industry, the value of experience rises with the tide over time, climbing steadily. In a sunset industry, the value of experience steadily decays.

Here's an example. In 1925, two young people graduated from college. One chose a big company that paid more; the other chose a small workshop that didn't pay much. On the surface, the big company was clearly the better choice. But do you know what these two outfits actually did? The truth is that the big company made carriages; the small workshop made cars—Ford.

24. What you feel is your "favorite" right now might, once you actually do it, reveal that you lack the ability or the temperament for it, that it gives you no sense of achievement—and slowly you'll come to "dislike" it. Conversely, a job that looks less appealing right now might suit your abilities exactly, give you plenty of a sense of achievement, and, as you go, you'll gradually come to love it.

25. So how do you settle on and think through your own career?

a. First, pin down what your single most maximized ability actually is—whether it's reusable, and how long its half-life is.

b. How great and how strong is your willingness to pay for strengthening that ability?

c. What resources can you mobilize, and what conditions do you have, to support that ability in finally cashing out into value?

d. What difficulties and what field-level ceilings will you face? Is that ceiling high enough?

e. After giving it everything you've got, can you actually seize the opportunities in this field?

If all of the above is clear, then it comes down to time, patience, and luck.

Finally, let me close with five lines:

Count not in years, but in decades.

Unfold not from a point, but across a plane.

Reckon not by the technology, but by the demand.

Judge not by your longest plank, but by your shortest.

Reckon not by the known, but by the unknown.