都在聊失业，我们来聊聊就业Everyone's Talking Layoffs — Let's Talk Jobs

Preface

This is a long piece. Roughly 10,000 characters in the original; budget at least 12 minutes to read.

I'd suggest you read it through patiently and think it over carefully.

01 Looking Back

In 2023, the thing discussed most across public discourse and social media has been careers: quitting, layoffs, the midlife crisis, selling the apartment.

Most people's state of mind is probably much the same: you can't quite bring yourself to slack off, you can't out-grind the competition, and you can't fully lie flat either. On the day you quit, don't you feel like screaming inside: to hell with the "future"? The impossible clients, the pie-in-the-sky bosses, the colleagues locked in an arms race, the tangled workload, the pay that adds work but not money—right now, give them a proper goodbye. However tangled the job was, however heavy those responsibilities once loomed, the handover takes only half a day.

What has all that hard work brought us? Anxiety, hair loss, insomnia, messages any time of night, a laptop you have to pack even on vacation, calls you have to take even while hooked up to an IV in the hospital. A salary that looks decent, yet no matter what you do, can't buy you an apartment in Beijing or Shanghai. Maybe it buys you some high-end cosmetics or a few luxury bags, to feed a pitiable vanity.

If all that endless internal grinding brings back is this bit of vanity, then what's the point? The way I see it, you can compress the cost of living, and thereby compress the pain of working for someone else.

Plenty of people dream of escaping the workplace—becoming digital nomads, living abroad. But frankly, most of us still have to face the workplace, unavoidably. It's just that you should work, but try not to "go to a job." Don't work harder—work smarter.

02 Your Career Is Yourself; Your Choices Are Your Life

1. What we're looking for isn't a job—it's a job opportunity. I've made this point before. What does it mean? One essence of the job search is this: at some place, some company, is there a spot that belongs to you—a seat with your name on it? If there's no spot for you, then no matter how outstanding you are, it has nothing to do with you.

Everyone habitually says "job-hunting, job-hunting," but what they're really hunting for is a job opportunity—your position. Whether it's a big company or a startup, what you're seeking is your spot. For a fund, if someone already covers your sector, chances are there's no spot for you. For a corporate/company, it's not quite the same as for a firm: at a corporate, the later you arrive, the less spot there is for you and the harder promotion gets. To give an example—and it doesn't even have to be that early—joining ByteDance in 2016 versus joining after 2018, your growth curve and financial return differ by an order of magnitude. For a firm it's similar, though not identical.

Many people, much of the time, actually did have a spot of their own—they just missed it by some quirk of fate. So where does position come from? It comes from your boss's trust in you, from the choices you make, from your mindset (your character), and from your ego.

2. At first glance these two framings seem barely different, but they're worlds apart. Once you redefine it, what you're weighing is no longer the job, but how to handle your cover letter and résumé, how to run the interview, how to close it out, and how to ultimately land the opportunity.

The most important thing about this redefinition is how it shifts your mindset. You no longer agonize over whether to accept this job (which you don't actually understand at all), but approach it with more curiosity, wanting to see what interesting opportunities you might discover inside this company. And you stop coming in judgmental and negative, and instead do useful, wide-ranging, positive exploration.

When you're hunting for a job, your focus lands mostly on the job, so you circle around the job itself, trying to persuade the employer to pick you, conveying your supposed "love and yearning" for the work. Most of the time you fake being full of passion, to get them to believe you. In other words, you're either lying or giving up the job. But nobody likes to lie.

Flip the perspective: if your goal is to land as many job opportunities as possible, rather than a job, everything changes—there's no real need to deceive anyone.

You can genuinely express your thoughts about the job and your curiosity, because you really do want to explore and evaluate this opportunity. This isn't a matter of semantics; it's a matter of sincerity.

When you shift your mindset toward seeking job opportunities rather than a job, you become more sincere, more energized, more resolute, and happier. The funny thing is, doing this is exactly what lands you the opportunity. Companies are hiring people—the people they recognize as their own.

3. No school and no company can guarantee your success. The role of education is really just to set a floor—to guarantee the downside, not to secure success. As for the upside, how you play it depends entirely on the individual: on their choices, their character, their appetite for risk, their fortunes in life, and the dividends of the era.

(Figure in original.)

If getting into a certain school (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT; Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan, Jiao Tong, Zhejiang, Nanjing, Renmin) or into a certain company guaranteed that a person would succeed or strike it rich and reach financial freedom, then the world's logic would be far too simple, and how it ran would look completely different: everyone would just go to that school, graduate, and join that company. Convenience that simple would rival hereditary succession to a throne. So stop asking whether getting into somewhere can change your fate, whether joining somewhere can bring success.

Academic credentials in China have been ground to insane extremes. They stopped carrying the value they did 30 years ago long ago. Back then, jobs came assigned and a college graduate was precious; now, even a Tsinghua or Peking grad goes off to grind in the internet sector alongside everyone else. Same caliber, same role—the workload in China is at least 1.5 times that abroad, and the pay is 30%-plus lower. Tsinghua and Peking students are just as lost.

4. Let's talk money—the thing everyone cares about most. Money matters; no one can deny that, myself included. After all, nobody in this world has a quarrel with money, and no one thinks they have too much of it. But one essence of the workplace is this: if everything you do at work is chasing money, then with better than 90% probability you won't last long at that company or in that industry, because there's always someone younger than you, more capable, in their prime, hungrier for money than you were back then—and the high of a promotion or a raise doesn't outlast a month.

You'll simply fall back into a cycle of worthlessness and meaninglessness. A high salary alone can't keep a person in an environment they hate for long, and money alone can never make an excellent person willingly do a garbage job.

I forget who said it: wages and money are hygiene factors—the incentive of money is indispensable, but the incentive of money alone isn't all-powerful either. Any office drone who longs for a life with meaning and substance can't stand meaningless bullshit work and a working state that feels like grave-sweeping.

As a creature who interrogates and ponders the meaning of life thousands of times a year, performative work, working just to slack off, or work with no meaning and no positive feedback—all of it drives us humans mad.

5. Comparison is human nature, so comparing incomes is something many people can't help doing. I've made a point about this before: if you really must compare income, compare the sum total of a lifetime—your life total package.

The starting point matters, but it isn't decisive. I've seen far too many come-from-behind players: their credentials are ordinary, their looks are ordinary, but they have focus in their industry and passion for what they do, they've thought things through clearly enough, they're decisive enough in their choices, they concentrate on their own field, they befriend time (first-hand or second-hand, who cares)—and in the end they hold on until the clouds part and the moon shines through.

I've also met plenty of people with first-rate credentials and a high launch point into the industry, who later slipped quietly out of their high-paying fields or gradually faded into obscurity. Their traits are nothing but these: arrogance, impatience, interests that shift too fast, a lack of humility, an excess of careerism.

6. There's no loyalty in the workplace, which is exactly why a high enough salary quote can move people to swarm. But you need to understand one thing: headhunters and employers don't care about your career—but you yourself can't withstand blow after blow and layoff after layoff. Your price is set by fair market value; if it far exceeds the market level, you've definitely paid something for it.

Take a recent case from my own circle: someone already at a top-1 consulting firm chased higher pay in 2019 and went to a boutique consultancy. Then a black swan struck in 2022: with dollar capital pulling out, the clients vanished, and the whole firm laid off at least a third of its staff. Because they'd lost their clients and their own pay was too high, many saw their salaries "halved"—cut down to the ankle. You can roughly imagine the psychological gap: you used to earn 30k or even 40k-plus a month, and now the market will only offer 10k.

I wrote this before: 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.

Of course, having said all this, an individual's reasons aren't entirely the individual's fault. Family, schooling, and social culture are all inseparable parts of it, all bearing some responsibility. But for the individual, the true core is to figure out, as early as possible, your own character, and to understand what kind of life you're after.

If your temperament is conservative, then risky things like starting a company or joining a startup are essentially a poor fit for you. So the odds of a windfall landing on you are near zero. Most people say they want financial freedom, but at bottom they don't crave it that badly, and are even less willing to put in the extraordinary effort it takes.

7. A few days ago an article made the rounds—a joke, really: one way to spot an industry that's peaked is to look at where Tsinghua and Peking grads go to work. The first line claimed that foreign firms had peaked back in 2005. But look how much the market cap of foreign firms (Nike, P&G) has climbed since 2018; today internet workers who can't take the grind anymore want to retreat to foreign firms to coast. Foreign firms never actually peaked. What changed was people's appetite for chasing wealth fast.

(Figure in original.)

P&G's pay—outside of finance's core roles and core companies, and outside the internet—is still the most competitive in the market; its training of people is still comprehensive and systematic; its career paths are still varied and full of options. Don't believe me? Compare yourself with your friend who went to P&G, and see whether their options aren't broader than yours.

The story goes that in a class taught by Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, a student asked him: from an economics standpoint, how many years does it take for college graduates who finished during the crisis years to catch up with those who graduated during the boom? Krugman's answer was: almost never. His answer may not be correct, but it can offer us some insight and a warning.

On the question of career choice, the first thing a college student should understand is: Where am I in the cycle of the era? Then, combining that with family background and individual traits, decide whether to adopt an aggressive or a conservative career strategy—and decide which industry, which role, to choose.

A snapshot of reality: in 2020, at the peak of his career, earning a million a year, someone took out a 20-million-yuan loan to buy a mansion in Shanghai. In 2021, at the highs in new energy, pharma, and premium liquor, dreaming that the economy would keep climbing, he put all his cash into funds. Every day he saw himself as one of fortune's favorites—earning from work, earning from his appreciating property, earning from his rising funds—smiling from ear to ear. In the blink of an eye, just a year later, he was laid off in 2023: no wages coming in, the loan going unpaid, the fund account down 50%. Every day he dreamed he was the biggest failure in the world—wages gone, the apartment about to be gone, the funds still bleeding, weeping day after day. In just two or three years, how did the world change so much? How did I go from fortune's favorite to the biggest failure?

You really can't take the era's beta and mistake it for your own alpha.

There's no best career, and the universe has no edge. What matters most is to always make decisions grounded in serious research and reasoning, and to follow the voice of your own heart.

8. The ultimate yardstick of life is time, not money. You absolutely must work with people you like, and absolutely must do work you love. In your twenties you can fool others, and you can fool yourself. But once you brush up against thirty, the wear and tear of deceiving and enduring starts to grow unbearable. "Sure, I can make money at it, but this money I can't make for long" essentially becomes most people's model for refusing work they don't much like.

Time is the gravity that accumulates over a life. What you truly love, you do more and more comfortably; what you loathe, you do more and more miserably. When making a choice, beyond the visible pros and cons on the horizontal and vertical axes, most people forget there's another dimension—a powerful but invisible axis. It's called time.

Many people assume they're already too old to launch something they're genuinely interested in, or mistakenly believe such a venture needs many preconditions, or that any real achievement requires more than a decade of accumulation. Humans are creatures superbly gifted at making excuses. In fact these beliefs are both right and wrong, but mostly they spring from obstacles you've preset in your own mind. "Preset positions" are the sturdiest psychological prison a person can build—and they can be shattered entirely by objective fact.

Most industries take only 2-3 years to go from beginner to practitioner. You assume changing direction is too hard, but in fact, once you decide to do it, you can think as you go, learn as you go—know through doing, do through knowing.

It's not "figure it out first, then act"—you'll never figure it out in a lifetime: you can never be ready. Start moving first, then adjust your breathing; take off first, then adjust your posture. Thinking yields only difficulties; doing yields answers. A dead end is only a state of mind, and the answer already lives in your heart.

Anyone with basic learning ability and enormous passion for a field, who sticks with it for 2-3 years, can beat most of the skilled hands who go through the motions listlessly and without feeling.

People underestimate their own initial spark, their longing, their impulse—so much so that if a person harbors a great wish, they'll willingly give it their all, truly go all in, and that wish transmutes into a driving force that pushes you to places you never imagined you could reach. When you truly resolve to become a certain kind of person, to do a thing you love, you might as well give yourself 2-3 years and some patience—you'll find there's still time, it's not too late, and every thrilling adventure is only just beginning.

Choice outweighs effort. Choose yourself once, then work hard for yourself.

9. In normal years the feeling may be faint; you think you can go anywhere, join any company. When the economy and the industry head downhill, that's when you truly learn how hard it is. That's when you understand: a young person's opportunities really are limitless—but young people are limitless too. Carry more awe, and less ego.

Students fresh out of school or only a short while into work are often haughty, and not a few of them come from elite schools: they feel it's this place or nowhere, that only this place is worthy of them. Look at them again a few years later, after society has knocked them around, and the old swagger has long since drained away.

10. Students from elite schools basically only have their halo while in school and just after graduating. In the first few years out, you can still trot out the school title to impress people. Six years past graduation, if the school-and-big-company title is all you've got left, and you have to lean on your credentials to demonstrate your worth your whole life, then it means they aren't doing so well.

If you must show off, showing off the following earns more respect: how much revenue your company brings in, for how many employees you pay social insurance, how much tax you've paid over the past few years. Let your work speak directly—don't hoist up your alma mater as a shield.

11. My advice: when you're job-hunting, pay attention to and record your own state of mind. What matters isn't the job change, but the why. When you notice someone landing an offer, the thing to focus on isn't the offer itself, and certainly not their so-called package—it's the mental journey they went through in choosing that offer, and their reasons for choosing it over the others.

(Figure in original.)

When choosing a major, people generally head for high-paying ones and are forever warning others off the worst ones. But don't overlook the many who, having gotten into a "good major," discover they're simply not suited to it and leave. Why? Because the "bad" and "good" you speak of are dynamic indicators set by social demand and social structure. First, they aren't fixed. Second, they factor in neither your own value nor your own traits. Your own life choices must account for yourself to determine what's good and bad.

College, work, changing jobs—none of these are ends in themselves. They're means, shuttle buses that carry you closer to your dream, closer to the ideal state of your life. If your goal is already fairly clear, and your self-knowledge is relatively deeper and more complete than your peers', and you know there's an express bus here that goes straight there, then get on it without hesitation.

If you don't know what you want, then these are your best sightseeing shuttles. They give you the chance to grow through trial and error and help you find your direction. What you need to understand here is that they only make your ticket a bit more worthwhile, the ride a bit faster, the resources a bit better; they make the transfers a bit easier as you search for your direction (an edge in applying abroad, an edge in job-hunting, an edge in alumni resources). But they won't carry you straight to the finish line.

12. A person who rises steadily in the workplace basically relies on their longest plank, because the longest plank creates value for the boss. A person who succeeds when starting their own company basically relies on having no short plank, because as an independent operator going through the 0-to-1-to-10, there's always some link where a short plank will sink you.

13. Being overbearing in everything is a flaw shared by many elite-school graduates. In the past everything went smoothly for them; they achieved successes many never reach; when there were disagreements, they were often the ones who were right—and over time it's easy to grow domineering. But showing weakness isn't real weakness. Water is softer than stone, yet it wears the stone through.

The truly strong at heart don't mind appearing soft on the surface; showing some gentleness in front of others may well be a strength. Aggression aimed at "people" won't carry you far. Aggression aimed at "getting things done" will.

14. Some realities and problems in how Chinese students job-hunt:

• One, they can't settle on an industry (e.g. internet or finance).
• Two, they've settled on an industry but can't see the optimal path (e.g. wanting to do investing, believing that going straight into a tier-2 investment firm out of school is definitely a better choice than doing the Big Four first and then jumping).
• Three, they've chosen a path but can't read the road map.

At the very moment media hype was building the anxiety of internet-giant new hires—Ivy-League launch, unemployed at 35—the community-group-buying boom let a vocational-school grad with a supply-chain background and two years of experience command an outrageous salary. Someone leaving Xingsheng or Meicai could hold 10 offers and pick slowly.

Low energy demand, high growth, big reward—the impossible trinity of a job. Two out of three makes it worth doing. Just one, and you need to think hard. If it has all three, congratulations—do whatever it takes to lock it down. None of the three, and the sooner you leave the better.

Choice is a matter of strategy; effort is a matter of tactics. If your hand is already decent, I hope you think carefully about how you're going to play it. Don't let typical tactical diligence paper over strategic laziness. Short-term goals push you along; long-term goals are ones you push forward yourself.

Making choices is itself a skill. Why do you think the skill of solving problems can be raised through practice, but the skill of making choices can't be raised through diligent practice? Never procrastinate on making a choice—procrastinating on a choice is, without doubt, the worst choice.

15. My advice: in making friends, both at work and outside it, don't be too utilitarian, and try to keep it diverse and multidimensional. A friend who's interesting and attuned to life will lift your quality of life far more than one who's smart and earns a lot. Fixing your eyes only on your peers only brings you grief. Comparison is the thief of joy, and this world is far richer than you imagine, inside and out. At the same time, I'd encourage everyone to find a source of pleasure that you can realize on your own without relying on others, with no obvious side effects, a low barrier to entry, occurring relatively often, able to fill a certain stretch of time, and reliably delivering a moderate dose of joy. A hobby outside of work is our way of fighting back against the world.

This was advice I wrote in 2020. Now, three years on, it feels a great deal more useful.

If you befriend someone only because of which company they're at, then chances are that someday, someone will choose and discard you for the very same reason. All the choices born of refined self-interest and utilitarianism will, in the end, come back to bite you.

You're bound to meet people a rank above you—whether at work, in love, or in life. In our lives now, doing anything requires you to provide value, but a person is allowed to show vulnerability. Men have their vulnerable moments too, and so do women. Friends, brothers, close girlfriends—they too have their moments of misunderstanding.

Do your work solidly. Don't waste every day on empty comparison, on food-chains, on scheming get-togethers. Don't be drowned by meaningless vanity and pride. Don't be hemmed in by an over-scrutinized self.

03 Everyone's Looking for Their Own Battlefield—and Many Have Picked the Wrong One

First, let's talk about the investment industry (mainly the primary market: angel/VC/PE; the secondary market is out of scope here). Things change far too fast. In 2021 people still swore up and down that the dollar would reign supreme forever—and then, who'd have thought, just a year later the whole industry was all but gone. A resounding slap in the face.

(Figure in original.)

In 2022 and 2023, more and more people began leaving—fleeing—the investment industry. I made a rough back-of-envelope estimate: from "entering the field" and touching the investment industry in late 2016 up to now, only about a third of the people are still doing investing. Of those above director level, 60-70% are still in the industry; below VP, they've basically cycled through several rounds.

Among those who left, the proportion of women is higher than men—which fits the pattern of many women at the base and fewer the higher you go. After all, female partners can just about be counted on one hand. As for where the leavers went, roughly these directions:

• Internet: strategy; strategic investment; business analysis (some also moved from their own strategic-investment role into the business side)
• FA (financial advisory): solo; institutional; partnerships
• Startups: several waves; including but not limited to investors striking out on their own, and FA people striking out on their own
• Web3

A few reasons the leavers gave, summed up:

• No chance to pull the trigger / no path upward
• Thinking the boss is an idiot, the colleagues are idiots
• Pay too low

Most people, men and women alike, can't withstand the test of time (the cycle), or, under the pressure of real life and after seeing the industry's essence clearly, conclude that doing FA is still the faster way to money, and more of it.

The primary market, frankly, doesn't suit most people. Putting it this way may offend a lot of people, but the fact is so. At home or abroad, looking across the industry, not one successful person went into investing straight out of school (undergrad or master's).

Whether VC or PE, across the whole world, not a single successful or top-tier investor did investing as their first job straight out of school—it's at least their second or third. Especially, look at those the domestic industry universally regards as good: Boss Cao, Boss Han. Or other partners—not one had investing as their first job out of school. Never mind the likes of Neil, Hans, and Hurst.

Regardless of career path, speed to money, or hard skill, the secondary market is the better fit for the general public. Doing VC is very hard, doing VC as a woman harder still, and the ceiling is visible at a glance: the female partners in the whole industry, added together, come to about one hand. Of those, 4-5 are founding partners. PE is the same: at any given firm, the women above D/ED level generally number no more than 5.

Of course, I don't think the women who left the investment industry are doing worse than those still in it. But here's the thing: those who truly do well in the industry—not just in investing—apart from luck, all did one thing right, or made one right choice: they kept playing to their longest plank. Yet there's a precondition: against the backdrop of a great era, they followed a good boss, chose a good firm, and secured a good spot of their own; after that, they kept playing to their longest plank, taking it to the extreme. Then worldly success is merely a matter of time.

The problem with many smart people is that they're too smart. Or rather, precisely because they're too smart, their ego is too heavy, and nothing meets their standards.

I've actually never encouraged young people, especially fresh grads, to go straight into investing. From a career-development standpoint:

First: too few opportunities, too narrow a funnel. Bluntly, what people used to want was a dollar VC. But dollar funds recruit an extremely limited number each year—the top 30 combined take fewer than 60 people. To break into this industry you have to endure an enormous screening; just imagine the ratio. Not getting picked usually isn't the applicant's fault—there are simply far, far too many applicants, especially in recent years as 2B tech investing has flourished, and virtually every firm has the same hard requirements: male, STEM, from within the industry. It's been ground into a lottery.

Second: the ROI actually isn't that high. Outside the top-of-the-pyramid dollar VCs, the pay at most mid- and lower-tier VCs isn't nearly as high as imagined, and carry, for 99% of people, is a flower in the mirror, a moon in the water. For a VC, the most core skill is judgment, not sourcing—and I'd argue the essence of sourcing is judgment too. Of course that judgment is sometimes luck as well. But the juniors at most VC firms simply have no way and no chance to judge. In other words, you can't actually pull the trigger, and you'll never have first-hand feel and experience. For the practitioner, there's no real output either, and if your investment history lacks a track record, moving around within the industry isn't easy.

Third: it easily breeds the fault of being out of touch. Fresh grads do VC largely out of admiration for the industry's halo—after all, this is the legendary top of finance's pyramid. But there are too many smart people in the circle, and digging up resources also requires you to be a smooth operator, someone who works every crowd with ease, a fish in water. But are you sure your ability and character really make you that kind of person? What others say about choosing a job matters, sure, but what matters most is what suits you. After all, making money with your strengths is the smart way. Back when I did investing, plenty of people gathered around me and there were constant get-togethers: "Let's grab something sometime." After leaving the industry it basically became: "If it's nothing important, let's not bother."

In truth, "primary-market investing" really is an industry that anyone can do, at any time, but that few can do well. Getting into this circle is often just a credential halo, and represents nothing much. Actually landing a deal—that's what earns the industry's respect. Practitioners have all had a version of this experience: at a pitch, you ask the founder sitting across from you to modestly introduce the company, and after they finish they add, "Please advise us, gentlemen." And in that moment, aren't you thinking with a guilty conscience: advise you on what? ... I'm here to learn from you.

For most people, VC should be the last job, not the first. Compared with the primary market, the secondary market suits most people—in financial return and other respects. Relatively speaking, the secondary market is the cleanest corner of finance, the hardest for power and capital to penetrate, with relatively the fewest headaches.

To sum it up in one line: we appear to be choosing a job, but at bottom we're merely choosing the angle from which to enter society.

Open up your frame; widen your field of vision.

04 The Internet: You Are a Human Being, Not a Human Doing

Only horses work themselves to death—but you're a person. You're a human being, not a human doing.

On January 13, 2019, I posted this on Weibo:

"The dividends of the internet industry's rise have begun to give off their knock-on effects. Viewed through the lens of workforce mobility, a talent fault line has grown increasingly apparent of late; the industry-cycle swings and the downturn in the broader economic climate have brought a slump across industries, prompting the various players in each sector to shrink in scale and lay people off. The role cuts that come with layoffs, and the difficulty of re-employment, are also happening under a poor fit between the two sides—job seekers and employers.

Imagine: if job seekers formerly in the internet industry lowered their employment expectations and were willing to take internet thinking deep into traditional industries to build something new, wouldn't that be a fine choice?

But the problem lies precisely in whether the working atmosphere, management style, and compensation systems of traditional industries—once empowered and boosted by emerging industries—can meet the expectations of internet job seekers. After all, it's a two-way choice. So getting through the trough of the economic cycle and the pains of industrial transformation ultimately still comes down to talent turnover and mobility, time, policy responses, and a mix of many combined factors.

For the class of '19 fall-recruitment students, and for workplace newcomers a year or two out, facing this kind of employment environment right at the start of their careers can indeed count as a 'disaster.' But stretch out the timeline: you'll go through at least four or so major cycles, no one can dodge them, so it's better to go through it early than late. The sky is vast and boundless, after the raging storm. Only after living through the pain will a new generation of young people more clearly understand their future mission and what they truly want.'"

Looking back four years on, some changes have indeed appeared. The internet industry, ByteDance especially, is still where practitioners flow most; but a portion of people have begun to flee the internet and ByteDance, moving toward manufacturing, retail, new energy, and the like.

(Figure in original.)

The facts prove that young people aren't unwilling to enter the factory—they're unwilling to enter a factory that's grueling, exhausting, low-paying, and dead-end. If manufacturing can offer good conditions, including pay and room for development, it can just as well draw talent in droves.

At Geely's supporting factories, the number of undergraduate fresh grads joining has already risen sharply, most of them from majors like mechanical engineering, electronics, computer science, and digitalization—a model for how manufacturing's transformation and upgrade is reshaping the employment landscape. Beyond that model lies manufacturing's vast demand for higher-caliber professional talent. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security projects that by 2025, China's talent gap in intelligent manufacturing will reach 4.5 million.

And the talent-short companies keep staging fierce bidding wars for people. On pay, even at an ordinary manufacturing firm, professional talent commands a monthly salary above 10k; and a phone giant like Honor has flatly promised it's willing to pay 40%-50% above the industry.

After all these years of development, it's an indisputable fact that the internet industry's dividends have vanished. What everyone now criticizes most is: the grind, the exhaustion, not treating employees as human.

That doesn't sound right at first. After all, internet companies have plenty of perks, brim with "vitality," provide meals, reimburse cab fares after a certain hour at night, hand out mooncakes and fruit to everyone on holidays. But you didn't join this company to eat mooncakes, did you?

Whether a company truly "treats employees as human" versus talking up perks is also a sleight of hand. To "treat employees as human" is to respect employees' differences as human beings.

(Figure in original.)

Take Alibaba's problem—the most glaring point: drinking culture. For people who don't like to drink, don't force employees to drink in the name of company culture and workplace custom. That's a basic right no quantity of mooncakes can replace.

As for ByteDance: roles blooming everywhere, pay quite competitive, perks top-notch across the board—probably many "dancers" got fattened up within a month of joining. But the bug is: ByteDance can treat you as a bubble to be squeezed out all too easily. A new business comes along. It feels the moment, hires a wave of people at high pay. As it goes, they find the growth is just so-so, and they start squeezing out the bubble. Chances are you get squeezed out as the bubble. There are many new businesses they want to develop, yet they won't give a new business much time to develop. The report you made last month, and next month you find the new business is gone—internally it really is a bit chaotic.

The ultimate management goal of a big company is to establish order—to eliminate the chaos and difference within "natural persons," and thereby cut out redundant motion, achieve maximum combined force and resonance, and survive brutal competition at minimum cost. So it must inevitably deploy powerful disciplinary means that erase individual difference.

A big company that has never liked treating employees as human, nonetheless very much hopes employees will treat the company as a "person." Through a set of Confucian techniques, it personifies the collective, giving it a character and emotions it doesn't actually possess, maintaining a moral narrative that doesn't actually exist, so that every person builds a special bond with the company—this "spiritual body" that doesn't really exist.

Confucianism actually isn't a pedantic, useless body of learning. The Analects, at first, taught the principles of cultivating the mind and nurturing one's nature, the patterns of life. But later rulers found the knack in it, grasped how to set rules and how to use and channel these patterns, then perfected and expanded it generation after generation; when they hit a problem, they revised, fine-tuned, and found compromises. For thousands of years, the top minds of every dynasty poured themselves into perfecting this philosophy of governance, like sand sifted by great waves. Peel back the surface—mild and pedantic in appearance—and at its core it's a genuinely, supremely pragmatic system of governance.

In modern management philosophy, for a company, being able to cultivate a company culture and give people a sense of belonging already takes enormous effort—it's almost the ultimate goal. Confucianism, by contrast, is a whole genealogical tree of genes; it manages the hearts of countless millions, and does it in a way people can't even feel—people simply take it for granted.

Facing the state of the internet today, if I really must offer some (perhaps useless) advice:

• Look at what work and roles you can do outside internet companies. Don't hang yourself from a single tree.
• Around age 30, while still within your shelf life, go out and take in more information about the outside world, to prepare yourself to do something independent in the future.
• As much as possible go to the core business, not the innovation business; don't be tempted by the big pie. Eat a little less and you won't starve.
• In the workplace you have to follow the right person; at a big company especially. See whether your boss is a grind-lord. Even if it's a grind, it should be an altruistic grind; grind purely for yourself and others will do you in.
• Don't add too much leverage. Life's great joys come from the quality of the cash-flow statement, not the balance sheet.
• If you run into a layoff, try to accept and understand that this is a normal business decision. Accept it and face it.
• On layoff negotiations: if you still need to find work, I don't recommend going to war with the company; N+3 is already very good, and there's no need to fixate on things like 2N. If you don't plan to go to a big company again, a bit of a fight can win you more.
• Face doesn't matter.

05 A Final Word

Many people spend their whole career doing one thing: chasing. Chasing their way into some industry (FMCG, finance, consulting, internet); chasing their way into a big name within the industry (P&G, Sequoia and Hillhouse, MBB, BAT).

The career plan you should have, the right one, is this: find your passion, play to your longest plank, lock onto a broad direction, and then advance one square a day. This path suits most people, and the sum of your career income won't turn out too badly. Chasing the hot wave, seeking sudden riches, is a game of probability for a tiny few, and can't be replicated. Most retrospectives are the rearview-mirror kind.

(Figure in original.)

The initial differences among people and organizations are normally distributed. But keep making choices purely on the basis of pros and cons, and then add the ultimate yardstick—time—and you may turn that normal distribution into a power-law one.

The reality is: almost no one can truly summarize history well. The flip side: everyone is wildly keen to predict the future.

There's a line I've always kept in mind: What is interest? Strength is interest. When you have the edge in competition, interest naturally follows; when you keep falling behind, interest naturally fades.

Whatever stage of life you're in, I hope you can find the thing and the chips on which to plant and steady your life—not money, not power, but a desire from the depths of your heart, such as: I absolutely will become that kind of person, I absolutely will live that kind of life.