It's just business

Work became more demanding after the Lunar New Year, and I began working overtime more often. At a client site around noon today, my colleagues and I were talking. We had different views, but agreed on one thing: internet and software companies are becoming increasingly competitive. It is not just frontend, backend, or algorithms—the entire computing industry is fiercely competitive.

Half a year has passed since I started working, and I have had to look carefully at whether this is the career I really want. Over the past few months, I have learned a great deal of practical knowledge, including Docker, Linux, and, most valuable of all, ways of thinking about software design. It has benefited me enormously.

Yet the question I have often asked myself remains unanswered: what exactly is my career plan? This work has not made it any clearer. Am I doing software development, algorithms, or data mining? I have not entered a Kaggle competition for a long time either. I seem to be drifting further from the career direction I first imagined.

We often blame our disappointments on a bad macro environment, yet there is little we can do about it. That may be one of the saddest things about this era.

On the way home, I saw a sentence that felt like the right kind of self-mockery:

Don’t worry! It’s just business.

March 13, 2024, in Suzhou