1. Relatively High Salary
This must be put first: working in IT can support yourself. In China, if you look only at salary income, finance and IT are definitely among the top industries. Compared with other traditional industries, the IT industry's salary level is still relatively high, not to mention if you're lucky enough to join a startup and receive equity or stock options. The rapid development of the IT industry brings tangible benefits to every practitioner. I think this is the reason the IT circle can attract so many promising young people to join.
2. Fair Competitive Environment
Yes, IT is a fairer platform than other industries. The so-called fairness means that regardless of appearance or background, your ability determines everything. For all the talented young people, as long as you have real skills, you don't need to worry about your future in this industry.
3. Broadened Horizons
The IT industry originated in Europe and America and has swept across the globe with great momentum. Working in IT, the world you see is no longer just your company, your product, or your country; you deal with people and things from different countries, regions, and industries every day. It's what they mean by focusing on China while keeping an eye on the world.
4. Staying Fresh and Young
Hanging around the IT circle, you come into contact with new things every day. I think this is an important feature that distinguishes it from all other industries. Every day, a constant stream of new products, new ideas, new methods, and new creative concepts comes rushing before you. If you have an open mind and are willing to learn about and explore these new things, you will always keep your curiosity and maintain a young mindset. Trust me, be sure to maintain your curiosity about the world, so that you won't become a mediocre and muddle-headed person after entering middle age.
5. Continuously Improving Skills
This is vague to talk about. There are many kinds of abilities. In IT, which ability can be improved the most, or which ability should be improved the most?
- First, learning ability. You must keep learning, and you won't be given much time for learning. Quickly mastering various technical skills related to your work in a short period of time is an ability that will benefit you enormously in the IT circle or even in other industry circles in the future. For example, in my first two years of coding career, I used three different programming languages. Besides C++, which I had learned in college, the other two languages were quite obscure: one was a development language commonly used in banking systems, and the other was a communication language for the Mainframe environment. At that time, I had to use these two languages to complete the system programming required by the client, learning entirely from scratch. I read tutorials, studied other people's programs, kept trying to program, test, and debug. In just half a month, I mastered all the programming methods and completed the system development within the client's required time. Similar situations have occurred repeatedly throughout my IT career. No one will wait for you to grow slowly; this industry requires you to quickly transform from a novice in a certain field into an expert.
- Second, time management ability. The busyness of working in IT has been mentioned earlier. You face a large amount of work every day and every week, plus your own study plans—it's truly a tangled mess. Everyone who can thrive in the IT industry must be someone who can manage their own time and affairs well. Highly efficient work is absolutely a basic skill in IT. As for how to work efficiently, everyone can learn about many excellent time management and calendar management methods and choose the methods and tools that best suit themselves.
- Third, the ability to think rationally. IT is a typical science and engineering field, and having rational thinking is the most fundamental foundation. Being immersed in the IT circle for a long time will greatly improve your rational thinking ability. Look at any problem rationally and objectively, and don't mix any emotional thinking into your search for solutions.
6. Sense of Achievement
Based on all the above abilities, I believe you will surely stand firm in the IT world. The growth of abilities, the broadening of horizons, and an open mindset will allow your IT career to develop by leaps and bounds. Developing source code that satisfies clients, providing clients with a complex IT architecture design, and solving an urgent system failure for a client—behind all these successes, you will reap a full sense of achievement. One year during the Spring Festival, when a client's business was at its busiest, their remittance system chose that moment to fail, with extremely slow response times, and customers were queuing in long lines at the counters. In the midst of this emergency, our team worked together with the client, spent several hours locating the fault, decisively eliminated it, and restored normal business operations the next day. The client was so grateful that they almost knelt down to thank you. Things like this that give you an overwhelming sense of achievement are still quite common in this circle.
In summary, according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, working in IT can not only satisfy survival requirements but also fulfill the needs for gaining respect, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. Even if you feel a bit lost when you're tired, after calm reflection, I believe you will still choose to continue working in this industry.