Special Observer | Xiaohong Tractor Edited by V
, a well-known workplace leader | Lin Fuhan
Special Observer | Xiaohong Tractor
Core Views
- The biggest feature of Internet companies is the sensitivity to monopoly and the expansion model of exponential growth.
- Traditional company salaries seem to be much lower than those of Internet companies, but in fact these salaries may be reasonable.
- When we feel anxious, it is because we have inner pursuits.
Editor's note: This article is compiled from the live broadcast, with deletions. The full live broadcast can be viewed here>>
What is the nature of the middle-aged crisis?
People will have a sense of crisis in middle-aged life, both internal and external, such as work. Recently, it has been reported that Huawei and Tencent will both Significant layoffs are targeted at people over 35 who have not yet become executives. Why is there such a situation?
First of all, everyone will have a midlife crisis. It is actually anxiety caused by the gap between your expectations at this age and the reality. According to Erickson's growth stage theory, people's psychology in different growth stages will evolve, and each stage has a unique need to maintain inner balance. For example, many people start to pursue stable intimacy and reproduction of the next generation at the age of 30. But in the workplace, especially in Internet companies, although everyone has a long time to retire, they all begin to feel that they may be eliminated, with fewer development opportunities and narrower channels. is closely related to the model behind the Internet, and its biggest feature lies in its sensitivity to monopoly and its exponential growth model. If
Internet companies cannot monopolize the market and occupy the top position, they may go to extinction. How can achieve rapid growth? Throw people and money. Money is easy to say, how about people? Internet leading companies and companies that want to have a monopoly will require a high talent-return ratio. It requires excellent core talents to turn the company's desired results into an achievable path. In order to attract outstanding talents, most of them will adopt leading compensation strategies, such as leading companies like Bytedance. It is difficult for ordinary small and medium-sized enterprises or ordinary Internet companies to dig into corners with high salaries.
salary has a certain rigidity, that is, the salary does not have the flexibility to fluctuate and can only increase the salary. Once the salary is reduced, most employees will have to leave. This also leads to a problem: It is difficult for companies to control costs through group salary reductions.
Enterprises are not so sensitive to human costs or management efficiency during the period of rapid growth and extensive development. Once the enterprise cannot grow as savagely as an Internet company, it will begin to pursue the human efficiency ratio. Under the influence of multiple factors such as the epidemic, the growth rate of labor costs has exceeded the growth rate of market revenue. The only way to achieve efficiency is to reduce labor costs and ensure the company's high human efficiency and sustainable development. And it is difficult to reduce wages, so we can only lay off employees.
Internet companies don’t really want to lay off employees. The layoffs will limit the possibility of business development and will shake the company’s morale. However, companies also need to consider shareholder returns and healthy cash flow. If the impact of the epidemic is long-lasting, the market recovery cycle is long, high cost expenditures are unsustainable, and they have to reduce costs through layoffs. Why does
lay off these older employees? Over 35 years old, the position and salary grade are not low, but it is difficult to guarantee high output like young people. This is also the accelerated depreciation of personnel caused by the Internet market growth, because in traditional enterprises, a person’s value curve is turning point It is generally more backward, such as 45-50 years old. In addition to the workplace crisis of layoffs, also has a sense of inner crisis, . At this age, I need to put more energy into limited directions, and consider how I can make my career go more stable, smoother, and higher. But because all kinds of social relations, management responsibilities, and family affairs all take up energy, it may feel like I want to do a lot, but I seem to be more and more powerless. But anxiety itself is a good thing, because the various emotional bodies that people have remind us that when we have a sense of anxiety, it is because we have the pursuit of in our hearts, hoping to transcend the dilemma of growth, but the current situation brings us With great resistance, we can't grow so smoothly.
So between our limited ability, resources, and our unlimited dreamsGreat contradiction. Everyone wants to have a good life, but at any time, only the head can have goodness in certain dimensions, because material productivity is limited, but goodness is often comparative. Our life as an ordinary person now surpasses the emperor even in ancient times.
We went back to Huawei’s layoffs. Actually, it’s not as troublesome as everyone thought. If you feel that you have to find a job with the same annual salary to be satisfied after you come out, then you can ask yourself, are you really worth so much money? ? In fact, no one knows how much money he is worth. Our perception of value depends on a frame of reference.
For example, many people think that the average monthly salary of human resource managers in first-tier cities may be 20K, but the current situation in China is that people with a monthly salary of more than 10,000 may be less than 5%. If the monthly salary is 20,000, it may already be %. A few tenths. In most cities in China, regardless of buying a house and the fashion quality guided by consumerism, a monthly salary of 10,000 can live in most cities in China, but life may not be so good. If your needs are not basic needs, but better material life, then higher investment is needed.
So you have to understand one thing, traditional company salaries seem to be much lower than Internet companies, but in fact these salaries may be reasonable. is just that your appetite has been stoked by Internet companies. I think I should have been paid such a high salary, but in fact, there are still a few people who get high salaries. Even most of the ordinary employees of Internet companies are also paid. The median value is only higher than that of a particularly traditional enterprise. Under the same conditions, the income will be higher, but the higher part is rational and limited. The explosive growth rate of Internet companies has gone forever, and most areas have passed the bonus period. Your value, which was overestimated before, is returning to a normal value.
Positioning of knowledgeable employees
Even if Huawei is laying off employees, there will certainly be many people over the age of 35 who are in a stable position, because as long as you have sufficient abilities, there will still be a very broad market. So we must know where the knowledge workers are.
Jack Ma said in an interview that he thinks that those with higher academic qualifications do takeaways, something that is very worthy of admiration and encouragement. Everyone strongly disagrees and thinks that people with a high degree of education cannot do work such as food delivery. Why? Because we are positioning them as knowledge workers, they should do some knowledge-related mental work instead of manual work.
But what is the difference between knowledge labor and ordinary employee labor? A very typical feature of knowledge work is knowledge overflow. : I do a good job. In addition to realizing my personal value, I have the opportunity to provide this organization with more valuable things. For example, if I work as a human resource, I can develop a set of tools to effectively improve the efficiency of interviews. If I do a training internally to train other HR or front-line leaders to master this set of interview methods, our overall efficiency will be Will improve a lot, this is the overflow of knowledge.
But if you work in food delivery, it will be difficult to achieve this. You have proposed a strategy for the company. Will anyone listen? Will your message reach the CEO? No, but if you are a human resources or marketing manager, your very good point of view may become a strategy of the company and become a competitive advantage of the company.
Therefore, if the knowledge spillover effect you can provide to the company is very weak, and there is a big gap between the distance from a truly valuable knowledge worker, you have to consider whether you are already in a career crisis. Of course, there is no need to worry so much. As long as you always think about your work and how you can make greater contributions to the company, department, and business, you can always think of ways.
The path to break through from the crisis
So, how do we deal with a potential mid-life crisis? Let me give you a few suggestions:
first, keep an open mind . Never feel that you are very mature, professional, and capable of everything, and don't worry about anything and learn nothing because of your high salary. As long as you think about it this way, you will be eliminated one day, because now the latter have worked very hard and are also fighting. Your learning speed and learning ability may not be able to catch up with others, you are just older than others, what you have experiencedMore than others.
The second is fluid intelligence . Psychologists put forward the concepts of crystal intelligence and fluid intelligence when studying intelligence. When a person is young, he is good at crystal intelligence. At this stage, he has a good memory, and he can remember even useless knowledge very firmly. But in adulthood, you will remember things with logic and reasoning more deeply, and your brain will not be sensitive to boring opinions and theories. So people in middle age should actually use your fluid intelligence more to solve problems and serve the organization. How do you improve your fluid intelligence? keeps an open mind, learns more work-related knowledge content, and pursues some knowledge output in cross-fields.
Blindly pursuing professional competence may limit your growth. As the position develops, the company's needs are no longer for you to solve a specific problem, but for you to help others solve the problem and help the company to sort out this problem. Therefore, the higher the level, the more you need your interpersonal skills and conceptual thinking skills. On the contrary, the proportion of your business skills will become lower and lower. Therefore, you need to have this kind of retreat ability, to understand the business in a cross-domain combination of strategies, to sensitively perceive the gap between the businesses, to find problems in many phenomena, to predict the problems in advance, these capabilities will become more core. Ability, this is also the basic potential of a senior manager.
So the pursuit of knowledge of cross-competence, let yourself become a manager or become a professional, these are the two directions you can grow.
If you can ensure that your knowledge spillover is very frequent and valuable, you must be in the last row when layoffs, so this is a knowledge worker who pursues his career development and resists these middle-aged crises. Must pass the road.
QA link
@wiki小小cute: From the first group of people working on the Internet in the 90s to the present, in the past 20 years, the Internet industry has basically only entered but not exported. Does it mean that the industry is saturated and there is nothing new Opportunity.
@小红 Tractor: looks like this from the perspective of the big picture. Any industry will experience a halo curve and life cycle: there is a frenetic cycle at the beginning, then it declines, grows slowly, and then matures. Period and recession period. The development cycle of China's Internet has passed 20 years, and it has grown to the high point of the second turning point. The dividend has basically been eaten through, and the development is very weak.
In addition, the epidemic has also accelerated its decline, and it will be more difficult for some old Internet companies to survive. The "eyeball economy" originally proposed by the Internet industry, that is, the attention economy, refers to the allocation of human consumption time. Various markets have been divided up, and people’s energy has been distributed to various apps. It is even more difficult to use another product to capture people’s attention and make people have a strong stickiness to the product.
The timing is not good for many Internet companies, especially traditional Internet companies. I don’t recommend that you pursue the Internet industry in particular, such as O2O industries such as Meituan or Ele.me. In such a company, the proportion of knowledgeable employees is even lower. The company may have 50,000 employees, but 80%-90% of them are takeaway guys. Therefore, if an industry or company has passed the start-up growth stage and has reached a more mature stage, it will enter a stage of recession and shrinkage. At this time, these companies will pursue efficiency, pursue capital turnover, and pursue a lower rate of bad debts. And so on, will pay more attention to management efficiency and reduce labor costs.
@豆豆: How to avoid involution in Internet companies?
@小红 Tractor: involution is a view put forward by the American anthropologist Giltz, which means that although people don’t know how to improve production efficiency, people will work hard within a constant production efficiency. Work, but the marginal rate of return is extremely low.
For example, a farmer can only produce 100 kilograms of grain per mu without new machinery operations. He is very diligent and can produce 10 kilograms more than others. Others may go to farm early in the morning, and come back when the weather is hot. He goes to farm early in the morning, working from noon to afternoon, and working every day. In the end, 10 acres of land may yield an extra 100 catties of grain, but 100 catties of grain will be sold. His money may be offset by the overtime he paid, and it did not even bring about a significant increase. This is the involution.
zHow can 8z avoid involution? How to use knowledge, experience and thinking to help the company solve problems ? First, read more; second, learn more; third, think more, and try to put forward management suggestions, so that your views have a greater chance of being recognized and adopted, and ultimately improve the company's production efficiency. If you bring value to the company, there will be no involution. But if you only consider your own job, your substitutability is very high, so you must surpass your position, have an open mind, and avoid the shortcomings of thinking that the position brings to you.
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