A few years back, a big-tech badge was, in many people’s eyes, the optimal solution for life.
A degree from a prestigious school plus a big-tech resume meant high pay, respectability, and stability — the era’s pass that ordinary people would break their heads to obtain. Everyone assumed that as long as you squeezed into a top platform, you could ride the industry’s growth and coast comfortably through your whole career. But with AI restructuring every industry and the internet dividend hitting its ceiling, that old-era survival logic has completely stopped working. Being infatuated with the brief glamour a big company gives you is nothing more than clutching an expired old boarding pass — you can’t get on the current wave of the times.
Yesterday I talked with a former former-colleague who went to ByteDance years ago. A technical support role on their team has become so involuted that it now requires a 985 Harbin Institute of Technology master’s degree, and I’d even heard before that a PhD interned on their team. Although my own monthly salary once peaked at 30k, that wasn’t because my ability was so much greater than anyone else’s — it was because I caught the era’s tailwind. When you’re on the tailwind, even a pig can fly. But now, if I go out and look for the same job as before, I can only get around 15k — straight down by half — and it’s still an outsourced role. That’s supply and demand out of balance: too many people plus the impact of AI, and past experience is no longer worth anything. There are heaps of people on the market with better degrees and richer experience than yours, competing with you for a low-end execution-level role, and you have no bargaining power at all. Those development roles that used to look highly complex are the same now: a Java developer who can only do CRUD is still around 15k, and I’ve even seen 12k a month in Shanghai. The internet has long since entered an era of stock competition, and the job market has completely become a buyer’s market:
- Stock of unemployed people: successive rounds of internet layoffs have released large numbers of 30+ and 35+ senior practitioners;
- Increment of graduates: hundreds of thousands of computer science undergraduate and master’s graduates keep entering every year;
Both groups are fighting over a sharply reduced number of technical positions, and supply is severely excessive.
I used to hold my head higher — I turned down an “outsourced” role at over 20k a month, and later turned down an Alibaba outsourcing role at 16k a month, loudly declaring that “even a dog wouldn’t take outsourcing work.” But half a year later I still haven’t found a job I’m satisfied with. I’ve long since faced reality: there’s no choice to be had.
1. The Curtain Has Fallen on the Growth Era; the Base Color of Big-Tech Respectability Has Long Since Faded
The old big-tech halo was built on the foundation of continuous industry expansion. During the high-speed growth phase of mobile internet, new projects came endlessly, companies expanded headcount year after year, division of labor was clear, and promotion paths were well defined. Even if you were only a basic cog, you could ride the platform’s traffic and its mature business to raise your pay quickly; job-hopping came with a built-in resume premium, and the platform backstopped most people’s career risk.
But now everything has changed.
Market growth has bottomed out, corporate core objectives have shifted from expansion to cost reduction and efficiency gains, and AI tools have heavily compressed the demand for labor. Standardized development, operations, basic operations roles, and technical support are all contracting continuously. There are technical practitioners out of work all over the industry — you can grab a handful anywhere — the recruitment market has completely become a buyer’s market, and companies hold vast piles of resumes and raise the bar at will.
Reality that overturns your assumptions is everywhere around you: 211-university graduates hit walls in every direction while job-hunting, Alibaba outsourcing interviews cut the salary straight in half; basic technical support roles that used to be transitional positions for fresh graduates are now packed with 985-university master’s grads; a Java programmer with five years in the industry runs into company wage arrears and can only passively accept a pay cut to keep the job.
Everyone is squeezing onto the narrow road of big tech, but the track can’t hold this many people. People burn their best physical condition, their mental energy, and their youth competing in involution, fighting for a job that could be optimized away at any moment. This seemingly glamorous big-tech respectability has long since become pitifully poor value.
2. Big Tech Only Manufactures Cogs; Experience You Can’t Take With You Is No Moat at All
Big tech’s most fatal trap is that its highly segmented workflow slowly grinds away a person’s overall competitiveness.
Inside a colossal system, each person is responsible for only a tiny link in the business chain: backend people just repeat basic business code, operations people just handle fixed online issues, and over the long term you’re trapped inside internal processes and cross-department meetings, with little chance to touch a complete business loop. The experience you accumulate is highly dependent on the platform’s internal system, and once you leave big tech, that segmented skill set is hard to reuse.
We always mistakenly assume a big-tech resume is a moat. The fact is exactly the opposite: a moat is an ability that belongs entirely to you and works wherever you go, while what big tech gives you is only an added halo conferred by the platform. A company won’t show mercy because of your years of tenure or your glamorous resume. In the face of cost-cutting layoffs, tenure, degrees, and past performance can’t serve as a get-out-of-death card.
Staking all your life’s chips on a single platform is essentially handing over your life’s right to choose on your own initiative. The moment the industry wobbles, you instantly lose your footing.
It isn’t only the internet industry. The current state of the film and TV industry confirms the same principle. Quite a few professionally trained actors with years of shooting experience have no roles to take under the impact of AI digital-human short dramas, and can only go back to their hometowns to set up a stall selling vegetables. The specialty and the resume they once took pride in are flimsy in the face of technological change and industry contraction. Dependent survival on a single track and a single platform has risk tolerance weak to the extreme.
3. In the AI Era, the Real Moat Was Never the Platform — It’s You
In the old era everyone chased the big-tech halo because there were no more channels for making a living independently. Now that AI is widespread, ordinary people have a real opportunity to build a survival barrier of their own that isn’t affected by a company’s rise and fall.
1. Build composite technical ability — drive AI instead of being replaced by it
Purely standardized, repetitive technical work will sooner or later be replaced by AI in bulk. Tool-people who can only mechanically write code and do basic operations will keep facing compressed salaries and shrinking roles.
What’s genuinely scarce is composite talent who understand the complete business and can skillfully use AI tools to build solutions that land. Years of hands-on frontline experience is the underlying confidence; fold AI into your workflow and accumulate landing experience unique to a vertical industry, and that ability lets you take contracts and get employed apart from any big company. That’s a real technical moat.
2. Build a personal IP and side-income channels — leave yourself a survival exit
In a downturn cycle, “survive first” is everyone’s bottom line. Don’t hang all your income on one full-time job. Self-media, vertical content sharing, and light brick-and-mortar small businesses are all low-cost buffer exits.
You don’t need to rush to monetize a side hustle; its core function is diversifying career risk. When your main job is unstable or your job search is blocked, your own traffic, your private-domain followers, and your small offline business can all become backstop income, so you don’t have to passively accept the harsh salary and over-extractive conditions a company offers.
For example, travel content across the whole internet has long been highly standardized: 318 self-driving guides, what to wear in Tibet, check-in photo spots, hotel group-buy deals — the same templates over and over, which AI can generate in bulk with a flick of the wrist. That kind of standardized content will forever only get scraps of traffic.
The blogger Li Yaode had one video blow up to 3.2 million likes. The public’s standardized understanding of a taxi is: short-distance transport, commuting within a city. Nobody takes a taxi across more than a thousand kilometers on the 318 into Tibet.
“Chongqing’s yellow Ferrari, straight through to Lhasa” is itself counterintuitive and extremely rare: long-distance charter costs run into the tens of thousands, the road is perilous, and very few taxi drivers are willing to take the job. The overwhelming majority of ordinary people will never do this in their whole life.
That kind of low-probability, unreplicable unique experience is an exclusive scarce resource: other people shoot self-driving trips, he shoots a cross-city taxi journey; other people recreate viral routes, he does an outrageous challenge almost nobody on the internet has actually attempted, naturally pulling away from every other travel blogger.
3. Refuse to be bound to a single track — spread your life’s risk across multiple paths
Every industry has cycles; the internet, film and TV, and brick-and-mortar are no exceptions. Defending one track to the death makes it very easy to end up with nowhere to go once the industry contracts.
You don’t have to cling to a high-salary technical role. Outsourcing, a small physical business, and content creation can all serve as backup buffers. Put down the professional filter, shed the obsession with “big-tech respectability,” and leave yourself a few more exits — only then can you withstand the impact of the era’s waves.
4. Standardization Only Earns Hard Money; Scarce Experience + Precise Urgent Need Brings Excess Returns
I said above that a personal IP and a side hustle are a fallback, but many people overlook a key question: what kind of personal IP can actually be monetized?
The answer is simple: standardized content only gets a thin share of traffic; scarce experience plus a precise urgent need is what keeps earning excess returns.
1. The lesson from Yong Ge Talks Restaurants: why pitfall-avoidance experience sells so well
Take “Yong Ge Talks Restaurants” (勇哥说餐饮) as an example. Countless people across China want to get into the restaurant business, and opening a shop is a track with an extremely low barrier and extreme standardization: you can buy a milk tea recipe online for a few hundred yuan, kitchen hires are everywhere, and franchise brand salespeople will even walk you through the operating procedures hand in hand.
So why does his 399-yuan course keep selling explosively, with the account reaching a million followers?
Because what he sells isn’t standardized skill — it’s scarce hands-on experience that others can’t replicate: how to spot the transfer-fee trap on a storefront, how to estimate real dining foot traffic, how to tell a legitimate chain from a franchise-harvesting company, how to identify the bullying clauses in a franchise contract, and how a small shop can drive traffic cheaply and control shrinkage.
This experience can’t be made into a uniform template: every single item comes from years of stepping in pits, post-mortems on failed shops, and real trips to scout storefronts offline. AI can’t write it, ordinary shop owners can’t summarize it completely, and recruitment brands certainly won’t volunteer it.
What a beginner entrepreneur fears most isn’t failing to make money — it’s impulsively throwing a hundred-plus thousand yuan into franchise fees and transfer fees in a heat of the moment and ending up with nothing. Compared with a potential loss of a hundred-plus thousand, spending three hundred-something yuan on a pitfall-avoidance guide is an extremely high-value risk hedge. Standardized tutorials are everywhere, but hands-on content that stands on the ordinary person’s side and specifically teaches people how to “lose less money and not get scammed” is in very short supply. That supply-demand gap directly props up his traffic and his sales.
2. Mapped onto a technical person’s personal IP: where is your scarcity
The same principle holds in the programmer track.
90% of the technical content on the market is standardized tutorials: Python syntax, operations commands, framework usage, LeetCode solutions. Free materials flood the internet and AI can generate them in bulk — there’s no scarcity at all, so all you can do is involute on traffic and on price.
But if you’re a genuine frontline technical person, you may hold a lot of scarce hands-on experience that others don’t have:
- How a programmer with a junior college degree or an ordinary degree keeps job-hunting after 30;
- The real threshold of big-tech degree involution, and the industry reality of outsourced salaries being cut in half;
- How basic development and operations roles are contracting under the impact of AI tools;
- The real paths and pitfalls of technical people switching into brick-and-mortar, content, or side hustles;
- How someone from an ordinary family background can find a more stable way to survive in the tech industry.
This content isn’t a standard tutorial — it’s the pits you really stepped in, the tuition you really paid, and the industry truths you observed. It corresponds to a huge urgent need right now: large numbers of programmers over 30 with ordinary degrees, out of work or lost, are facing job-search involution, age anxiety, fear of being eliminated by AI, and a wish to switch careers without being able to find a trustworthy direction.
An ordinary blogger outputs standardized technical know-how; what you output is firsthand, ground-level survival experience that others don’t have. That’s scarcity. Large numbers of lost people need real reference points and pitfall-avoidance guides — that’s precise demand. Stack the two together and you can jump out of standardized involution and have a premium space of your own.
3. Design yourself a “scarce + urgent need” exit
So if you’re considering a side hustle or a personal IP, don’t just fixate on “what technology do I know.” Technology itself is worth less and less — too many people know it, and AI learns it fast.
What you should ask yourself is:
- Which of my experiences do other people not have and can’t find by searching online?
- Whom have I helped solve what problem? Is that problem something a lot of people are anxious about right now?
- Can I summarize the pits I’ve stepped in into content that others are willing to pay for or keep following?
It could be helping junior-college-degree programmers sort out a job-search strategy; it could be explaining the industry’s transition directions clearly for middle-aged operations people; it could be documenting your own complete process of moving from a technical role into a small brick-and-mortar business. As long as the content is real, scarce, and hits a group of people’s fear or urgent need, there’s a chance to slowly build a moat of your own.
Final Words
Once, big tech was the optimal solution in countless people’s eyes. Now we finally see clearly that it was only a boarding pass exclusive to the last growth era — one that can’t fit the brand-new world being restructured by AI.
Spending your most precious years involuting for a platform respectability that could vanish at any moment is truly a waste. Platforms will always rise and fall, but the technology, reputation, and diverse ways of making a living that settle onto you yourself are the real moat — the thing you hold in your hand no matter how the industry changes, and the thing that never expires.
You don’t need to chase the halo the outside world confers. Going deep on yourself is the only stable way out in this era.
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