"Do you think I'm a useless person?" I didn't answer, I just quietly picked up the glass on the table. In fact, I didn't know how to answer either.
Sitting across from me was Mr. Er, whom I hadn't seen in a year. Today is Christmas Eve, and it's rare that I can invite him out. But we've been sitting here for almost half an hour, and he finally slowly said this sentence.
I saw a trace of tiredness in his eyes. I didn't know what he had experienced in the past year, and I didn't know how to answer him. All I could do was raise my glass and clink it with him, then wait for him to tell me about his experiences in the past year.
I have known Mr. Er for almost ten years. In my impression, he has always been a diligent and intelligent person. People around him are used to seeking his help whenever they encounter any problems, and Mr. Er never refuses.
"I feel like I've wasted this year. I didn't learn what I wanted to learn well, and I've been frustrated several times for no reason," he said, taking a big gulp of beer. "No way, didn't you tell me that you've developed several software programs? The one called Staple..." Finally, I could join the conversation. "Oh, you mean Staple. Yeah, I'm almost done with it."
Yes, Staple. According to what he said at the time, he wanted to create a static blog generator, similar to Hugo. I didn't know what Hugo was, but I knew what a static blog generator was. During the time he was working on it, we kept in touch and discussed how to design Staple and what features it needed. Although I'm not in the internet industry, I had many conversations with him from the perspective of a beginner and user, and he was good at explaining things in a simple and understandable way. It was as if he saw me as a product manager.
One thing I admire about Mr. Er is that he seems to have endless motivation to work on things he is interested in. But what others don't know is that he has basically spent all his spare time on it. He is one of the few people I've met who truly enjoys programming, and I feel sorry for him that such a talented person is writing mediocre code for an outsourcing company. I have talked to him about this before, saying, "Why don't you prepare and interview with a BAT company? With your skills, you should be able to get in."
"But I can't stand overtime work. If I do that, I won't have time to go out or study," he replied.
"Enough!" Mr. Er looked at the almost empty glass of beer and said this sentence, and then our conversation returned to the topic of being "useless."
Is Mr. Er useless? I have been pondering this question since he asked it. If you say he is talented, his English level has been at the level of being punished to stand since high school; if you say he is useless, his logical thinking ability is beyond ordinary people.
"Actually, you are quite outstanding. At least your colleagues have a positive opinion of you," I said.
Mr. Er sighed deeply, and I also knew that he is the kind of person who will learn something over and over again until he gets it. He said he spent so much time on it and only achieved a little bit of output and benefit, which means he really doesn't have the talent for it. He mentioned several people who graduated from top universities, work at well-known companies, and have jobs at BAT, saying that they talk about things he has never even touched. "You see, that's how the gap is formed." Indeed, this reminded me of a girl in high school who worked hard every day to barely meet the requirements for a prestigious university. Part of Mr. Er's pressure actually comes from within his company, where there are countless students from top universities and returnees from overseas, all of whom have better qualifications than him. In that environment, I would probably feel oppressed too.
Thinking about how he was punished to stand in English class, I remembered a product he wanted to create, Resource.rs. When he told me about it, his eyes were shining with excitement. "I want to integrate all kinds of information and articles about Rust on the internet and give Chinese learners a great gift." Now, a year has passed, and I estimate that I am one of the few people who occasionally click to see if there are any updates. The content on the website hasn't been updated for a long time, and many of the already scarce content is outdated. I personally appreciate this idea, to explain something with a high threshold in simple language, which is a noble thing to do. "Probably only programmers are so foolish to invest a lot of time in maintaining and writing something that doesn't bring much profit," I thought to myself, but I didn't dare to tell Mr. Er.
Mr. Er told me that he might not be able to continue with it anymore, and he summarized a few reasons:
- Insufficient ability. The resources on the internet are uneven, and to filter and summarize these contents, the maintainer needs to have the ability to discern and the energy to produce summary articles. This requires the maintainer to be at least a proficient user of Rust, and Mr. Er believes that he doesn't reach that level. And this brings another problem, if the content being maintained is official, then it's no different from "The Rust Programming Language" or "Rust by Example". A person relying on their spare time really can't maintain such detailed content.
- Unclear positioning. Mr. Er wants to position Resource.rs as a comprehensive and accurate beginner-level information website. But the content that has been produced so far is more like his personal journey of learning Rust. Users with high English proficiency are fully capable of reading English articles, and the Chinese community cannot produce articles of comparable quality, resulting in a lack of content on the website.
In fact, those who often follow Mr. Er can see that there are quite a few blog posts about Rust on his blog. I once asked him curiously, "Why don't you post your Rust blog posts on your Rust information website?"
"It's not that I don't want to, but I'm just starting to learn about this field myself. I don't even know if what I'm writing is right or wrong. I don't have the courage to put it on the website, for fear of misleading others, right? There's a great cheats.rs website overseas, and there's rust-lang-cn and rust.cc forum in China. I really don't know if I can keep going."
A gust of wind blew past our ears, and we fell into a brief silence again, drinking alone. The laughter from the next table occasionally reached our table.
"Ah, I've been so tired recently, I want to quit and take a break," our two glasses clinked together, breaking the silence of the moment. "Yeah, I've wanted to do that for a long time," I agreed.
"I don't even know what I've been doing this year. Time seems to pass by so quickly. I close my eyes and before I know it, the alarm clock rings and it's time to go to work. I blink and it's time to leave work. I blink again and it's late at night, time to sleep.
I make mistakes at work all the time and get criticized by my boss and colleagues. I do the same repetitive work every day and have arguments with my colleagues at my company. Didn't we say there's no competition pressure among colleagues in our company? Why is there such a rush to shift blame when a problem arises?
I'm even forced to transfer to another department by my boss. It caused quite a stir, and I guess the evaluation of me in the training for the transfer should be the lowest. I probably won't have anything to do with this year's salary increase. I can't believe that I became famous because of my mistakes and almost everyone in the China region's top management knows my name. It's really pathetic. I probably won't last long in this company.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm really not suitable for this industry. I look at technology at work, look at technology after work, look at technology on weekends, and still haven't learned anything. I always feel like I'm trapped in the dilemma of 'the more I learn, the more useless I become.' Whenever I see others on the internet saying that they learned from someone, I envy and admire them. I feel like I can only fool around by myself most of the time. I guess what I'm doing is just wasting time.
I envy and admire those people. They got into top universities, love computers, are sensitive to logic and mathematics, have good jobs, and have like-minded people around them. I can't achieve any of these.
Sigh, I wish I could be like that."
I knew it wasn't the right time to speak, and I didn't know what to say. All I knew was to silently drink with him. Everyone has their own difficulties, just like the saying goes, "Everyone's joys and sorrows are different, I just feel that they are noisy." No one has the right to mock each other, at least I don't have the ability to mock him, no matter how naive he sounds.
"It's getting late, let's go back."
"Yeah, it's time to go back."
"Okay, I'm leaving."
"Yeah, I'm leaving too."