1 引言

你被雇佣不是为了写代码，别再骗自己了。工程师的第一课，看懂商业(赚钱)，而不是技术框架(编程)。

别叫自己“程序员”：给独立开发者的5个残酷商业真相 ——这篇文章，可能是你职业生涯的README

如果我能在每一份工程教育里硬塞一门必修课，它不是编译器、不是操作系统、不是时间复杂度。它叫：《你所在行业的现实》。

因为没人教过这些，所以太多聪明人——包括当年的我——花了十年痛苦才搞明白：现实世界根本不关心你代码多优雅，只关心你帮公司（或自己）赚了多少钱、省了多少钱。

你是一个独立开发者。你可能以为，只要产品够酷、技术够新、UI 够好看，用户就会来、钱就会到账。大错特错。

90% 的编程工作，是在写那些“无聊到窒息”的业务软件——运费优化、商品定价…… 它们技术难度几乎为零，但每年能省下 25 万美元。公司愿意为这 25 万美元付你薪水，而不是为你写的那个“漂亮的递归算法”。

你把自己叫“程序员”？那你就已经被归入“高成本小工”的类别，随时可能被外包、被 AI、被更便宜的年轻人替代。你应该叫自己：那个能​解决问题、能创造商业价值​的人。

这篇文章是我从一篇经典长文里榨出来的 5 个最残酷、也最值钱的真相。它花了作者十年痛苦才总结出来，现在你只需要 5 分钟读完。

读完你会明白：

• 为什么你的技术栈根本不重要
• 为什么谦虚是你职业生涯的毒药
• 为什么沟通能力比写代码能力值钱十倍
• 以及——独立开发者真正的生存法则是：为商业价值编程，而不是为技术热情编程

准备好被泼冷水了吗？

Note

2 你被雇佣不是为了写代码，而是为了“赚钱”或“省钱”

别骗自己了。公司不在乎你的代码多优雅、用了多时髦的语言、解决了多复杂的算法难题。

他们只在乎两件事：增加收入，降低成本。

做不到这两点，你写得再漂亮的代码也是成本中心里的废话。做到了，你就是公司的宝贝。

3 别叫自己“程序员”——那是个等着被外包的称呼

“程序员”听起来像“一个贵得要死的小工，在键盘上敲一些别人看不懂的咒语”。

你一旦这么叫自己，就有人已经在琢磨怎么用更便宜的人替换你。

正确的自我介绍：用你为前雇主“赚了多少钱 / 省了多少钱”来描述自己。

没有战绩？那就去创造，然后说出来。

4 你的技术栈根本不重要，别再纠结学哪个语言了

Java vs. Python vs Rust vs C​++​？

问这种问题的人，已经输了。

真正的工程师学一门新语言只需要几周。

公司招你，是因为你能帮他们解决商业问题，不是因为你简历上写了某个热门框架。

5 沟通能力比你写代码的能力值钱十倍

你见过最厉害的程序员，但根本不想跟他共事，因为他说不清楚任何事？ 反过来，一个能清晰、自信、不带术语地解释“我怎么帮公司赚钱”的工程师，哪怕代码水平中上，也会被当成天才。

你不会沟通，你的价值就被埋没。这不是不公平，这是现实。

6 谦虚是你职业生涯的毒药

你觉得自己只是团队里的一颗螺丝钉？ 那你就会被当成螺丝钉来付钱。

正确的做法：清晰、克制、自信地说出“我在这个成功项目中具体做了什么关键贡献”。

这不算吹牛，这叫专业。 那些不好意思说自己功劳的人，最后只会被更会表达的人拿走功劳。

7 总结

最后一句话送给你，也送给我自己:

• ​为生活而工作​，不要为工作而生活。
• 但既然你选择了工程师这条路，就别再用学生思维去闯荡成年人的世界。
• 现实不关心你多聪明，只关心你创造了多少价值。

8 附原文及双语翻译

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

如果我能为每所工程教育增加一门课程，那它不会涉及编译器、门电路或时间复杂度。它将是《你的行业现实 101》，因为我们不教授这些内容，这导致了大量不必要的痛苦和折磨。这篇帖子旨在成为年轻工程师职业生涯的 README.txt。目标是填补你教育中关于“现实世界”如何运作的空白，使你快乐。我花了大约十年时间并经历了许多痛苦才弄清楚其中一些内容，从“一个自信不足、对商业实践一无所知的聪明工程师”开始。我不会信任这作为权威指南，但希望它能提供你大学职业中心没有告诉你的价值。

90% of programming jobs are in creating Line of Business software: Economics 101: the price for anything (including you) is a function of the supply of it and demand for it. Let’s talk about the demand side first. Most software is not sold in boxes, available on the Internet, or downloaded from the App Store. Most software is boring one-off applications in corporations, under-girding every imaginable facet of the global economy. It tracks expenses, it optimizes shipping costs, it assists the accounting department in preparing projections, it helps design new widgets, it prices insurance policies, it flags orders for manual review by the fraud department, etc etc. Software solves business problems. Software often solves business problems despite being soul-crushingly boring and of minimal technical complexity. For example, consider an internal travel expense reporting form. Across a company with 2,000 employees, that might save 5,000 man-hours a year (at an average fully-loaded cost of $50 an hour) versus handling expenses on paper, for a savings of $250,000 a year. It does not matter to the company that the reporting form is the world’s simplest CRUD app, it only matters that it either saves the company costs or generates additional revenue.

90%的编程工作是在创建业务软件：经济学 101：任何东西（包括你）的价格都是其供给和需求的一个函数。我们先谈谈需求方面。大多数软件不是以盒装形式出售，也不是在互联网上提供，或从应用商店下载。大多数软件是公司里枯燥的定制应用程序，支撑着全球经济的每一个可想象的方面。它追踪费用，它优化运输成本，它协助会计部门准备预测，它帮助设计新的小工具，它定价保险单，它标记订单供欺诈部门人工审核等等。软件解决商业问题。软件常常在令人窒息的枯燥和极低的技术复杂性的情况下解决商业问题。例如，考虑一个内部旅行费用报告表。在一个有 2000 名员工的公司里，这每年可能节省 5000 人时（以每小时平均完全负荷成本 50 美元计算），与纸质处理费用相比，每年可节省 25 万美元。 对这家公司来说，报告表单是否是世界最简单的 CRUD 应用并不重要，重要的是它要么节省公司成本，要么产生额外收入。

There are companies which create software which actually gets used by customers, which describes almost everything that you probably think of when you think of software. It is unlikely that you will work at one unless you work towards making this happen. Even if you actually work at one, many of the programmers there do not work on customer-facing software, either.

有些公司开发出的软件确实会被客户使用，这几乎涵盖了你对软件的所有想象。除非你致力于促成这种情况，否则你不太可能在这样的公司工作。即使你真的在这样的公司工作，那里的许多程序员也不负责开发面向客户的应用程序。

Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

工程师被雇佣是为了创造商业价值，而不是为了编程：企业总是出于非理性或政治原因做事情（见下文），但主要目的是做增加收入或降低成本的事情。在管理良好的企业中，地位通常授予那些成功获得这些事情功劳的人。（这可能，但并不一定，意味着他们真的做了这些事情。）决定雇佣更多工程师的人并不是因为他们喜欢在房间里有个技术宅，而是因为增加技术宅能让他们完成能增加收入或降低成本的项目（或多个项目）。创造漂亮的软件不是目标。解决复杂的技术问题不是目标。编写无错误的代码不是目标。使用时髦的编程语言不是目标。增加收入，降低成本。那才是你的唯一目标。¹

Peter Drucker — you haven’t heard of him, but he is a prophet among people who sign checks — came up with the terms Profit Center and Cost Center. Profit Centers are the part of an organization that bring in the bacon: partners at law firms, sales at enterprise software companies, “masters of the universe” on Wall Street, etc etc. Cost Centers are, well, everybody else. You really want to be attached to Profit Centers because it will bring you higher wages, more respect, and greater opportunities for everything of value to you. It isn’t hard: a bright high schooler, given a paragraph-long description of a business, can usually identify where the Profit Center is. If you want to work there, work for that. If you can’t, either a) work elsewhere or b) engineer your transfer after joining the company.

彼得·德鲁克——你可能没听说过他，但在那些签发支票的人中，他是一位先知——提出了“利润中心”和“成本中心”这两个术语。利润中心是组织中赚钱的部分：律师事务所的合伙人、企业软件公司的销售、华尔街的“宇宙主宰”等等。成本中心嘛，嗯，就是其他人。你真的想归属于利润中心，因为那里能带给你更高的工资、更多的尊重，以及对你有价值的一切更大的机会。这并不难：一个聪明的高中生，只要给一个商业段落长的描述，通常就能识别出利润中心在哪里。如果你想去那里工作，就为那个地方工作。如果你不能，那就要么 a)去别处工作，要么 b)在公司加入后设计你的调岗。

Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks.

工程师通常是支付非常高昂成本的中心，这会让 MBA 的优化雷达变得敏感。这就是为什么我们会得到像外包这样的美妙想法，即“让我们用较低工资国家的成本中心来替换那些做些我们有点需要但并不真正关心的真正昂贵的成本中心”。（快速补充：如果你阅读了本指南的其余部分，完全可以忽略外包作为职业威胁。）从没有人会外包利润中心。尝试这样做会是 MBA 幽默的铺垫。这就像建议用保存在软盘上的多个副本来替换你的源代码管理系统。

Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)

不要自称程序员： “程序员”听起来像是“异常高成本的小职员，在输入一些胡言乱语到其他胡言乱语中。”如果你自称程序员，就有人已经在想办法解雇你了。你知道 Salesforce，被工程师们广泛认为是软件即服务公司吗？他们的座右铭和销售点是“没有软件”，这向他们的实际客户传达了“你知道那些负责你们内部系统的程序员吗？如果你使用 Salesforce，你可以解雇他们的一半，并将部分差额存入你的奖金中。”（顺便说一句，这没什么不对。你的业务是让员工失业。如果你认为这不公平，那就回去上学，学习一些无关紧要的东西。）

Instead, describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs. If you have not had the opportunity to do this yet, describe things which suggest you have the ability to increase revenue or reduce costs, or ideas to do so.

相反，你应该通过你为前雇主所取得的成就来描述自己，比如增加收入或降低成本。如果你还没有机会做到这一点，就描述一些能表明你有能力增加收入或降低成本的事情，或者你有这样的想法。

There are many varieties of well-paid professionals who sling code but do not describe themselves as slinging code for a living. Quants on Wall Street are the first and best-known example: they use computers and math as a lever to make high-consequence decisions better and faster than an unaided human could, and the punchline to those decisions is “our firm make billions of dollars.” Successful quants make more in bonuses in a good year than many equivalently talented engineers will earn in a decade or lifetime.

有许多高薪的专业人士会编写代码，但他们并不自称为以编写代码为生。华尔街的量化分析师就是第一个也是最著名的例子：他们利用计算机和数学作为杠杆，比没有辅助的人类更快、更准确地做出具有重大影响的决策，而这些决策的笑点就是“我们公司赚了数十亿美元。”成功的量化分析师在一个好年头的奖金比许多同等才华的工程师在十年或一生中赚取的还要多。

Similarly, even though you might think Google sounds like a programmer-friendly company, there are programmers and then there’s the people who are closely tied to 1% improvements in AdWords click-through rates. (Hint: provably worth billions of dollars.) I recently stumbled across a web-page from the guy whose professional bio is “wrote the backend billing code that 97% of Google’s revenue passes through.” He’s now an angel investor (a polite synonym for “rich”).

类似地，尽管你可能会认为谷歌听起来像是一个程序员友好的公司，但程序员和那些与 AdWords 点击率提升 1%密切相关的人是不同的。提示：这被证明价值数十亿美元。我最近偶然发现了一个网页，上面写着这个人的职业简介是“编写了 97%的谷歌收入流经的后端计费代码。”他现在是一名天使投资人（一个礼貌的同义词：“富人”）。

You are not defined by your chosen software stack: I recently asked via Twitter what young engineers wanted to know about careers. Many asked how to know what programming language or stack to study. It doesn’t matter. There you go.

你并非由你选择的软件栈所定义：我最近通过 Twitter 询问年轻工程师们想了解哪些职业相关的问题。许多人问如何知道应该学习哪种编程语言或技术栈。这并不重要。就这样吧。

Do Java programmers make more money than .NET programmers? Anyone describing themselves as either a Java programmer or .NET programmer has already lost, because a) they’re a programmer (you’re not, see above) and b) they’re making themselves non-hireable for most programming jobs. In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career. I did back-end Big Freaking Java Web Application development as recently as March 2010. Trust me, nobody cares about that. If a Python shop was looking for somebody technical to make them a pile of money, the fact that I’ve never written a line of Python would not get held against me.

Java 程序员比.NET 程序员赚更多钱吗？任何自称为 Java 程序员或.NET 程序员的人已经输了，因为 a)他们是个程序员（你不是，见上文）b)他们让自己在大多数编程工作中变得不可雇佣。在现实世界中，学习一门新语言只需要几周的努力，在 6 到 12 个月后，没有人会注意到你整个职业生涯都没有做过那门语言。我最近在 2010 年 3 月还做过后端大型 Java Web 应用开发。相信我，没人关心那件事。如果一家 Python 公司正在寻找技术人才来为他们赚大钱，我从未写过一行 Python 代码这一事实不会对我不利。

Talented engineers are rare — vastly rarer than opportunities to use them — and it is a seller’s market for talent right now in almost every facet of the field. Everybody at Matasano uses Ruby. If you don’t, but are a good engineer, they’ll hire you anyway. (A good engineer has a track record of — repeat after me — increasing revenue or decreasing costs.) Much of Fog Creek uses the Microsoft Stack. I can’t even spell ASP.NET and they’d still hire me.

天才工程师非常罕见——使用他们的机会要稀少得多——目前几乎所有领域的劳动力市场都是卖方市场。Matasano 公司的每个人都使用 Ruby。如果你不使用，但是一名优秀的工程师，他们仍然会雇佣你。（一名优秀的工程师有——跟我重复——增加收入或降低成本的记录。）Fog Creek 公司的大部分人使用微软技术栈。我甚至不会拼写 ASP.NET，他们仍然会雇佣我。

There are companies with broken HR policies where lack of a buzzword means you won’t be selected. You don’t want to work for them, but if you really do, you can add the relevant buzzword to your resume for the costs of a few nights and weekends, or by controlling technology choices at your current job in such a manner that in advances your career interests. Want to get trained on Ruby at a .NET shop? Implement a one-off project in Ruby. Bam, you are now a professional Ruby programmer — you coded Ruby and you took money for it. (You laugh? I did this at a Java shop. The one-off Ruby project made the company $30,000. My boss was, predictably, quite happy and never even asked what produced the deliverable.) 有些公司的人力资源政策有缺陷，缺乏一个热门术语就意味着你不会被选中。你不想为这些公司工作，但如果你真的想，你可以花几个晚上和周末的时间，在你的简历中添加相关的热门术语，或者通过控制你目前工作的技术选择，以这种方式推进你的职业发展。想在 .NET 公司接受 Ruby 培训？用 Ruby 实现一个一次性项目。唰，你现在是一名专业的 Ruby 程序员——你编写了 Ruby，并且你因此获得了报酬。（你笑？我在一家 Java 公司做过这件事。这个一次性 Ruby 项目为公司带来了 30,000 美元。我的老板，不出所料，非常高兴，甚至从未问过是什么产生了这个交付成果。）

Co-workers and bosses are not usually your friends: You will spend a lot of time with co-workers. You may eventually become close friends with some of them, but in general, you will move on in three years and aside from maintaining cordial relations you will not go out of your way to invite them over to dinner. They will treat you in exactly the same way. You should be a good person to everyone you meet — it is the moral thing to do, and as a sidenote will really help your networking — but do not be under the delusion that everyone is your friend. 同事和老板通常不是你的朋友：你会花很多时间与同事相处。你可能会和其中一些人最终成为亲密的朋友，但总的来说，你三年后会离开，除了保持友好关系，你不会特意邀请他们来吃晚饭。他们会以同样的方式对待你。你应该对遇到的每个人都友善——这是道德的要求，顺便说一句，这真的能帮助你的社交——但不要有所有人都把你当朋友的错觉。

For example, at a job interview, even if you are talking to an affable 28 year old who feels like a slightly older version of you he is in a transaction. You are not his friend, you are an input for an industrial process which he is trying to buy for the company at the lowest price. That banter about World of Warcraft is just establishing a professional rapport, but he will (perfectly ethically) attempt to do things that none of your actual friends would ever do, like try to talk you down several thousand dollars in salary or guilt-trip you into spending more time with the company when you could be spending time with your actual friends. You will have other coworkers who — affably and ethically — will suggest things which go against your interests, from “I should get credit for that project you just did” (probably not phrased in so many words) to “We should do this thing which advances my professional growth goals rather than yours.” Don’t be surprised when this happens. 例如，在面试工作时，即使你正在和一个友善的 28 岁年轻人交谈，他感觉像是你稍微年长一点的版本，他仍是在进行一场交易。你并不是他的朋友，你只是他试图为公司以最低价格购买的一个工业流程的输入。关于魔兽世界的闲聊只是建立专业关系，但他会（完全合乎道德地）尝试做一些你真正的朋友永远不会做的事情，比如试图压低你几千美元的薪水，或者让你花更多时间在公司而不是和真正的朋友在一起。你会有其他同事——他们友善且合乎道德地——会提出一些违背你利益的事情，从“我应该为那个你刚完成的项目获得信用”（可能不会用这么多的字眼）到“我们应该做这件事，这会促进我的职业发展目标而不是你的。”当这种情况发生时，不要感到惊讶。

You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with: Many people already successfully employed as senior engineers cannot actually implement FizzBuzz. Just read it and weep. Key takeaway: you probably are good enough to work at that company you think you’re not good enough for. They hire better mortals, but they still hire mortals. 你因为周围的人群而极大地高估了竞争者的平均水平：许多已经成功担任高级工程师的人实际上无法实现 FizzBuzz。只需读一读就知道了。关键要点：你可能足够优秀，可以进入你认为不够格的公司工作。他们雇佣更优秀的人，但他们仍然会雇佣普通人。

“Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment: Most jobs are never available publicly, just like most worthwhile candidates are not available publicly (see here). Information about the position travels at approximately the speed of beer, sometimes lubricated by email. The decisionmaker at a company knows he needs someone. He tells his friends and business contacts. One of them knows someone — family, a roommate from college, someone they met at a conference, an ex-colleague, whatever. Introductions are made, a meeting happens, and they achieve agreement in principle on the job offer. Then the resume/HR department/formal offer dance comes about. “看广告。寄简历。去面试。收到录用通知。”这是获得工作的例外情况，而非典型情况：大多数工作从未公开招聘，就像大多数有价值的候选人也从未公开露面（参见此处）。关于职位的信息传播速度大约和啤酒一样慢，有时会通过电子邮件得到一些润滑。公司里的决策者知道他需要人。他告诉他的朋友和商业联系人。其中一个人认识某个人——家人、大学室友、会议认识的人、前同事，无论什么关系。于是进行引荐，安排会面，并在原则上就工作录用达成一致。然后就是简历/人力资源部门/正式录用通知的流程。

This is disproportionately true of jobs you actually want to get. “First employee at a successful startup” has a certain cachet for a lot of geeks, and virtually none of those got placed by sending in a cover letter to an HR department, in part because two-man startups don’t have enough scar tissue to form HR departments yet. (P.S. You probably don’t want to be first employee for a startup. Be the last co-founder instead.) Want to get a job at Google? They have a formal process for giving you a leg up because a Googler likes you. (They also have multiple informal ways for a Googler who likes you an awful lot to short-circuit that process. One example: buy the company you work for. When you have a couple of billion lying around you have many interesting options for solving problems.) 这在你真正想得到的岗位上尤其如此。“成功创业公司的第一个员工”对很多极客来说具有一定的吸引力，而几乎没有人是通过向人力资源部门递交求职信获得这个职位的，部分原因是两个人的初创公司还没有形成足够的老伤疤来建立人力资源部门。（附言：你可能不想成为初创公司的第一个员工。成为最后一个联合创始人吧。）想得到谷歌的工作？他们有一个正式的程序来给你提供帮助，因为一个谷歌人喜欢你。 （他们也有多种非正式的方式让一个非常喜欢你的人绕过这个程序。一个例子：收购你所在的公司。当你手头有几亿美元时，你有很多有趣的选择来解决问题。）

There are many reasons why most hiring happens privately. One is that publicly visible job offers get spammed by hundreds of resumes (particularly in this economy) from people who are stunningly inappropriate for the position. The other is that other companies are so bad at hiring that, if you don’t have close personal knowledge about the candidate, you might accidentally hire a non-FizzBuzzer. 大多数招聘都是私下进行的，原因有很多。其中之一是公开可见的职位招聘会被数百份简历（尤其是在当前经济形势下）轰炸，而这些人对于这个职位来说完全格格不入。另一个原因是其他公司在招 聘方面做得非常糟糕，如果你对候选人没有密切的个人了解，可能会不小心招聘到一个非 FizzBuzzer。

Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets: Networking just means a) meeting people who at some point can do things for you (or vice versa) and b) making a favorable impression on them. 网络：它不只是 TCP 数据包：网络意味着 a)结识那些在某些时候能为你做事的人（或者反过来也一样），以及 b)给他们留下良好的印象。

There are many places to meet people. Events in your industry, such as conferences or academic symposia which get seen by non-academics, are one. User groups are another. Keep in mind that user groups draw a very different crowd than industry conferences and optimize accordingly. 可以结识很多人的地方有很多。比如行业内的活动，像面向非学术界的会议或学术研讨会。用户组也是另一个途径。需要注意的是，用户组和行业会议吸引的群体非常不同，因此需要相应地调整策略。

Strive to help people. It is the right thing to do, and people are keenly aware of who have in the past given them or theirs favors. If you ever can’t help someone but know someone who can, pass them to the appropriate person with a recommendation. If you do this right, two people will be happy with you and favorably disposed to helping you out in the future. 努力去帮助他人。这是正确的事，而且人们非常清楚谁在过去曾经给予过他们或他们的家人恩惠。如果你无法帮助某人，但知道有能帮的人，就把他们推荐给合适的人，并附上推荐语。如果你这样做得恰当，两个人都会因此高兴，并且在未来更愿意帮助你。

You can meet people over the Internet (oh God, can you), but something in our monkey brains makes in-the-flesh meeting a bigger thing. I’ve Internet-met a great many people who I’ve then gone on to meet in real life. The physical handshake is a major step up in the relationship, even when Internet-meeting lead to very consequential things like “Made them a lot of money through good advice.” Definitely blog and participate on your industry-appropriate watering holes like HN, but make it out to the meetups for it. 你可以在网上认识人（哦上帝，你能行的话），但某种程度上，我们猴脑中的直觉让面对面的会面显得更为重要。我通过互联网认识了许多人，后来又和他们见了面。即使是通过互联网建立联系最终导致了重大成果，比如“通过良好建议让他们赚了很多钱”，握手这种身体接触也是关系发展的重要一步。当然，要写博客并在适合你行业的社区如 HN 上参与讨论，但一定要去参加相关的线下聚会。

Academia is not like the real world: Your GPA largely doesn’t matter (modulo one high profile exception: a multinational advertising firm). To the extent that it does matter, it only determines whether your resume gets selected for job interviews. If you’re reading the rest of this, you know that your resume isn’t the primary way to get job interviews, so don’t spend huge amount of efforts optimizing something that you either have sufficiently optimized already (since you’ll get the same amount of interviews at 3.96 as you will at 3.8) or that you don’t need at all (since you’ll get job interviews because you’re competent at asking the right people to have coffee with you). 学术界与现实世界不同：你的 GPA 基本上无关紧要（除了一个高调的例外：一家跨国广告公司）。它之所以重要，仅仅在于决定你的简历是否会被选中参加面试。如果你在阅读这篇文章的其余部分，你就知道简历并不是获得面试的主要途径，所以不要在优化那些你已经足够优化（因为你在 3.96 和 3.8 时获得的面试数量相同）或完全不需要的东西上花费巨大的精力（因为你会因为擅长与合适的人约咖啡而获得面试）。

Your major and minor don’t matter. Most decisionmakers in industry couldn’t tell the difference between a major in Computer Science and a major in Mathematics if they tried. I was once reduced to tears because a minor academic snafu threatened my ability to get a Bachelor of Science with a major in Computer Science, which my advisor told me was more prestigious than a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Academia cares about distinctions like that. The real world does not. 你的主修和辅修并不重要。工业界的大多数决策者如果尝试的话，都分不清计算机科学专业和数学专业的区别。我曾经因为一个小小的学术失误而伤心落泪，因为这个失误威胁到了我获得计算机科学专业理学学士学位的能力，而我的导师告诉我，这个学位比计算机科学专业理学学士学位更受重视。学术界在乎这种区别，而现实世界并不在乎。

Your professors might understand how the academic job market works (short story: it is ridiculously inefficient in engineering and fubared beyond mortal comprehension in English) but they often have quixotic understandings of how the real world works. For example, they may push you to get extra degrees because a) it sounds like a good idea to them and b) they enjoy having research-producing peons who work for ramen. Remember, market wages for people capable of producing research are $80~100k+++ in your field. That buys an awful lot of ramen. 你的教授可能了解学术就业市场如何运作（简短来说：在工程领域它极其低效，在英语领域它已经混乱到超出了人类的理解能力），但他们往往对现实世界的运作方式有着天真的理解。例如，他们可能会推动你获得额外的学位，因为 a) 在他们看来这是个好主意，b) 他们喜欢拥有能产出研究成果的、为泡面打工的仆人。记住，在你们领域，能够产出研究成果的人的市场工资是 80~100 万美元以上。这能买到大量的泡面。

The prof in charge of my research project offered me a spot in his lab, a tuition waiver, and a whole $12,000 dollars as a stipend if I would commit 4~6 years to him. That’s a great deal if, and only if, you have recently immigrated from a low-wage country and need someone to intervene with the government to get you a visa. 负责我研究项目的教授提出，如果我愿意跟随他 4 到 6 年，就给我实验室的一个位置、免除学费，并提供整整 1.2 万美元的津贴。如果，而且只有当你最近从低收入国家移民过来，并且需要有人出面与政府交涉以获得签证时，这才会是一笔划算的交易。

If you really like the atmosphere at universities, that is cool. Put a backpack on and you can walk into any building at any university in the United States any time you want. Backpacks are a lot cheaper than working in academia. You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.) 如果你真的喜欢大学的氛围，那很酷。戴上背包，你随时可以走进美国任何大学的任何建筑。背着背包比在学术界工作便宜多了。你也可以在工业界过上有思想的生活——而且能享受更少的政治斗争和更好的待遇。如果你愿意，甚至可以在期刊上发表文章。 （在逃离学术界令人精神错乱的氛围之后，你可能会合乎情理地质疑，发表在期刊上是否真的具有个人或社会意义，而不是像写博客文章并展示给聪明人这样的近似情况。）

How much money do engineers make? 工程师赚多少钱？

Wrong question. The right question is “What kind of offers do engineers routinely work for?”, because salary is one of many levers that people can use to motivate you. The answer to this is, less than helpfully, “Offers are all over the map.” 错误的问题。正确的问题应该是“工程师们通常接受什么样的工作机会？”，因为薪水只是人们用来激励你的众多手段之一。对这个问题的回答，不太有帮助地说，“工作机会五花八门。”

In general, big companies pay more (money, benefits, etc) than startups. Engineers with high perceived value make more than those with low perceived value. Senior engineers make more than junior engineers. People working in high-cost areas make more than people in low-cost areas. People who are skilled in negotiation make more than those who are not. 一般来说，大公司支付的薪水（包括金钱、福利等）比初创公司高。被认为价值高的工程师比被认为价值低的工程师薪水高。资深的工程师比初级工程师薪水高。在高成本地区工作的人比低成本地区的人薪水高。擅长谈判的人比不擅长谈判的人薪水高。

We have strong cultural training to not ask about salary, ever. This is not universal. In many cultures, professional contexts are a perfectly appropriate time to discuss money. (If you were a middle class Japanese man, you could reasonably be expected to reveal your exact salary to a 2nd date, anyone from your soccer club, or the guy who makes your sushi. If you owned a company, you’d probably be cagey about your net worth but you’d talk about employee salaries the way programmers talk about compilers — quite frequently, without being embarrassed.) If I were a Marxist academic or a conspiracy theorist, I might think that this bit of middle class American culture was specifically engineered to be in the interests of employers and against the interests of employees. Prior to a discussion of salary at any particular target employer, you should speak to someone who works there in a similar situation and ask about the salary range for the position. It is <%= Date.today.year %>; you can find these people online. (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and your (non-graph-database) social networks are all good to lean on.) 我们有着非常强烈的文化训练，从不询问薪水。这并非普遍现象。在许多文化中，专业场合讨论金钱是完全合适的。 （如果你是一个中产阶级的日本男性，你可能会在第二次约会、足球俱乐部成员或制作寿司的人面前透露你的确切薪水。如果你拥有公司，你可能会对净资产保密，但你会像程序员谈论编译器一样频繁地谈论员工薪水——毫不尴尬。） 如果我是一个马克思主义学者或阴谋论者，我可能会认为这种中产阶级美国文化是特意设计出来，以雇主利益为重，而损害员工利益的。在讨论任何目标雇主的薪水之前，你应该与在那里工作且处于类似情况的人交谈，并询问该职位的薪水范围。现在是 <%= Date.today.year %> 年；你可以在网上找到这些人。（LinkedIn、Facebook、Twitter 和你的（非图数据库）社交网络都是很好的资源。）

Anyhow. Engineers are routinely offered a suite of benefits. It is worth worrying, in the United States, about health insurance (traditionally, you get it and your employer foots most or all of the costs) and your retirement program, which is some variant of “we will match contributions to your 401k up to X% of salary.” The value of that is easy to calculate: X% of salary. (It is free money, so always max out your IRA up to the employer match. Put it in index funds and forget about it for 40 years.) 不管怎样。工程师们通常都会被提供一系列福利。在美国，值得担心的是医疗保险（传统上，你获得保险，而你的雇主承担大部分或全部费用）以及你的退休计划，该计划是“我们将匹配你 401k 的贡献，最高可达工资的 X%。”这个价值很容易计算：工资的 X%。（这是免费的钱，所以一定要将你的 IRA 贡献到雇主的匹配额度。把它投入指数基金，然后忘掉它 40 年。）

There are other benefits like “free soda”, “catered lunches”, “free programming books”, etc. These are social signals more than anything else. When I say that I’m going to buy you soda, that says a specific thing about how I run my workplace, who I expect to work for me, and how I expect to treat them. (It says “I like to move the behavior of unsophisticated young engineers by making this job seem fun by buying 20 cent cans of soda, saving myself tens of thousands in compensation while simultaneously encouraging them to ruin their health.” And I like soda.) Read social signals and react appropriately — someone who signals that, e.g., employee education is worth paying money for might very well be a great company to work for — but don’t give up huge amounts of compensation in return for perks that you could trivially buy. 还有其他好处，比如“免费汽水”、“提供午餐”、“免费编程书籍”等等。这些更多的是社会信号。当我说我将给你买汽水时，这具体地表明了我如何管理我的工作场所，我期望为谁工作，以及我期望如何对待他们。（这表明“我喜欢通过购买 20 美分的汽水来让那些不成熟的年轻工程师的行为变得有趣，同时节省我数万补偿金，同时鼓励他们损害健康。”而且我喜欢汽水。）解读社会信号并做出适当反应——某个人传递出例如员工教育值得花钱的信息，可能是一个非常棒的公司——但是不要为了那些你可以轻易买到的福利而放弃巨额的补偿。

How do I become better at negotiation? This could be a post in itself. Short version: 我如何才能更好地进行谈判？这本身可以是一篇文章。简而言之：

1. Remember you’re selling the solution to a business need (raise revenue or decrease costs) rather than programming skill or your beautiful face. 记住你是在销售解决商业需求（增加收入或降低成本）的方案，而不是编程技能或你漂亮的面孔。
2. Negotiate aggressively with appropriate confidence, like the ethical professional you are. It is what your counterparty is probably doing. You’re aiming for a mutual beneficial offer, not for saying Yes every time they say something. 以适当的自信积极谈判，就像你是一个有道德的专业人士一样。这是你的对手可能正在做的事情。你追求的是互利的提议，而不是他们说什么就同意什么。
3. “What is your previous salary?” is employer-speak for “Please give me reasons to pay you less money.” Answer appropriately. “你之前的工资是多少？”是雇主用来表达“请给我理由让我付你更少的钱”的行话。要适当回答。
4. Always have a counteroffer. Be comfortable counteroffering around axes you care about other than money. If they can’t go higher on salary then talk about vacation instead. 总是要准备一个反报价。要在金钱之外你关心的其他方面感到舒适地进行反报价。如果他们在工资上不能提高，那就谈谈假期。
5. The only time to ever discuss salary is after you have reached agreement in principle that they will hire you if you can strike a mutually beneficial deal. This is late in the process after they have invested a lot of time and money in you, specifically, not at the interview. Remember that there are large costs associated with them saying “No, we can’t make that work” and, appropriately, they will probably not scuttle the deal over comparatively small issues which matter quite a bit to you, like e.g. taking their offer and countering for that plus a few thousand bucks then sticking to it. 讨论工资的唯一时机是在你原则上已经达成协议，他们如果与你达成互利协议就会雇佣你。这是在过程后期，在他们已经在你身上投入了大量时间和金钱之后，而不是在面试时。要记住，当他们对“不，这行不通”时，会涉及巨大的成本，并且，相应地，他们不太可能因为对你来说很重要的小问题（比如接受他们的报价，然后反报价加上几千块钱，然后坚持这个报价）而破坏协议。
6. Read a book. Many have been written about negotiation. I like Getting To Yes. It is a little disconcerting that negotiation skills are worth thousands of dollars per year for your entire career but engineers think that directed effort to study them is crazy when that could be applied to trivialities about a technology that briefly caught their fancy.

读一本书。关于谈判的书已经写了很多。我喜欢《达成共识》。令人有点不安的是，谈判技巧在整个职业生涯中每年都值数千美元，但工程师们却认为将精力用于研究这些技巧是疯狂的，而那些精力本可以用于研究那些短暂吸引他们兴趣的技术琐事。

How to value an equity grant:

如何评估股权授予的价值：

Roll d100. (Not the right kind of geek? Sorry. rand(100) then.) 掷一个 d100。 （不是那种类型的极客？抱歉。rand(100)然后。）

0~70: Your equity grant is worth nothing. 0~70: 你的股权授予一文不值。

71~94: Your equity grant is worth a lump sum of money which makes you about as much money as you gave up working for the startup, instead of working for a megacorp at a higher salary with better benefits. 71~94: 你的股权授予相当于一笔巨款，这笔钱让你获得的价值几乎等同于你放弃为创业公司工作而选择为一家大公司工作所放弃的高薪和更好的福利。

95~99: Your equity grant is a lifechanging amount of money. You won’t feel rich — you’re not the richest person you know, because many of the people you spent the last several years with are now richer than you by definition — but your family will never again give you grief for not having gone into $FAVORED_FIELD like a proper $YOUR_INGROUP. 95~99: 你的股权授予是一笔足以改变人生的巨款。你不会感到富有——你不是你所知的最富有的人，因为许多与你共度数年的人现在按定义比你更富有——但你的家人将再也不会因为你没有像其他圈内人那样进入$FAVORED_FIELD 而责备你。

100: You worked at the next Google, and are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Congratulations. 100: 你在下一家谷歌工作，已经富得连贪婪都无法想象。恭喜你。

Perceptive readers will note that 100 does not actually show up on a d100 or rand(100). 敏锐的读者会注意到，100 实际上并不会出现在 d100 或 rand(100)上。

Why are you so negative about equity grants? 你为什么对股权激励这么消极？

Because you radically overestimate the likelihood that your startup will succeed and radically overestimate the portion of the pie that will be allocated to you if the startup succeeds. Read about dilution and liquidation preferences on Hacker News or Venture Hacks, then remember that there are people who know more about negotiating deals than you know about programming and imagine what you could do to a program if there were several hundred million on the line. 因为你极度高估了你的创业公司成功的可能性，并且极度高估了如果公司成功的话将分配给你的那部分利益。去 Hacker News 或 Venture Hacks 上阅读一下关于稀释和清算优先权的文章，然后记住，有人的谈判经验比你懂编程还要丰富。想象一下，如果涉及数亿资金，你会如何对待一个程序。

Are startups great for your career as a fresh graduate? 初创公司对刚毕业生的职业生涯有帮助吗？

The high-percentage outcome is you work really hard for the next couple of years, fail ingloriously, and then be jobless and looking to get into another startup. If you really wanted to get into a startup two years out of school, you could also just go work at a megacorp for the next two years, earn a bit of money, then take your warchest, domain knowledge, and contacts and found one. 高比例的结果是，你接下来几年会非常努力地工作，但最终却惨败，然后失业并试图加入另一家创业公司。如果你真的想在毕业后两年进入创业公司，你也可以先去一家大公司工作两年，赚一点钱，然后带着你的资金储备、领域知识和人脉创办一家。

Working at a startup, you tend to meet people doing startups. Most of them will not be able to hire you in two years. Working at a large corporation, you tend to meet other people in large corporations in your area. Many of them either will be able to hire you or will have the ear of someone able to hire you in two years. 在创业公司工作，你往往会遇到其他正在创业的人。他们中的大多数在两年内可能无法雇佣你。在大公司工作，你往往会遇到你所在地区其他大公司的人。他们中的许多人要么能够雇佣你，要么能接触到两年后能够雇佣你的人。

So would you recommend working at a startup? Working in a startup is a career path but, more than that, it is a lifestyle choice. This is similar to working in investment banking or academia. Those are three very different lifestyles. Many people will attempt to sell you those lifestyles as being in your interests, for their own reasons. If you genuinely would enjoy that lifestyle, go nuts. If you only enjoy certain bits of it, remember that many things are available a la carte if you really want them. For example, if you want to work on cutting-edge technology but also want to see your kids at 5:30 PM, you can work on cutting-edge technology at many, many, many megacorps. 那么你会推荐去创业公司工作吗？在创业公司工作是一条职业道路，但更重要的是，它是一种生活方式的选择。这类似于在投资银行或学术界工作。那三种生活方式非常不同。很多人会试图以自己的理由将那些生活方式推销给你，认为它们符合你的利益。如果你确实喜欢那种生活方式，那就尽情享受吧。如果你只喜欢其中的一部分，请记住，如果你真的想要，很多东西都是可以按需选择的。例如，如果你想在尖端技术领域工作，但又想晚上 5:30 见到孩子，你可以在很多、很多、很多的大公司从事尖端技术工作。

(Yeah, really. If it creates value for them, heck yes, they’ll invest in it. They’ll also invest in a lot of CRUD apps, but then again, so do startups — they just market making CRUD apps better than most megacorps do. The first hour of the Social Network is about making a CRUD app seem like sexy, the second is a Lifetime drama about a divorce improbably involving two heterosexual men.) （是的，真的。如果它能为他们创造价值，他们当然会投资。他们也会投资很多 CRUD 应用，但创业公司也是这样——它们只是比大多数大公司更擅长营销 CRUD 应用。社交网络的第一小时是关于如何让一个 CRUD 应用看起来很酷，第二小时则是一部关于离婚的 Lifetime 剧情，其中涉及两个异性恋男性，这很不寻常。）

Your most important professional skill is communication: Remember engineers are not hired to create programs and how they are hired to create business value? The dominant quality which gets you jobs is the ability to give people the perception that you will create value. This is not necessarily coextensive with ability to create value. 你最重要的职业技能是沟通：请记住工程师不是被雇佣来编写程序的，而是被雇佣来创造商业价值的。让你获得工作的关键品质是能够让人们认为你会创造价值。这并不一定等同于实际创造价值的能力。

Some of the best programmers I know are pathologically incapable of carrying on a conversation. People disproportionately a) wouldn’t want to work with them or b) will underestimate their value-creation ability because they gain insight into that ability through conversation and the person just doesn’t implement that protocol. Conversely, people routinely assume that I am among the best programmers they know entirely because a) there exists observable evidence that I can program and b) I write and speak really, really well. 我所知道的最好的程序员中，有些人病理性地无法进行对话。人们往往不会) 不想与他们共事，或者) 因为他们通过对话了解其创造价值的能力，而那个人根本不实施那种协议，从而低估他们的价值创造能力。相反，人们通常会认为我是他们所知道的最好的程序员之一，完全是因为) 我有可观察的证据表明我能编程，以及) 我写作和演讲真的很、真的很棒。

(Once upon a time I would have described myself as “Slightly below average” in programming skill. I have since learned that I had a radically skewed impression of the skill distribution, that programming skill is not what people actually optimize for, and that modesty is against my interests. These days if you ask me how good of a programmer I am I will start telling you stories about how I have programmed systems which helped millions of kids learn to read or which provably made companies millions. The question of where I am on the bell curve matters to no one, so why bother worrying about it?) （曾经我会自认为编程技能“略低于平均水平”。后来我意识到我对技能分布的印象严重扭曲，编程技能并非人们真正追求的目标，而谦虚对我并无益处。如今如果你问我编程水平如何，我会开始讲述我如何编写帮助数百万孩子学习阅读的系统，或是如何让公司证明盈利百万的系统。在正态分布曲线上我的位置对谁都不重要，又何必担心它呢？）

Communication is a skill. Practice it: you will get better. One key sub-skill is being able to quickly, concisely, and confidently explain how you create value to someone who is not an expert in your field and who does not have a priori reasons to love you. If when you attempt to do this technical buzzwords keep coming up (“Reduced 99th percentile query times by 200 ms by optimizing indexes on…”), take them out and try again. You should be able to explain what you do to a bright 8 year old, the CFO of your company, or a programmer in a different specialty, at whatever the appropriate level of abstraction is. 沟通是一项技能。练习它：你会变得更好。一个关键的子技能是能够快速、简洁、自信地向非本领域专家且没有先入为主理由喜欢你的人解释你如何创造价值。如果你尝试这样做时，技术术语不断出现（“通过优化索引将 99 分位查询时间减少 200 毫秒…”），那就把它们去掉再试。你应该能够向一个聪明的 8 岁孩子、你公司的首席财务官或不同专长的程序员解释你在做什么，无论适当的抽象程度是什么。

You will often be called to do Enterprise Sales and other stuff you got into engineering to avoid: Enterprise Sales is going into a corporation and trying to convince them to spend six or seven figures on buying a system which will either improve their revenue or reduce costs. Every job interview you will ever have is Enterprise Sales. Politics, relationships, and communication skills matter a heck of a lot, technical reality not quite so much. 你经常会被要求做企业销售和其他你进入工程领域想避免的事情：企业销售是进入一家公司，试图说服他们花费六位或七位数购买一个系统，该系统将要么提高他们的收入，要么降低成本。你将拥有的每一场工作面试都是企业销售。政治、人际关系和沟通能力非常重要，技术现实则没那么重要。

When you have meetings with coworkers and are attempting to convince them to implement your suggestions, you will also be doing Enterprise Sales. If getting stuff done is your job description, then convincing people to get stuff done is a core job skill for you. Spend appropriate effort on getting good at it. This means being able to communicate effectively in memos, emails, conversations, meetings, and PowerPoint (when appropriate). It means understanding how to make a business case for a technological initiative. It means knowing that sometimes you will make technological sacrifices in pursuit of business objectives and that this is the right call. 当你与同事开会并试图说服他们实施你的建议时，你也在做企业销售。如果完成工作是你的工作职责，那么说服他人完成工作就是你的核心工作技能。要投入适当的努力去精通它。这意味着在备忘录、电子邮件、对话、会议以及适当使用 PPT 时能够有效沟通。这意味着要懂得如何为一个技术倡议做商业论证。这意味着要明白有时为了实现商业目标，你需要做出技术上的妥协，而这是正确的选择。

Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait: Many engineers have self-confidence issues (hello, self). Many also come from upbringings where modesty with regards to one’s accomplishments is culturally celebrated. American businesses largely do not value modesty about one’s accomplishments. The right tone to aim for in interviews, interactions with other people, and life is closer to “restrained, confident professionalism.” 谦虚不是能提升职业生涯的性格特质：许多工程师有自信心问题（嗨，自己）。许多人还来自重视成就谦虚的文化背景的成长环境。美国企业基本上不重视成就谦虚。在面试、与人互动以及生活中，应该追求的语气更接近“克制、自信的专业性”。

If you are part of a team effort and the team effort succeeds, the right note to hit is not “I owe it all to my team” unless your position is such that everyone will understand you are lying to be modest. Try for “It was a privilege to assist my team by leading their efforts with regards to $YOUR_SPECIALTY.” Say it in a mirror a thousand times until you can say it with a straight face. You might feel like you’re overstating your accomplishments. Screw that. Someone who claims to Lead Efforts To Optimize Production while having the title Sandwich Artist is overstating their accomplishments. You are an engineer. You work magic which makes people’s lives better. If you were in charge of the database specifically on an important project involving people then heck yes you lead the database effort which was crucial for the success of the project. This is how the game is played. If you feel poorly about it, you’re like a batter who feels poorly about stealing bases in baseball: you’re not morally superior, you’re just playing poorly 如果你是团队协作的一部分，而团队协作取得了成功，正确的说法不是“这一切都归功于我的团队”，除非你的职位是那种每个人都会明白你在谦虚时说谎的情况。试着说：“很荣幸通过在$YOUR_SPECIALTY 领域领导他们的工作来协助我的团队。”对着镜子说上千次，直到你能坦然地说出来。你可能会觉得你在夸大自己的成就。去他的吧。一个自称领导生产优化工作，而职位却是三明治艺术家的人就是在夸大自己的成就。你是工程师。你施展魔法，让人们的生活变得更好。如果你在一个涉及人员的重要项目中负责数据库，那么是的，你领导了数据库工作，这对项目的成功至关重要。这就是游戏规则。如果你对此感到不满，就像棒球比赛中感到懊悔的盗垒手：你并不道德上更高尚，你只是玩得不好。

All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms: People are people. Social grooming is a really important skill. People will often back suggestions by friends because they are friends, even when other suggestions might actually be better. People will often be favoritably disposed to people they have broken bread with. (There is a business book called Never Eat Alone. It might be worth reading, but that title is whatever the antonym of deceptive advertising is.) People routinely favor people who they think are like them over people they think are not like them. (This can be good, neutral, or invidious. Accepting that it happens is the first step to profitably exploiting it.) 所有商业决策最终都是由少数几个与黑猩猩关系密切的多细胞生物做出的，而不是由规则或算法决定的：人就是人。社交梳理是一项非常重要的技能。人们常常会支持朋友提出的建议，因为他们是朋友，即使其他建议实际上可能更好。人们常常会对与他们一起吃饭过的人有好感。（有一本商业书叫《永远不要独自用餐》。这本书或许值得一读，但那个书名是什么欺骗性广告的反义词来着。）人们通常会偏袒那些他们认为和自己相似的人，而不是那些他们认为和自己不相似的人。（这可能是好的、中性的，也可能是恶意的。接受这种情况是盈利利用它的第一步。）

Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc. Your business suit will probably cost about as much as a computer monitor. You only need it once in a blue moon, but when you need it you’ll be really, really, really glad that you have it. Take my word for it, if I wear everyday casual when I visit e.g. City Hall I get treated like a hapless awkward twenty-something, if I wear the suit I get treated like the CEO of a multinational company. I’m actually the awkward twenty-something CEO of a multinational company, but I get to pick which side to emphasize when I want favorable treatment from a bureaucrat. 实际的形象管理至少也相当重要，因为人们很容易通过诸如着装得体、保持专业形象、用自信的语气说话等手段被轻易影响。你的西装可能和一台电脑显示器差不多贵。你只有在万里挑一的时候才需要它，但当你需要的时候，你会真心实意地庆幸自己拥有它。听我的，如果我在访问市政厅时穿日常休闲装，会被当作一个笨拙的二十多岁年轻人，如果我穿西装，就会被当作跨国公司的 CEO。我实际上是一个笨拙的二十多岁跨国公司 CEO，但我可以选择强调哪一面，以便从官僚那里获得有利待遇。

(People familiar with my business might object to me describing it as a multinational company because it is not what most people think of when “multinational company” gets used in conversation. Sorry — it is a simple conversational hack. If you think people are pissed off at being manipulated when they find that out, well, some people passionately hate business suits, too. That doesn’t mean business suits are valueless. Be appropriate to the circumstances. Technically true answers are the best kind of answers when the alternative is Immigration deporting you, by the way.) （熟悉我生意的人可能会反对我将其描述为跨国公司，因为当“跨国公司”这个词在对话中使用时，这并不是大多数人的印象。抱歉——这只是个简单的对话技巧。如果你认为当人们发现这一点时会因为被操纵而生气，那么，有些人也极其讨厌商务西装。但这并不意味着商务西装没有价值。要适合场合。顺便说一句，当另一种选择是移民局遣返你时，技术上正确的答案是最好的答案。）

At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career. Either talk to older people or trust the social scientists who have: family, faith, hobbies, etc etc generally swamp career achievements and money in terms of things which actually produce happiness. Optimize appropriately. Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work. 归根结底，你的生活幸福不会完全由你的职业决定。你可以和年长者交谈，或者相信那些社会科学家：家庭、信仰、爱好等等，通常在带来幸福方面，比职业成就和金钱更为重要。适当优化。你的职业很重要，现在它可能看起来是你生活中最重要的事情，但很可能你不会永远这么认为。为生活而工作，而不是为工作而生活。