The sense of security that young people want cannot be given by Dachang internships.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Tamen” (ID: DT-Tamen), author: Tamen.
Author | Zhang Chenyang
Edit | Wang Chaojing
Illustration| ins @onlyjoke
Title map| ins @simonlandrein
The middle-aged crisis is spreading among interns.
Nowadays, internship is no longer a resume drill before applying for a job. More and more students who have just entered colleges and universities start looking for internships, worrying about the “bright future”. While they are doing internships conscientiously, they searched on the website with fear:
“Where are the people over 35 in the workplace?”
In the past, people’s midlife crisis came only at the age of 30. This anxiety has occurred ahead of time for young people who have just graduated or even graduated from 25 years old.
The whole society is constantly turning, changing, and turbulent, like a high-speed machine.
The interns from Dachang in the gap between school and workplace, like the nerve endings of this machine, have keenly felt the pressure and anxiety before becoming the main driving force.
Graduating from prestigious schools and OFFER from big factories can hardly fill their inner crisis: “Is this line a youth fan?” “Will I be eliminated when I am middle-aged?” Even though they faintly know that “stability” may be Has become the biggest luxury item of this era.
Therefore, we can frequently see in recent years, “Young people who have just come to the Internet giant with full confidence will go home to take public exams after three years of work” and “985 graduate students are thinking about how to enter before they graduate. ‘Within the system'”.
We interviewed three young people who had interned in Dachang. They experienced this fast-paced “factory operation mode” intensely and briefly. In the process, they had similar anxiety and confusion, but in the end , They chose three different paths.
@二氧移访
#女#20 years old
After 00, he has become a “utilitarian pragmatist”
“No more trying to find a sense of accomplishment from work.”
this.
A big factory is like a closely-operated machine. Everyone is a screw. The fault tolerance rate is very low, but your substitutability is very strong.
To be honest, I am holding a very utilitarian mentality to go to a large factory for internship and to complete my work-the internship at a large factory is just to add luster to my resume.
I am a junior this year, and it sounds like I should still be the age of “dreaming.”
But now I have very clearly felt that the “idealism” in myself is passing.
I never thought that house and household registration were very important, until the first time I rented a house, a very small room, about ten square meters, the rent was more than two thousand.
Because of the urgent rent, many things were not considered at the time. The people who shared with me were all boys. The sanitary condition of the public space was particularly poor, and the shower head was always broken.
Once I got home from get off work very late, and when I entered the room, someone knocked on the door very hard.
I was so frightened that I stood still and didn’t dare to open the door. I took the courage to slowly move over to open the door, only to realize that it was actually just a boy who wanted to hand over the card.
At that time, I started to think, if I had my own house, it would be great.
It was also at that time, I realized that “dream” is really a very light thing.
I want to be rooted in a certain city by my own ability, I want to live in a more comfortable house; I want a car, I want to raise a cat leisurely.
But all of these premises are, first of all, you have to be rich.
Because of the internship at a large factory, I faced certain realities in advance:
I kept working overtime or reading papers in the small room with a lamp on;
I saw young lady secretly wiping her tears in the company toilet;
Many excellent people around me are constantly changing, which makes me stressed and anxious all the time;
Because of the internship at a large factory, I have gained salary, experience and more channels. Compared with many of my peers, I have enjoyed the sweetness of financial independence ahead of time.
The combination of these realities and sweetness makes me gradually become “a practical utilitarian”.
I feel that the idealism in my body is gradually dying out, and I feel sad about this, but in the grip of the big environment, it seems that nothing can be restored.
Some time ago, there was a well-known “FIRe Movement” abroad: economic independence,early retirement. If you save up to 25 times the cost of living in a year, you can rely on 4% of your financial income to achieve your retirement.
This is my goal.
Although I feel that I have lost something, I still keep going.
@胖嫣啊
#女#24 years old
For 985 graduate students, is it shameful to want to live a mediocre life?
To some extent, the interns are the last link in the Internet company system.
Compared with a full-time job, we have less workload, lower KPI requirements, and most importantly, because of the short cycle and the relative ease of competition, almost everyone inevitably has: “Internship anyway In three months, as long as there is no “particularly bad”, the relaxed mentality of “patting butt and leaving” after three months.
But my anxiety never stops there.
I am a child from a small town. I have very good grades. After graduating from my undergraduate degree, I got a place for undergraduate study in the school. Now I am internship at ByteDance.
When I was in college, my initial grades were only medium.
But I found that as long as I can stay up all night writing questions and endorsements a week before the exam, my final exam results will not be bad.
You can go out to play as usual, or you can lie in the dormitory all day and watch drama.
But when I left the campus, the test-oriented education taught me, in the workplace where I was an intern at a big factory, it seemed to be out of order.
In ByteDance, everyone is like a high-speed machine, leading several projects at the same time.
I thought, I’m just here, and I’m young, so I might have some buffer time.
But I, who is already in the second year of graduate school, are actually older than some of the regular jobs who came to work here after graduating from undergraduate.
I am like a stupid bird. Before I had time to learn how to fly, I plunged into the jungle of raptor competition.
They are young, smart, experienced, and they can’t use up their energy.
As for me, 985 colleges and universities, postgraduate degrees, national scholarships…everything that I was proud of has become unassuming in the face of the dense code and the overwhelming “to-do”.
I don’t know many things, but looking at other busy people in front of me, I don’t dare to take the initiative to ask;r, then reject
Dachang’s work is like a “siege”: I want to have a challenge when I am stable, and I want to be flat when I challenge every day.
To this day, I still feel that the period of internship at the goose factory was a precious and fulfilling time.
But if I choose again, I will still give up working at a big factory and choose to go to a lower-paid but more stable central enterprise.
When I was in the second year of graduate school, the major I was studying was in line with the Internet industry. I recruited for internship through school and joined the goose factory.
At that time, although I was an intern, because it was a school recruitment, I came into contact with the core tasks: projects, products, operations, and overall planning. Our department made a lot of explosions, and the sense of achievement was high.
At the time, everyone had at least two projects in their hands, and they switched between different projects every day.
The busiest time is from work to get off work, with WeChat hanging on the computer, but I am always dealing with work, connecting and communicating with various departments, and friends looking for you, there is no time to reply.
One Saturday night, I spent my birthday with a good friend in Gongti, and everyone else was drinking at the deck. I was called by Leader WeChat, holding my laptop directly, and squatting in the corner of the storage room at 13 Processing work.
During that time, I had become accustomed to being on standby 24 hours a day, coming out at any time to reply to work messages, taking a computer with me when I went out, and every night I got home so tired that I didn’t want to do anything, so I fell into bed and went to sleep.
I worked in Dachang for a year and a half, and I have almost decided to stay there. When I was about to graduate, I got another offer from a central enterprise.
Choose between dream and reality, challenge and stability.
I was very entangled, and even held a family meeting to discuss the experience of many people who came over.
Two days later, I chose the latter.
In fact, considering stability, salary, work pressure, and platform development, both have their own advantages, but what made me make the final decision is a sense of crisis that is always hidden in my heart:
It’s good to stay at Tencent. But one day, I am 35 years old, what should I do?
The advantages in Internet companies are very obvious-decent work and salary, broader channels and resources, but once the price of falling behind is equally disastrous-it was sought after last month, and may be eliminated by the market next month .
More importantly, the Internet giants can’t give me a sense of security of being firmly chosen.
I’m less than 30 years old, and I’m already worried about the midlife crisis.
I graduated from graduate school at the age of 26 and recruited to Tencent, but many full-time employees are younger than me, and the same batch of interns are from 1997 to 1998.
In our industry, at the same time, the first-line industry experience, contacts and circles formed in three years of work are completely different from staying in school for three years.
Not to mention staying in the Internet company to do content, young is capital.
When I was in school, I talked about dreams and wanted to make my own products for the first-line public. Now, I just want to make money.
I didn’t give up my dreams. It would be great to be able to make money through my dreams.
But I know that it is an extravagant hope.
Actually, I, who was still standing at the door of my career shortly after graduating, are still not sure which choice is right and better.
Some time ago, I saw a previous colleague post on Moments, and he has a new project to go online. I envy them: rich resources, active atmosphere, and of course, high salary.
From another perspective, the former colleague is still working overtime at the company at one o’clock in the morning, and I am eight to five in the morning, and life is much more comfortable than him.
When I left Tencent, my colleagues at Tencent said that I went to a good place.
When I was in a new company, when my colleagues knew that I had given up Tencent’s offer, they said that Tencent was the best place.
Thinking about it, but just “siege”.
Write at the end
The American writer Brooks experienced a middle-aged mental crisis at the age of 52: talking less with friends, living alone, and being exhausted from work every day. He described his state as “There are many long-lasting friendships, and few people trust me. I am too busy, exhausted, like duckweed, lonely, dejected, and staring.”
Years later, this has become the status quo of many people.
In major Internet companies, clever minds, strong ambitions and strong productivity have been gathered. Here, people who can survive often have things in common, such as rationality, resistance to pressure, good introspection, and strong self-drive. , They work hard and get a decent salary, superior resources and respect from their peers.
But the other part of the storyOne side is often sad.
In the Internet giants of new labor-intensive enterprises, with fast-paced, high-competition, and many changes, what is more uncomfortable than fatigue and pressure is the uneasy feeling of “always full of uncertainty” in life.
The interns who stayed here for a short time felt the strong “factory atmosphere” of this era, and finally made various choices: some people insisted on staying in it, some people struggling to support it, subconsciously already waiting for an opportunity to flee, and some people Actively choose to leave the center of the whirlpool… The only thing in common is that their anxious emotions are almost nowhere to be placed, and the pressure of the environment and the artificial pressure of the same age makes them almost nowhere to escape.
Perhaps, no matter what choice you make, study or work, big factory or state-owned enterprise, in the face of too many unknowns, some things are actually only about choices and cannot be judged “good or bad”.
Talk about it
Nowadays, what are the interns around you like?