Very bad.
In my country, even though I have an excellent master degree, 2 years of work experience in decent sized companies, I'm having a hard time finding a new ideal job as a backend engineer.
I want to change my job because this job is 996.There are very few companies that are hiring, and even if they do, it's a 996 job too.
Given that you mention 996, I guess that means you're in China. What are living conditions like currently? How did Evergrande and the emergence of so-called AI affect the job market over there?
Yes, I'm in China. I'm glad I can share this with you.
Overall, living conditions are definitely a bit worse than in previous years. The main signs are that people's incomes have dropped, job opportunities have become fewer, and expectations have worsened. For the IT industry, there are more 996 companies.
The Chinese people are very hard-working, so at the moment this doesn't cause serious social problems. But the uneven distribution of wealth will worsen, and people at the bottom will have a harder time.
Regarding Evergrande, there are a lot of people who can't get their houses because of this, even though they have paid for them. The government has also made some efforts to try its best to have these houses finally delivered. Houses are very expensive, so this is a very hard time for them.
Regarding ai, the ai-related industries in China are developing very rapidly and there are more job opportunities. For example, Xiaomi Group is recruiting deepseek employees with a salary of 10 million RMB per year.
However, due to the uncertainty of ai companies, the high threshold and the large number of unemployed people, it is not easy to find an ai related job.
It makes perfect sense. But my question is that when we switch to a new job, we always learn something new. But most of the jobs are repetitive labor (for programmers too). I mean they are all not very challenging.
How do I go about determining if I can grow better?
Of course these are just my questions and I am open to any ideas you may have.
I'm a software engineer from China, my annual salary is only 5w USD (which is not a very low salary for software engineers in China), but I need to work more than 12h per day (so tired). This post is very useful for me, thanks a lot.
If you want to earn ( correspondingly ) such a high income in China, you can basically only do so by joining a startup or starting your own business.
