The question wasn’t mine. I ran into it on Zhihu: Can a 30-year-old illiterate person switch careers and become a programmer?
For the record, I really am already 30. I’m also not a programmer. As for whether I count as illiterate—standards vary so much that I can’t confidently rule it out.
Then I saw this reply:
Programming may have a low barrier to entry, but starting from illiteracy is still a bit difficult. Better to become a product manager.
— reply to “Can a 30-year-old illiterate person switch careers and become a programmer?”
Wait a second. I have worked as a product manager.
At that point, I started wondering whether I really might be illiterate after all.
Lately my writing has been getting looser and more undisciplined. I’m coming up on the 100th entry, which means the 500-day writing streak is one-fifth done, so now I’ve entered that slightly smug, overly hopeful phase where writing every day starts to feel like proof of character. I can see a random internet meme and immediately spiral into old stories and strange associations.
And honestly, product management doesn’t seem to require any hard educational threshold. If anything, it rewards exactly that kind of optimism—the kind that reaches day 100 of a 500-day writing project and already feels triumphant.
That’s a joke, obviously. But I do think there’s something very particular about the product manager role: whether someone is smart or not almost isn’t the key distinction. The real difference is whether they can treat users like idiots while also treating everyone in the development process—engineers, bosses, even themselves—as idiots too.
That process is excellent mental training.
I actually like big companies where everyone more or less treats everyone else as idiots. It makes things simpler. You propose a requirement, people do their part, and the thing gets shipped on schedule. The real nightmare is the office environment where everyone insists on being clever, everything runs on personal relationships, cliques form everywhere, and eventually politics hardens into open camps.
Then the classic chain reaction begins:
- programmers think product managers come up with idiotic requirements;
- product managers think programmers are idiots who can’t write code that works;
- designers think product managers are idiots who don’t understand interaction;
- product managers think designers are idiots who can’t draw the UI they want;
- QA thinks everyone is an idiot for producing such idiotic bugs;
- after a bug gets kicked back upstream, programmers conclude that this idiotic bug exists only because the product manager had some idiotic idea in the first place, and now the whole project has been dragged into an idiotic situation.
And of course the biggest idiots of all are the bosses who got sold on an idiotic product by an idiotic product manager. They get spun in circles, the thing launches, the metrics are idiotic, and now even they start wondering whether they hired a whole office full of idiots. Especially after they already carried this idiotic product out to fool idiotic investors into putting more chips on the table for the grand idiotic venture.
Since I’ve done product work before, I can accept being called an idiot with good grace. If there weren’t at least one idiot somewhere in a product development pipeline, maybe people wouldn’t need to treat each other like idiots in the first place. But that’s almost impossible.
As long as human beings are involved, there will be idiots.
The non-illiterate people go become programmers. The 30-year-old illiterates, constrained by being idiots themselves, go become product managers.
By now I’m already deep into this piece and still haven’t quite reached what I actually wanted to talk about.
What I really mean is this: I have a strange fondness for this kind of writing—the kind built on comparison by insult, the kind that elevates one thing by trampling another. Take programmers, throw in a jab at product managers, wrap it in clever black humor, and suddenly it feels like someone has captured the essential conflict.
There are plenty of these long-running genres of contrast-and-contempt that never seem to get old. Every so often the same arguments come back around:
- humanities vs. sciences,
- marriage vs. staying single,
- having children vs. not having children.
Any topic that can be split into two opposing camps eventually attracts this style of argument.
And maybe that’s because, without that act of belittling the other side, people often have no direct way to prove that their side is actually better.
A product manager can rave all day about how brilliant, user-friendly, and visionary a product concept is, but if programmers can’t build it, then the concept is basically nothing. On the other hand, a programmer can write beautiful code, but if there’s no design capable of shaping the UI frame by frame into something that actually works for people, then the finished product still turns out to be a mess.
So after all the arguing, what people are really debating is this:
Which smells worse: a fart or a pile of shit?
And honestly, outside of this whole insult-driven comparison game, I don’t know what better method there is for people who only see the world in black and white.
It reminds me of a comment I once saw on a forum. Someone tagged the moderators to complain about it like an elementary school student tattling to the teacher, calling it a “personal attack.” Whether it counts as one, you can decide.
Someone asked: Between Baidu Input Method and Sogou Input Method, which would you choose?
Personal attack: Why do I have to pick the prettier one out of two piles of shit to eat?
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