Value, in a Programmer's Eyes中文EN

A couple of days ago I read Tim Yang's 一个技术从业人员眼中的2014. I agreed with a lot of what he said, and it stirred up an urge to write something of my own...
On the second day of 2015, I finally seem to have some jumbled thoughts I can share with you all. Maybe they aren't systematic enough, maybe they aren't complete — but perhaps they'll resonate with someone.

Let me start with my own story. In 2007 I went to Yahoo as an intern. When I interviewed for that internship, I remember telling the interviewer that I didn't care about the money (the intern stipend), I just wanted to learn.
Later, in 2008, I was about to graduate. The atmosphere at Yahoo and everything else felt so right to me that I signed with Yahoo China without really looking at any other opportunities. The salary at the time was 7,000 RMB a month..
Two months passed without incident. Then suddenly, in the third month, they had to back-pay social insurance or something, and the take-home for the month was barely over 1,000 RMB (maybe I don't remember the exact number, but I do remember it being very little)..
That's when I realized: this won't do, I need to support myself first...... So I decided to change jobs.......
To this day, I no longer tell fresh graduates the line "don't worry about salary when you've just graduated."
This is one aspect of a programmer's "value" that I want to talk about...
In 2011, after three years at Baidu, I had reached technical level T7. There was so much praise, so many compliments offered out of politeness, that I convinced myself my skills had already "reached the summit" — I thought I was incredibly badass, that the company's leveling of me was unfair. I felt I was being evaluated unjustly; I thought the architects in other domains who reviewed me simply didn't understand how good I was. I felt my salary didn't come close to matching my ability.. and so on....
Over those three years I improved a great deal, and made further gains in quite a few new areas. And I came to see just how narrow-minded I had been back then, how obvious my technical gaps were, and how far I stood from the people on the other side of the mountain.
These days I prefer to measure my own shortcomings against other people's strengths and chase after what they do well — rather than dragging others into my own domain to compare, and further blinding myself to my own weaknesses...
This is another aspect of a programmer's "value" — the one a programmer sees in themselves.....

After a while working in the PHP development group, I helped quite a few people fix PHP bugs. One time I resolved a bug reported by someone at ifix very quickly. The person emailed me to express their thanks, and asked for my mailing address because they wanted to send me a gift in appreciation..
It didn't feel quite right, so I asked Rasmus whether it was okay to accept the gift. He said: "We're not politicians. We do open source; we've created enormous value for who knows how many people. Accepting a gift given out of genuine thanks — there's nothing wrong with that."
In the end I received an ifix kit... with a little note on it: "Thanks for your help."

This is yet another aspect of a programmer's "value" that I want to talk about.....
2014 was probably the year I made the biggest contributions. At Weibo, we improved the performance of mobile LAMP by 2.6x, cut response time by more than half, and saved 60% on servers (several million RMB a year).
In the PHP community, after all sorts of attempts spanning last year through this year, we finally got PHP 7. Its performance is many times better than PHP 5.6, and every PHP project can transparently reap a huge speedup. Perhaps the entire community stands to benefit from it.
I also found that many people had come to support me, that I'd gained quite a few "fans," and that I received a lot of respect — some overt, some subtle.
This is the "value" I care about most....

Alright, after all that, let me sum it up:
A programmer's value lies in how much you actually contribute — to your company, to others..
If you truly make contributions of real worth, then you can earn recognition commensurate with that value. A little more, a little less, a little earlier, a little later.
You may feel what you got wasn't what you hoped for, or that you received less than you gave. But it shouldn't be too far off.
And if you only chase the value you receive — chasing every kind of value — while ignoring the value you put out, life gets very hard..

These scattered fragments, shared with you.
2015 — I wish you all the ability to create ever greater value, and to attain the value you're after. Happy New Year.