Table of Contents
At one in the morning, someone posted in the group chat: “Brothers, I’m getting ready to go back to my hometown and sell skewers.”
Three seconds later, a row of replies appeared below in perfect unison: “Take me with you.”
The status of this sentence in programmer circles is roughly equivalent to the status of the blue screen in Windows circles—its frequency of appearance is directly proportional to how much overtime the person in question has been working recently.
1. Career Change Illustrated Guide: Five Official Tracks
Food and Beverage Track: Selling skewers, opening a café, setting up a stall selling jianbing. The three ultimate careers for programmers, with the entry barrier reading two big words: “Not hard.” The actual barrier is written in the ingredient wholesale market at four in the morning.
Transportation Track: Driving for Didi, delivering food. The shared selling point of both is “flexible hours”—so flexible that you can decide for yourself whether to drive twelve hours today or fourteen hours tomorrow.
Agriculture Track: Going back to your hometown to farm, raise chickens, or lease a fish pond. Our parents struggled to get into the city, and we struggle to get back—the spiral of history can be genuinely funny sometimes.
Government Track: Taking the civil service exam, the public institution exam, becoming a middle school teacher. “The end of the universe is a government post”—it only took a few years for this to go from a joke to a belief.
Pseudo Career Change Track: Switching to product, switching to pre-sales, switching to management. Calling it a career change, but really it’s just switching desks to keep attending meetings—from the person who says “it can’t be done” to the person who says “this requirement isn’t feasible.”
2. Why These Five?
Laying out the illustrated guide flat, the five tracks share one eerie commonality: low barrier, fast feedback, no need to read other people’s code.
What drains people most about writing code was never “difficulty”—it’s “uncertainty.” Requirements change, production crashes, and the line of code you’re modifying might have been left by someone who quit three years ago. Skewers are different: whether the meat is cooked, one bite tells you; how much you sold today, one tally at closing time makes it clear.
What the career change meme is really shouting is: “I want to do something where effort is proportional to results.”
Unfortunately, that’s a filter. Didi drivers’ revenue has to deduct gas money, vehicle depreciation, and platform commissions; skewer vendors’ pre-dawn ingredient sourcing, daytime skewering, and nighttime closing is a three-shift rotation starting at fourteen hours. Mistaking “exhaustion” for “freedom” is the biggest Bug in this illustrated guide.
3. The Reality Beyond a Dark Joke
In Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey (official press release), there’s an interesting detail: although AI tool usage has risen to 84%, 64% of developers still don’t believe AI threatens their jobs. What actually makes people consider changing careers is often not the technology itself, but structural anxieties like overtime, chaotic management, and the “age 35” problem.
In other words, most people who want to sell skewers don’t hate writing code—they hate everything that comes with writing code.
4. So, Take Me With You?
Sure, but distinguish between two kinds of career changes:
- Escape-driven career change: You want to leave because today sucks. On the new track, the suck comes back in a different form.
- Plan-driven career change: You’ve thought clearly about what you want to change—income structure, pace of life, or identity—and then you change it.
The illustrated guide can serve as an emotional outlet, but don’t use it as a basis for decisions. After all, the asset you can truly take with you isn’t those thousand commits on GitHub, but the ability to “break a vague problem into deliverable steps.” That ability is valuable when writing code, and equally valuable at a skewer stall—product selection, standardization, calculating table turnover rates are essentially the same problem.
As for me, I’m not switching for now. Let me finish fixing this Bug first—though it might be like skewers, always missing that final burst of flame.