When I first came to Beijing for an internship while still in college, I worked at a company in the mobile airtime business. There were about six or seven people in my team. Our daily work amounted to tweaking SQL, checking business logic, helping customer service and operations, and handling miscellaneous business requests.
There was a fairly pretty woman on the team, a gentle sort. I heard she even went to Zizhuyuan Park to take photos in Hanfu. She was something of the team’s favorite and handled backend logic for the company’s WeChat official account. Her workload wasn’t particularly heavy. With morning meetings every day, daily reports before leaving, and weekly reports as well, we more or less knew what everyone was working on. What I remember most clearly is that she always wrote the same thing in her daily report: “Routine support.” The team lead even reminded her that this sounded a little thin and wasn’t much to report upward.
Back then, I understood nothing and had no idea how good the team’s engineers actually were. I just remember everyone looking busy, discussing very specific, very small things. Only after working in Beijing for all these years, experiencing different companies and meeting different people, did I gradually realize something:
Beijing is full of country bumpkins.
By country bumpkins, I don’t mean people from elsewhere, much less people from rural areas. I mean people who have lived in Beijing for over a decade, sit in office towers, and earn Beijing salaries, yet have never ventured beyond their own tiny patch of ground. They might be programmers, technical managers, product managers, or company owners. Beijing has the best universities, the most advanced technology, and the richest business resources. But what does any of that have to do with them? They simply happen to live in Beijing.
When I was job hunting a few years ago, I interviewed at quite a few companies in Beijing, especially smaller ones. My impression was that, although these companies were based in Beijing, their business, management, and the things their employees cared about weren’t much different from ordinary companies in smaller cities.
Some worked in traditional industries, maintaining systems that had been around for who knows how many years. Their programmers spent each day writing APIs, changing SQL, and building admin panels. Some did outsourcing. Employees didn’t care where projects came from or what clients needed; they simply did whatever management assigned. Others had businesses with little inherent complexity, yet had established elaborate management systems: morning meetings, daily reports, weekly reports, approvals, and performance reviews, all mandatory.
I’m not saying nobody should do this work. These activities make up everyday life at the vast majority of ordinary companies. It’s just that I used to assume that Beijing, as a first-tier city, would have a higher overall standard of companies and talent, or at least offer more opportunities to encounter advanced technologies and business models. Later, I discovered these were entirely separate things.
Building an admin panel in Beijing doesn’t become more technically sophisticated than building the same panel in Shijiazhuang just because the office address is different. Maintaining an old business system in Zhongguancun doesn’t suddenly give you an understanding of cutting-edge technology because Tsinghua and Peking University happen to be nearby.
Yet these people often have a peculiar confidence. A programmer with ten years of experience thinks they’ve seen every technology. A technical manager who has supervised a few people thinks they’ve mastered all of software engineering. A company owner who gets by on a few regular clients thinks they understand the entire business world.
Some even develop an inexplicable sense of superiority simply because they work in Beijing or in a well-known business district.
Their business experience may be no broader than that of a small county town, but being in Beijing makes them think they have the perspective of a first-tier city.
During my job searches in 2025 and earlier years, I met some interesting interviewers.
Once, I interviewed at a small company planning to enter the blockchain business. The first interviewer clearly didn’t understand blockchain very well. For the second round, an older-looking interviewer took over. He held a notebook and took notes as he asked questions. The whole process felt rather traditional.
He asked something about broadcasting messages in a blockchain. I no longer remember the exact wording. I guessed he meant something like the Gossip protocol, so I explained node discovery, network connections, message propagation, and how nodes synchronize data, using Ethereum nodes as an example.
The problem was that he seemed to have no idea what I was saying. And I had no idea what he was really asking. I explained the entire operating mechanism of an Ethereum node, but he kept repeating that question about message broadcasting. I couldn’t even tell whether he meant block propagation, transaction propagation, node discovery, or simply how messages travel through a network. We were on completely different wavelengths. He seemed to be chasing a single isolated piece of knowledge.
Another time, also a few years ago, I interviewed for a Go developer position at a gaming company. There were many candidates that day, constantly coming and going from different meeting rooms. The hiring process looked highly standardized.
The interviewer said he’d previously worked on blockchain development and mentioned something like x+y=k. I brought up market makers, and he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Of course, I didn’t have a particularly thorough understanding of market makers myself at the time. But throughout the interview, I had a strong feeling that the questions I cared about had already diverged from what they wanted to test.
I had started caring about how blockchain infrastructure is designed, how trading systems operate, how projects establish business models, and how technology serves the product as a whole. These companies were still screening candidates using the traditional software engineer hiring model, focusing on scattered technical facts. This isn’t to say specific technical knowledge doesn’t matter. But it’s ridiculous to think that testing a few language features, framework internals, and algorithm problems lets you judge an engineer’s entire ability.
Especially when some interviewers may not even have a complete understanding of the system themselves, yet automatically acquire the power to judge others simply by sitting in the interviewer’s chair.
I increasingly feel that some technical workers, even after many years on the job, never develop a real understanding of their industry. They may know a particular company system extremely well, understand every business detail, and even solve complicated technical problems. But outside their familiar business environment, they have no idea how the industry actually works.
What they have may be experience in a particular role, rather than an understanding of the technology industry as a whole.
There was another interview a few years ago, somewhere near Wangjing or Guomao, though I can’t remember exactly. The company was planning a blockchain project and apparently originally intended to hire a developer for only 7,000 or 8,000 yuan a month. After talking with me, they reluctantly raised the offer to 9,000 or 10,000.
By then, I wouldn’t even consider that salary range, but I kept chatting with the person in charge for a while.
He left quite an impression. He looked like someone with a sales background in a traditional industry, a little overweight and fond of boasting, though even his boasts weren’t very coherent. He clearly knew little about blockchain technology, yet kept telling me about the company’s future plans.
Projects worth five million or ten million, funding rounds of ten million or twenty million: every other sentence involved a large number. The problem was that he didn’t sound as though he quite believed it himself. I remember wondering how a company that struggled so much to pay a developer 10,000 yuan had already started planning to raise tens of millions.
Still, they could indeed rent an office in Beijing’s Guomao district. It seemed to be some sort of property group. From his face and the moment he opened his mouth, you could tell the man in charge had little education or ability. He seemed like a salesman, dressed in a light blue suit and tie.
This brought to mind an interesting phenomenon: some so-called technology companies in Beijing may essentially be sales companies from traditional industries. Whether the owner used to work in real estate, enterprise services, or some other business, hearing that a technology concept is hot is enough to register a company, assemble a team, and launch a project.
When blockchain is hot, they do blockchain. When the metaverse is hot, they do the metaverse. Now that AI is hot, they can do AI. They don’t need to understand what the technology actually is or what problems it solves. They can hire programmers, find outsourcing teams, make slide decks, and pitch investors. For these people, technology itself may even be the least important part. Their previous business experience tells them that, as long as they can find clients, win projects, and collect the money, everything else can be left to someone else.
That logic may work in traditional industries, but it’s clearly a different thing from technology entrepreneurship in any meaningful sense.
Some people have simply transplanted the old sales playbook into Beijing’s technology office towers and started calling themselves tech entrepreneurs.
Interestingly, the Web3 companies I’ve encountered in recent years have become smaller and smaller, including startups with just a handful of people. These teams have no big-company pedigree or established business model. Many have worked on projects for ages without finding even basic product-market fit. Yet it was in these environments that I began to truly understand how a company operates.
At more established companies, I only needed to care about my own technical module. What the product should do was the product manager’s concern. Where users came from was operations’ concern. The business model was the boss’s concern. Whether the company actually made money seemed to have little to do with an ordinary programmer. Even at a huge company, where thousands of engineers maintain a complex system together, each person’s actual responsibilities may be very limited.
A programmer can spend five years at a big tech company, work on a product with tens of millions of daily active users, and deal with high concurrency, high availability, and distributed systems, yet never really encounter user growth, market competition, product pricing, or business revenue. They’ve participated in a large project, but may understand only a tiny part of it.
In a startup with just a few people, by contrast, responsibilities can’t be divided so neatly. Why aren’t users coming? Why do they register but never use the product? Why isn’t trading volume growing? How are competitors acquiring users? How much does promotion cost? What commission should distribution partners receive? Can revenue cover costs? How much longer can the company survive? These stop being questions for the boss or a particular department and become realities the whole team faces every day.
Technical solutions also stop being purely technical. Even if a feature can be built, you have to consider how long it will take, how many users it might attract, whether it can generate revenue, and even whether it’s worth further investment.
I have indeed worked on projects that started from zero and never made it to one. Their business results were poor, but they at least exposed me to many questions beyond technology. I began to understand why a technically excellent product can attract no interest, why some apparently unsophisticated businesses make a lot of money, and why user growth, competition, funding, and team management can matter more than the code itself.
So I now feel that small companies aren’t necessarily worse than large ones, at least in terms of what an individual learns. A bigger company doesn’t automatically expose you to a bigger world. At a mature large company, you can become a highly specialized cog with a high salary and an impressive résumé, while never understanding much about how the company actually works. In a small startup team, you might earn little and the project might fail at any moment, yet you have to confront the full range of business problems directly. Of course, understanding those problems doesn’t mean I can solve them, much less that a failed startup is something to brag about.
The point is simply that a company’s size has no necessary relationship to the world a person gets to experience. Many people think joining a big company means entering a bigger world. In reality, they’ve just entered a bigger machine to take care of an even smaller component.
Another increasingly strong impression I have is that, although Beijing is a first-tier city with excellent infrastructure and abundant resources, its business environment may not be as advanced as people imagine.
Many Beijing companies work on government projects or serve the procurement needs of state-owned enterprises, public institutions, and traditional industries. One feature of these companies is that their revenue depends heavily on winning projects, rather than necessarily on whether their products can compete in an open market. They build whatever the client requests. The technology only needs to pass acceptance checks; the project only needs to be delivered on time. Whether the technology is advanced, the product innovative, or further improvement even necessary may not be what they care about most.
More significantly, this kind of business produces a corresponding style of management. Client relationships, bidding, qualifications, approvals, reporting, and acceptance all require people to handle them. Over time, the company naturally develops a very traditional organizational structure. Some businesses are software companies in name, but what they are really good at may be conducting business around access to particular kinds of projects, rather than software development.
This makes me feel that Beijing’s progress and backwardness coexist.
On one hand, it has top research institutions, AI companies, internet businesses, and all kinds of high-tech enterprises. On the other, it has a vast number of companies that survive on traditional projects, client relationships, and management practices. Even within the same office building, one company may be researching the most advanced AI while its neighbor holds endless meetings over acceptance documentation for an admin panel.
There’s no contradiction, because Beijing has always consisted of many completely different business environments. I even increasingly wonder whether its business dynamism is gradually falling behind that of some other cities.
Shanghai, for example, strikes me as more open than Beijing, at least in its international outlook, finance, and commercial atmosphere. Shenzhen has plenty of problems too, especially the so-called Shenzhen schemes in blockchain circles, which have a bad reputation. But it has undeniably developed industrial strengths in electronics manufacturing, hardware supply chains, and tech startups. I’ve never been to Guangzhou and don’t know much about its actual development, so I won’t comment further.
These cities all have their own problems, of course. Nor do I believe moving somewhere else guarantees access to more advanced companies. But at least one thing is clear: a city’s infrastructure and its business dynamism are different things.
Beijing’s subway, roads, public services, and urban order can be excellent without every company being innovative, or ordinary people necessarily gaining access to better business opportunities.
Resources may be the last thing Beijing lacks. But how many resources a place has and whether ordinary people can actually use them are completely different questions.
After criticizing so many Beijing companies and workers, though, another question occurred to me. Why do so many people spend more than a decade working here without ever moving beyond their original circles? Is it really because they lack perspective, don’t understand technology, or refuse to learn?
Of course not. Many may know perfectly well that their company has little future, and that better jobs, more advanced technologies, and more promising industries exist elsewhere. They just can’t change their circumstances.
The reason is simple: no money.
An ordinary employee gets paid each month and has to cover rent, loan payments, living expenses, and perhaps family expenses as well. However hopeless the company seems, they dare not resign casually. Where the next job will be, when they’ll find it, and whether it will pay as much are all unknowns.
Tell them to start a business, and what happens if it fails? Tell them to learn about a new industry, and how do they get through the period without income? Tell them to move to another city, and who pays for moving, renting, and finding work all over again? For the wealthy, these are simply choices. Don’t like a city? Move. Don’t like an industry? Try another. A project fails? Start another one. For ordinary people, a single failure can wipe out months or even years of savings.
That’s why I increasingly dislike people who are forever advising others to improve their understanding or broaden their horizons. People certainly need knowledge, experience, and an understanding of how society works. But those things don’t necessarily translate into real choices about how to live.
You can know a hundred roads exist in the world, but without money, you may not dare leave even the one right in front of you.
What we call perspective often isn’t a question of whether someone is willing to broaden it, but whether they have the means to experience more and bear the cost of their choices. Someone can work in Beijing for twenty years and live entirely between a rented room and an office. That doesn’t necessarily mean they like it or don’t know about the outside world. They may simply have no better choice.
I’m actually the same. In recent years, I’ve often considered leaving Beijing for Shanghai, Hong Kong, or even Singapore. If I’ve begun to question Beijing’s business environment and think other places may offer more opportunities, why not simply move? The problem is that, once I seriously consider it, nothing is that simple.
First, Shanghai. Its business environment may better match what I expect from an international city, but I’m from northern China and have long been accustomed to Beijing’s relatively dry climate. I’m not used to the humid, muggy weather in the south. On previous visits to Shanghai, I didn’t particularly like the climate. That doesn’t matter much for a few days’ sightseeing, but if I live there long term, it’s something I’ll face every day.
Then there’s Hong Kong. Its finance and Web3 industries do offer some opportunities that interest me. But actually moving there to work and live means researching travel permits, work and residency eligibility, and housing. Homes in Hong Kong are generally small, while rents and everyday expenses are high. If moving means paying more to live and even accepting worse housing, what exactly is the point?
Singapore is even more complicated. That goes beyond moving to another city within China: I’d need to consider work passes, employment opportunities, the language environment, local living costs, and an entirely new way of life. Singapore also has a tropical climate, which may not suit someone like me who’s used to life in the north.
There seem to be many choices, but after serious analysis, every one has problems of its own. Of course I can buy a high-speed train ticket to Shanghai or fly to Hong Kong or Singapore for a holiday. But tourism and actually living somewhere long term are completely different things.
Changing cities may mean changing jobs, renting a new place, adapting to a new environment, and bearing the risk that things won’t turn out as expected. Especially for someone with no clear prospect of substantially higher income and real financial pressures to consider, moving isn’t something you can do simply because you feel like it.
I’ve even realized that, after all these years in Beijing, I’ve become quite accustomed to its lifestyle and climate. Despite my many complaints about the city, if I really had to leave, I’d struggle to find somewhere that suited me better in every respect.
It’s absurd.
When I first came to Beijing, I knew nothing. I didn’t know what kinds of companies existed elsewhere, what other industries were like, or what other possibilities life held. After all these years of work, I know more industries, have encountered different business models, and understand that Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore may offer different opportunities.
And the result? I’m still in Beijing.
I can even analyze each city’s advantages and disadvantages quite clearly, yet still lack the means to make a decision that would actually change my life.
This made me realize that a country bumpkin may not simply be someone narrow-minded who’s never seen the world. Even someone who understands the outside world can remain confined to one place by finances, work, family, habits, and all kinds of practical considerations. Besides, the world I understand may not be all that large either. I’ve simply experienced a few more things, become familiar with a few more industries, and learned about a few more business models than when I first graduated.
I can think those traditional company owners are provincial, that some technical managers have narrow horizons, and that certain programmers with years at big tech companies don’t really understand their industry. But looking back at myself, how am I fundamentally different? I still need a job and a salary, still have living costs to pay, and still lack the capital to try the life I want.
I used to be confined to one company and one technical role. Now I at least know there’s more out there, but I still struggle to actually enter those worlds.
So I increasingly feel that Beijing contains countless little worlds isolated from one another. Some people conduct global business here. Some research cutting-edge technology. Some run enormous enterprises. And vast numbers of ordinary people spend each day writing a few business APIs, maintaining a few database tables, handling a few client requests, and waiting for payday at the end of the month.
They may live in the same residential compound, take the same subway line, or even work in the same office building. Yet the business environments they encounter, the resources they command, and the life choices available to them may be on entirely different levels.
Beijing has so many universities, research institutions, technology companies, and business resources. But what do these have to do with an ordinary programmer whose daily responsibility is merely “routine support”?
Just like that woman at the mobile airtime company where I interned, writing “Routine support” in her daily report. Of course she wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the company’s business did need maintaining. But if someone works in that environment for five or ten years and still cares only about their handful of assigned requests, what does Beijing’s prosperity actually mean to them?
Perhaps just a salary a little higher than back home, and rent a lot higher. The workplace has moved from a small county town to Beijing, while life remains confined to a very small space.
And now I’m beginning to face the same problem.
Beijing having the best resources doesn’t mean those resources belong to me. Having the most advanced technology doesn’t mean I’ve encountered it. Having countless opportunities doesn’t mean I have the capital to seize them.
I used to think that leaving a small place and coming to Beijing meant seeing a bigger world.
Later I discovered that Beijing itself is simply made up of countless small places. Some people spend decades in one corner without ever truly stepping outside it.
Even more absurdly, some already know how big the outside world is, but without money or enough freedom to choose, can only stay where they are.
So when I say Beijing has many country bumpkins, I’m not talking about where they come from. I’m saying that what they can truly experience and possess in a lifetime may amount to only the tiny patch right in front of them.
And I’m just one of them.
We thought we’d left our small county towns, come to Beijing, and finally entered a real metropolis.
Only after many years do we discover that we’ve merely moved somewhere more expensive to continue living the same constrained lives.
Beijing is enormous. But for many of the people who live here, it’s pitifully small.