Why High Salary Offers in Embedded Development Go to Others
Question
Today, let’s discuss a question that everyone is concerned about:How can I secure a high salary offer?Working hard is certainly not just for money, and money is not the only measure of our contributions. However, you must admit that how much money you make is indeed a measure of success in society, and a higher salary can make our lives better. Therefore, striving for a higher salary is correct, progressive, positive, and should be pursued.However, many people only start to feel disheartened when they actually go for interviews. Why is it that I don’t get any response for a position with a salary of 15k? Why is it that after finally getting an interview opportunity, I wait for news and hear nothing? Why did that classmate sign for 12k while I, with 8k, can’t find a job and have to keep lowering my expectations, ultimately ending up with a 5k job?
I can only comfort myself that the starting salary is not important, there will be opportunities later, and I will work hard to catch up. Three years later, I will definitely be XXXX…. But the reality may be that one step leads to another, and the gap between you and others may widen. Are you working hard while others are not? When Chinese people say, “Don’t lose at the starting line,” do you think they are just joking?
Let’s stop the discouragement and the painful reminders.So, what should we do? Where is the way out?
What kind of positions offer high salaries?
When you look at job websites, some companies clearly state the salary range for positions, while others do not, requiring you to negotiate during the interview. However, whenever the salary is revealed, there are always some objective rules that determine the salary for the position.
First, you need to understand that the salary for a position is not determined by the applicant, but rather by the company when planning that position.Companies do not hire blindly or make decisions on a whim; it is all organized and planned.The larger and more reputable the company, the longer their planning will be.
Companies like BAT and Huawei may have decided a year in advance which positions to hire for the following year, how many people to hire, and what the salary range will be. These decisions are made directly by upper management. Of course, this determination is a range, not a precise number.
The personal excellence of the applicant mainly determines whether you can get the offer; it is a yes or no question.If they don’t want you, there is no need to discuss salary; even if you are willing to take half the salary, they still won’t want you. If they do want you, then you can discuss specific salary, but that specific number will not exceed the preset range (of course, exceptional candidates are an exception, but such geniuses are rare and not within our discussion scope. You should assume you are not such a genius; I certainly am not).
Understanding this principle makes it clear: if you want a high salary, the key is to secure positions in companies that are already prepared to offer high salaries.
So, what kind of companies and positions are willing to offer higher salaries? Let’s discuss it from two levels: company and position.
First, from the company level, for fresh graduates, generally, the larger and more reputable companies will offer higher salaries for similar positions. Why? Because excellent companies are inherently more profitable, and they understand the principle that you get what you pay for, so they are willing to offer more competitive salaries to attract top talent. Smaller companies may understand this principle but lack the financial capability, so they prefer to “pick up bargains” and cannot set high salary standards.So if you have the capability, you should prioritize companies like BAT and Huawei.
Secondly, from the position perspective, each type of position has a market standard for salary, and there will be differences between positions. For example, those working in AI algorithms will definitely earn more than those working with 51 microcontrollers, which is due to the significant differences in the difficulty of the two jobs and the supply-demand relationship for the two positions. There are many developers for 51 microcontrollers in the market, while those who can develop AI algorithms are few and far between, so the latter will have higher salaries.
Therefore, the first step to obtaining a high salary is to apply for positions in companies that are willing and able to offer high salaries. You cannot expect to earn 10k+ while interviewing for a position that clearly states a salary of 5-6k; that will not succeed and will only serve as experience accumulation.
Job applications are a localized ranking competition.
Anyone who has played games knows that sometimes your team may perform excellently, but you still lose to an exceptionally strong opponent. At other times, your team may perform poorly, but you win because the opponent is even worse.
Why? Because a competition is essentially a localized ranking competition. Localized means that the participants are limited to this specific group, and ranking means that the key to determining the outcome is not absolute level but relative level.
Even if you are not very good, as long as your opponent is worse than you, you can win. Therefore, many people say after achieving results: “It all depends on the competition.” This is the characteristic of ranking competitions.
Job applications are also a localized ranking competition.A company does not continuously hire; they hire only when there is a demand. A position may be filled in a few days or take months, but they cannot keep comparing candidates indefinitely. Therefore, from the initial resume screening to inviting candidates for several rounds of interviews to sending out offers, it often happens within two to three days. You are not competing with job seekers nationwide; with each step forward, the number of competitors decreases significantly, and in the end, you are competing with just a few dozen people. As long as you outperform those people, you can also succeed.
So, have you noticed? The second key to obtaining a high salary is to enhance your competitiveness within this localized range.
The first hurdle is submitting your resume.You need to make your resume stand out so that HR can filter you out from thousands of resumes and call you for an interview. If you are filtered out at this first hurdle, you have no chance at all.
The second hurdle is the technical written test.Your test scores cannot be too poor; in fact, they should be good to earn extra points. This relies on your basic skills and hard work; did you study well? Did you practice a lot? This depends on your ability.
The third hurdle is the interview.80% depends on ability, and 20% on luck. Ability is fundamental; if you have the ability, you will generally sweep through. Your school, major, degree, and project experience will all help you stand out among other candidates. If you are such a candidate, the company will likely sign you on the spot because they know that such candidates often have multiple offers and they fear you will accept another offer. The 20% luck factor is also true; sometimes, the interview depends on personal chemistry. For example, if you happen to meet an interviewer who is from your hometown or an alumnus, you may gain an advantage. I once took a student to an interview; this student had worked as a primary school teacher for three years before transitioning to IT, and he happened to meet the technical director of the company who had also made a similar transition. He was basically guaranteed the job. However, luck is uncontrollable; you might get eliminated for saying the wrong thing, which can feel quite unfair, but that’s how interviews work.
In summary,when considering all three hurdles, you will find that it still relies on ability.What makes a resume stand out? It relies on ability. What makes your test scores good? It relies on ability. What makes you impress others in the interview? It still relies on ability. With ability, you can go anywhere; without ability, you will inevitably be a stepping stone for others.
How to enhance job application competitiveness
After discussing so much, we return to the actual competitiveness. You may have noticed that there are no loopholes; except for a few people who have extraordinary luck and make unexpected leaps, 99.9% of people still need to rely on ability to secure high salaries.
This is actually very reasonable. Think about it: large companies spend so much money hiring professional HR and technical interviewers to select the best candidates from applicants. If you are not as good as others, how can you expect to outshine them? In a mature system, such things are not allowed to happen.
So how can you enhance your job application competitiveness, or in other words, how can you enhance your ability?There are two important methods for you.
What kind of positions offer high salaries?
Although you may think this is obvious, I still want to say:Learning indeed accumulates over time; a sword’s edge comes from sharpening. Ability is not something that can be developed overnight; it requires long-term accumulation.
Good courses are key; the quality of courses and guidance can have a significant, even decisive impact on anyone. I categorize courses into three levels.
Third-level courses are the worst.These poorly taught courses can be discouraging. A beginner may start with enthusiasm but quickly become disheartened and doubt their suitability for the field, leading to abandonment.
Why do most people find it difficult and unpleasant to obtain a driver’s license? It is not because driving itself is particularly hard, but mainly because most instructors are of low quality and teach poorly, both in terms of professionalism and temperament. Therefore, many people view the driving test as a nightmare. Most driving instructors are indeed third-rate.
Second-level courses are average.These courses are not poorly taught; they are just ordinary. They cover correct content, explain it clearly, and have a reasonable sequence, along with designed cases for practice. From a traditional perspective, they are acceptable (many university professors teach this way).
The issue is that they are not engaging enough and can be quite dull. Whether this type of course is useful or whether you can learn from it largely depends on the learner’s qualities. For high achievers and those who are self-motivated and have strong comprehension skills, these courses can be very useful. As long as you can explain things clearly, you can learn from them, and you are not afraid of monotony, you can control your learning.
However, if you do not have such good study habits or a solid foundation, it can be miserable. The more you listen, the more frustrated you become, and the more you struggle to understand. Learning from these courses can be torturous, and eventually, the pain will exhaust your willpower and interest, leading you to quit.
Therefore, the evaluation of these second-level courses is quite peculiar. Some people highly praise them, saying they learned a lot, while others are very dissatisfied, saying they are worthless. So when you see a course with polarized reviews, with both high praise and strong criticism, you should personally check it out to see if it suits you.
First-level courses are excellent.These courses not only cover correct and clear content, which is a basic requirement, but I believe excellent courses have several key points that second- and third-level courses lack.
First, excellent courses are inherently attractive, making people want to learn and continue learning, and they do not discourage.
Second, excellent courses teach knowledge and skills but also provide higher-level thinking guidance and character influence.
They will teach you how to think when encountering problems, how to consider solutions when facing difficulties, and may help you manage impatience and improve yourself. If you previously lacked interest in learning and perseverance, excellent courses will help you cultivate interest in learning and endurance.
In summary,excellent courses make you want to keep learning, help you minimize difficulties and pain in learning, and assist you in transforming and improving yourself through learning.Such courses can be considered excellent.
What kind of positions offer high salaries?
Accumulating knowledge mainly involves honing your internal skills and enhancing your inherent abilities and potential. However, this is still not enough because a talented person may go unnoticed; you need to showcase your abilities visibly, or else you risk being “picked up” by smaller companies at a low price, which is quite unfortunate.
This situation is quite common. For example, a person may graduate from a mediocre second-tier university but has been self-studying and happens to have completed our “Embedded Linux Core Course” or “Complete Microcontroller Learning Series Course,” with solid foundational skills and strong abilities. However, these achievements are hard to reflect on a resume, which can be quite frustrating.
After completing our “Advanced Topics in C Language,” you may have a very solid foundation in C, but you can only write “proficient in C language” on your resume, while others who know nothing also write “proficient in C language.” Do you think HR can tell the difference between you two when reviewing resumes? For HR, all these statements are just “bragging”; to increase their hit rate, they will prioritize hard qualifications.
What are hard qualifications? Objective criteria that cannot be self-reported are considered hard. For example, if you list Tsinghua University on your resume, that is a hard qualification. Being able to get into and graduate from Tsinghua is a hard skill that warrants a call for an interview. If you have a master’s degree, that is also hard; at least you have completed undergraduate and graduate studies, passed entrance exams, and defended a thesis. How bad can you be?
So sometimes people lament social injustice, judging people by their backgrounds. Is a graduate from a good school necessarily better? Are graduates from poor schools not elite? Is a master’s degree necessarily better than a bachelor’s? Many graduate students are not competent; how do we explain that?
I know this, and HR knows this too, but these are small probabilities. From a large probability perspective, looking at schools and degrees is indeed useful. Data shows that graduates from good schools and those with higher degrees tend to be more competent.
But you might say that there are also elites among graduates from poor schools; that is indeed true, and everyone acknowledges it. However, the problem is that filtering out such elites is very difficult; you might have to interview 1,000 graduates from vocational schools to find one qualified elite. Meanwhile, you might find one qualified candidate among just ten master’s degree holders. Good companies can afford to pay, so why wouldn’t they prioritize graduates from good schools and those with higher degrees?
Some might say, “Teacher Zhu, you are just stating the obvious. If I graduated from Tsinghua or have a master’s degree, I wouldn’t be here listening to you; I would have already gone to BAT or Huawei to earn an annual salary of 500,000.” Indeed, I have been in online education for five years, and I have had tens of thousands of students, but I have only encountered one or two from Tsinghua or Peking University. Most of the best schools are at the level of my alma mater, Xi’an Jiaotong University.
Why is this considered obvious? Because it is reasonable but not useful. If you are not from Tsinghua, can you write that you are? Do you think they will let you in without providing your diploma and degree certificate? Do you think you can get away with a fake certificate? If you are not a master’s degree holder, can you write that you are? These hard qualifications are hard because they cannot be faked or obtained in a short time, so while the reasoning is valid, it is ultimately useless.
So is there anything that is also hard (at least semi-hard) that can be obtained in a short time without strict requirements?
There is indeed, and that is enterprise-level projects.
What is an enterprise-level project? It is a project that involves technologies and hardware platforms that are not just “the principles are the same” but are actually used in products by enterprises.This is what qualifies as an enterprise-level project.
Our HiSilicon project is a heavyweight enterprise-level project.
The true value of the HiSilicon project
The HiSilicon project is a comprehensive project for “HiSilicon HI3518E Video Codec Transmission Deep Learning,” whichis based on the HiSilicon HI3518E hardware platform and implements mainstream skills in the video codec industry, including Camera acquisition, ISP processing, H.264 encoding, RTSP transmission, MP4 packaging, and OSD addition.
The HI3518E is a camera chip that HiSilicon is still shipping in large quantities. Most of the 720P or 960P (and a few 1080P) cameras you see on the market under 100 yuan are based on the HI3518E solution. Many companies also use this chip for their products. Even if higher-end products do not use the HI3518E, they will use other higher configurations from the HiSilicon HI35XX series.How powerful is HiSilicon in the camera field? They occupy a significant share of the global market.
Thus, this project is a truly heavyweight enterprise-level project, and the skills learned in this project can be directly applied in enterprises, meaning companies do not have to start from scratch to teach you, making them more willing to hire you. This project corresponds to companies in the video industry, such as Hikvision and Dahua, as well as CVTE in Guangzhou, all of which have many students from our HiSilicon project. Additionally, DJI also has many students, as their drones require aerial photography, which involves cameras.
Why are enterprise projects valuable? Why can they transform you from a novice to an expert? I will analyze this from several stages.
First, during theresume submission stage. If your school and degree are average, your resume will lack standout features, and HR will filter you out directly, leaving you unqualified for an interview. Since you cannot fake your school or degree, how can your resume stand out? It relies on enterprise projects, where you can list your experience with enterprise projects and include keywords that make HR’s eyes light up:HiSilicon HI35XX, HiSilicon SDK, H.264, RTSP, MP4, ISP debugging, Camera Sensor, etc.
Many companies actually filter resumes not manually but through automated systems. HR sets conditions and keywords based on the job requirements, and the system automatically filters out resumes that do not meet the criteria, leaving only those for HR to review.
Folks, writing “cheerful personality, love learning, love sports, can endure hardship…” on your resume is useless. Not to mention whether these statements are believable, are they even valuable?HR only cares about how much you can contribute, and if you can command a salary far above the market average, they will gladly have you work 996 or even 007.Have you ever seen someone from BAT or Huawei oppose 996? Those who oppose 996 are usually the ones who feel underpaid while being asked to work 996.
Well, even if you manage to pass the resume stage and go for the written test.The written test mainly assesses your fundamentals, and you can pass this stage without enterprise projects as long as your fundamentals are solid.However, the most critical stage, the interview, shows significant differences. If your fundamentals are solid but your school and degree are average, and you have not worked on any notable projects, can you succeed? The answer relies entirely on your peers.
You can only hope that the other candidates you interview with are of similar qualifications and have weaker fundamentals than you. In this case, even if the interviewer is not satisfied, they may have no choice but to select you.
However, if there are a few candidates with strong qualifications, they will definitely be prioritized, and then it will be your turn. If someone has a better school and degree, they will be prioritized. If someone has a similar school and degree but has enterprise-level project experience, they will be prioritized. In the end, if you only have solid fundamentals without any notable projects, you will be the last to be considered. Those without solid fundamentals will have already been eliminated.
In general, for technical positions, the final decision-making power lies with the technical interviewers, who are usually sent by the internal departments that will use the hired candidates. If you are hired, you will be in their department, and they understand the requirements and standards for the position. How can you gain their approval? If you have enterprise-level project experience, they will be pleased to chat with you for a few minutes, ask a few questions, and if you answer correctly, confirming that you have indeed learned and can do some things (you don’t even need to be particularly deep), they will be very happy to keep you. They do not expect you to start working immediately; they just want you to have a foundation so they don’t have to teach you from scratch.
In short, learning about enterprise projects does not mean you will instantly become highly skilled; it means you have a foundation in enterprise projects, which puts you in a completely different league from others, and they will definitely want you. Again, it all depends on your peers.
This is the true value of the HiSilicon project: it helps you stand out and win against others on that narrow bridge.
Finally
Let’s revisit what we discussed at the beginning: interviews are essentially localized ranking competitions, where you are competing with a limited number of people in a small range. If everyone else fails, even if you score 60, you will still be the champion, and that high-paying position will belong to you.So the key is to enhance your ranking ability.
Ability cannot be developed overnight; you must diligently study our Embedded Linux Core Course or the Complete Microcontroller Learning Course.However, hard skills can be developed quickly, and that is through the HiSilicon project.People rely on their appearance, and talents need to be showcased. If you want to avoid being overlooked, you must find ways to display your abilities.
In the past, interview guides emphasized dressing appropriately and adhering to workplace etiquette, which was also part of this idea. It made you appear more professional and polished. However, with societal development, these superficial enhancements have become meaningless; everyone understands this, and it does not create a significant gap. I believe no one would show up to an interview with unkempt hair and flip-flops, right?
So, let’s stop the talk and get to the point!
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