What Determines a Company’s Survival or Death?

Two things matter: Is the product solid? Can it sell? Your work directly impacts those two things. You're a core department, or you're not. If your work doesn't directly affect them, you're on the fringe.

Sometimes you'll notice R&D and sales are still hiring and raising salaries, while QA, operations, and customer support get laid off or outsourced entirely. A company grows from small to large and eventually goes public—yet among the people in QA, ops, after-sales, admin, HR, and finance, how many get stock options? Aside from the department heads getting a modest amount, it's extremely rare.

Fringe department heads are usually handed over to core department people as a镀金 (gold-plating) opportunity. Say a developer performs well and the company wants to promote them to senior leadership, overseeing the entire product line. Is experience just in R&D enough? No. So what do they do? They rotate them through other departments. They drop them into QA, ops, or after-sales. You personally lead the after-sales team and see how many issues your product actually has. With that experience, they return to manage the product holistically—and then they manage it well.

And what gets squeezed while they manage well? Your team's upward mobility.

You toil in QA, after-sales, ops—doing it with heart. Then someone空降 (parachutes) in, and you assist them. You become their sparring partner. Once they're polished, another空降 comes in, and you support them again. When is it your turn? Generally, it never is.

Does everyone in the core department have a bright future? Only a handful can seize the opportunity.

So what if your educational background is weak and you can't even get into the core department to start the game? The answer is simple: This track was never meant for you.