NTU Grad, NT$2 Million Salary — How He Lost His Job Overnight
Have you ever wondered what becomes of the person who lived everyone’s “correct answer”?
The person we’re talking about today is someone you’ve definitely met. He might be surnamed Lin, Chen, or Huang — the kind of person elders love to praise. Top schools all the way, landed at a major company, NT$2 million annual salary, owns a house, has a mortgage — life as stable as a straight highway.
Let’s call him Lin Zhi-Min, a senior engineer envied across Taipei’s Neihu Technology Park. A week after his 35th birthday, his perfectly stable life was彻底 (thoroughly) reset to zero by a single cold email.
You might think he made some huge mistake. Quite the opposite — he did nothing wrong at all. And that was the most fatal bug in his life.
A Life That Ran on Rails Like a Gogoro
Lin Zhi-Min’s life was like the Gogoro scooter he rode every day — a fixed route from his Xindian home to his Neihu office. The throttle twists, and he arrives in quiet smoothness at his destination. For 35 years, his life path was also set by a precise social algorithm: Jianguo High School, NTU CS — he was the “good kid who studied well” that relatives bragged about.
After graduation, he smoothly joined Asia Pacific Digital, hailed as the pride of Taiwan — a web giant. From菜鸟 (rookie) engineer, he rose to Principal Engineer leading a small team, with annual compensation steadily超过 (exceeding) NT$2 million including bonuses. A résumé that made every classmate envious. His life was like the server backend he maintained — stable, efficient, extremely low error tolerance.
Every morning at 9:00 a.m., he准时 (punctually) appeared at his seat on the 16th floor of that glass-curtain building on Ruiguang Road. At noon he ordered NT200 bowl of Japanese ramen in the alley. At 9:00 p.m., after handling his last email, he’d run 30 minutes in the basement gym, then check his phone app to confirm his wife had put the kids to sleep, before riding his Gogoro onto the Keelung Road elevated expressway and merging into the homebound traffic.
Two years earlier, he and his wife had emptied their savings plus help from six wallets (both families) to buy a community three-bedroom apartment of about 100 sqm in Xindian, taking on a mortgage of nearly NT60,000 monthly payment was like a gentle alarm clock, reminding him he couldn’t afford any slip-ups.
His company stock would all vest in two years, and he could pay off a big chunk of the mortgage then. He’d even discussed with his wife about whether they could, after 40, transfer to a less exhausting position and稳稳 (steadily) work until retirement.
See? A life approved by every elder, defined by society as having “successfully made it ashore” — a gold rice bowl firmly held in hand.
Until that Tuesday afternoon.
An Afternoon Thunderstorm That Cost 3,000 People Their Jobs
A sudden afternoon thunderstorm wildly beat against the 16th floor’s floor-to-ceiling windows. An email from the HR director to all employees landed like a lightning bolt in everyone’s inbox.
The subject: “Announcement on Organizational Restructuring in Response to Global Market Changes.”
Lin Zhi-Min’s entire Innovation Product Business Group — once hailed as the company’s future engine — was being strategically收缩 (contracted). From directors to frontline staff, 3,000-plus people were all “graduated” within a month, with no prior warning.
Last week he was still arguing with a newly arrived supervisor about next quarter’s KPIs. This week he was carrying a cardboard box, supervised by security, turning in his badge and processing separation paperwork.
That day, HR smiled like a professional flight attendant, handing him a thick document — N+3 severance plus unused annual leave compensation, totaling a sizable sum.
In that moment, something strange welled up in Lin Zhi-Min: an inexplicable sense of relief. He thought, with his NTU degree plus eight years at Asia Pacific Digital, finding the next job should be easy, right?
But reality quickly delivered a resounding slap.
First Month: Vacation Mode. Second Month: Alarm Bells.
In the first month, Lin Zhi-Min approached it with vacation mentality. He slept in naturally each day, dropped the kids at school, and even fixed every leaky faucet in the house. He elegantly updated his résumé on 104 Job Bank and LinkedIn, then began selectively applying.
Three months in, he had interviewed at more than a dozen companies — from major tech firms to unicorn startups. The situation was increasingly off.
Those sitting across from him, interviewers a full generation younger, no longer had worship in their eyes — just polite scrutiny. Their questions were like precise surgical knives, peeling away what he thought of as his proudest experience — and finding nothing underneath.
“Mr. Lin, we see that for the past eight years you’ve mainly been responsible for maintaining your company’s internal data middleware. The system is extremely powerful, but its underlying architecture is in-house. Could you tell us about your hands-on experience with mainstream open-source frameworks like CNCF or Spark?”
“Your project experience is very rich, we definitely acknowledge that. But it looks like these projects all围绕 (revolved around) optimizing an already very mature business with tens of millions of users. If we asked you to build a brand new product from zero to one right now, how would you approach it? How would you plan budget, headcount, technology choices?”
Lin Zhi-Min found that no matter what he said, he kept circling back to that massive,精密 (precise) yet extremely closed internal system at Asia Pacific Digital. In that system, he was a god — he knew every command and every line of代码 (code) by heart. But离开 (outside) that system, much of the experience he was proud of instantly became like an app with no network — utterly worthless.
He was like a top-tier F1 racing driver dumped onto the streets of Taipei — he knew how to take precision turns at 300 km/h on a track, but had no idea how to dodge a scooter suddenly cutting into his lane during rush hour on Minquan Boulevard.
Economics has a term: path dependence. It means once you’ve chosen a certain road, you’re like a train that’s entered a fixed轨道 (track). Massive inertia pushes you further and further down that path. The cost of switching tracks grows higher with time — so high that in the end you’d rather watch the train head toward a cliff than be able to turn the steering wheel.
Lin Zhi-Min’s NT$2 million stable job was the轨道 he had entered. During those eight years, what the company paid him in generous salary bought not just his time and experience — it bought out his possibility and courage to explore other轨道s. He was焊死 (welded solid) to that workstation by the high salary and the position.
What was worse was that he gradually got used to the temperature of that weld, and even gripped the焊枪 (welding torch) himself ever more tightly.
The Most Hidden and Cruel Price of Stability
This is stability’s most hidden and cruel price — it never appears in the guise of harm. Quite the opposite, it disguises itself as a sense of security and certainty, slowly钝化 (dulling) your crisis awareness and stripping away your transferable skills, using the温水煮青蛙 (boiling frog in warm water) method. Then when you’re completely unprepared, it turns off the heat, lifts the lid, and tells you: the market has changed. You’ve been cooked.
Japan’s lifetime employment system was once the dream of workers worldwide. What happened? In the 1990s, after the economic bubble burst, giants like Sony and Panasonic began大规模 (massively) laying off workers. Countless middle-aged people who’d given 20-30 years to one company were suddenly pushed into society overnight. Many of them couldn’t even write a proper résumé — because their entire life résumé contained only one short line: “Section Chief, XX Co., 30 years.”
A person’s most vulnerable moment is often when they think they’re safest.
Is the stability you assume a safe harbor, or a gilded cage精心 (carefully) built for you? This question is worth every one of us asking ourselves in the quiet深夜 (late night), hand over heart.
Stock-Market Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
Lin Zhi-Min’s tragedy was, in essence, a typical Stock-Market Mindset bankruptcy.
What’s stock-market mindset? It’s investing 90% of your energy to defend what you already have — holding onto this job, keeping this position, maintaining the relationships and resources in front of you. You’re like a farmer guarding a full warehouse of grain. Your most important daily task is checking whether the仓库 (warehouse) has holes or mice have gotten in.
This sounds absolutely reasonable. But stock-market assets have one fatal characteristic — they naturally depreciate. Your skills become outdated as technology iterates. The Java you’re proud of might be replaced by Python or Go tomorrow. Your industry contracts with economic cycles. Your network失效 (fails) as people move and利益 (interests) shift. The city walls you defend erode every day, while you just keep擦拭 (polishing) the family crest on the wall again and again.
Growth mindset is a completely different life algorithm.
Its core is永远 (forever) directing your attention toward things you don’t yet have — a new skill, a new circle, a new income stream, a new认知 (cognitive) framework. Back to the farmer analogy — a growth-mindset farmer might only spend 30% of energy guarding the warehouse, but would invest 70% of their time researching new rice varieties, learning more efficient farming techniques, or even开垦 (reclaiming) a new patch of wasteland to try planting coffee or high-mountain tea.
They know in their hearts: you can’t defend by holding. The best defense is always offense.
Let’s look at some telling data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics once tracked a group of Americans born in the 1960s, finding that between ages 18 and 54, they changed jobs an average of 12.4 times. The result? Those with the highest lifetime income and fastest wealth accumulation were恰恰 (precisely) those who actively switched jobs frequently.
This conclusion may seem counterintuitive, especially for those of us raised on concepts like “loyalty” and “stability.” But the logic behind it is crystal clear — every active choice is a market revaluation of your personal value. By constantly entering new environments, learning new skills, and solving new problems, you force yourself to complete capability iterations. Your value isn’t realized in stasis — it’s validated and amplified through exchanges and collisions.
Buffett’s overused phrase “be greedy when others are fearful”: many only记住 (remember) the后半句 (second half) about greed, but ignore the前提 (premise) in the first half — your greed must be建立在 (built on) your possession of increment capabilities that others don’t have. When the economy is down and the market is panicking, everyone worrying about being laid off — but you, possessing scarce market skills (like AI, blockchain), can buy优质 (quality) job opportunities at lower prices.
Stock-mindset defends life’s bottom line, pursuing safety and avoiding mistakes. Growth-mindset attacks life’s top line, pursuing breakthroughs and high returns.
In an era where rules are constantly rewritten, pursuing absolute stability is itself the highest-risk strategy — because you’re completely outsourcing the right to define your value to the platform you’re on. The platform thrives, you thrive. The platform declines, you perish.
A growth-mindset person, meanwhile, is building their own antifragility. They永远 (forever) ask themselves: “If the company collapses tomorrow, what qualifies me to find my next non-discount-paying job within 72 hours?” The answer to that question is your true survival ability.
Why Are We Like This? The Ruler Changed From School to Society
Hearing this, you might feel a bit wronged: “You’re right, but my mindset isn’t something I chose. From childhood, my education told me to obey, follow rules, study hard, get high scores, don’t think wild thoughts, and definitely don’t take risks.”
This deep-rooted desire-for-stability stock mindset is like code etched into our genes. Where did it come from? Tracing back, we can’t avoid one place — school.
The well-known writer Sun Yutong has a sharp observation in his book: School is essentially a single-variable competition.
What does that mean? The standard for evaluating you is basically just one thing — your score. You got 98, he got 60 — then you’re the good student, he’s the bad student. From elementary to high school, from学测 (the Taiwanese college entrance exam) to指考 (the older exam), the entire evaluation system is clean, simple, brutally crude — one ruler measuring to the end. The goal is crystal clear — get into NTU and you’ve won.
The biggest advantage of this model is fairness and efficiency,便于 (convenient) for large-scale talent screening in the industrial age. But its biggest problem is that it gives you a fatal illusion — assuming the real world runs the same way.
The moment you tossed your graduation cap into the air, the rules of the game彻底 (thoroughly) changed. The real world is an extremely complex multi-variable博弈 (game) — your communication ability, your stress tolerance, your ability to整合 (integrate) resources, your empathy, your business嗅觉 (instinct), your胆识 (courage) to take risk, even your appearance and family background. All these variables get thrown into a giant搅拌机 (mixer), collectively determining your最终 (ultimate) value.
Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner proposed the famous theory of multiple intelligences. He argued that human intelligence has at least eight dimensions — linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. But our school education and testing system basically only trains and rewards the first two.
This explains a very common phenomenon around us — why do many top-performing students who always won academic awards perform平平 (mediocre) after entering society, while some ordinary-looking, even slightly rebellious classmates thrive years later?
It’s not that anyone got dumber or smarter — it’s that the ruler used to evaluate you changed. School rewards the ability to quickly find the correct answer within a clearly-bounded, standard-answer closed system. Society rewards the ability to define problems and create effective solutions in an unbounded world without standard answers.
One is a problem-solver. One is an explorer.
A person’s tragedy often begins when they bring a map from the last game to play the next one. When you walk into a考场 (exam room) that doesn’t even issue test papers, armed with max-level problem-solving skills — that错愕 (disconcertion) and powerlessness is the fundamental reason many people feel increasingly trapped five to ten years after graduation.
Effort Means Nothing in Itself; Only Effort That Generates Scarcity Has Meaning
OK, now we know the track changed, the ruler changed, we can’t use student mentality to handle society. So many people拼命 (desperately) start trying harder — they become the last to leave the office,主动 (voluntarily) come in on weekends, post 3 a.m. Taipei cityscape photos on social media with the caption “pursuing dreams.”
They use tactical勤奋 (diligence) to cover strategic laziness.
But Sun Yutong punctured this bubble with one sentence in his book: “Effort itself has no meaning. Only effort that generates稀缺 (scarcity) value has meaning.”
This is harsh to hear, because it completely颠覆 (overturns) the “you reap what you sow” we’ve been taught since childhood. But the logic of business reality is this cold — it never asks how many overtime hours you put in, how many nights you stayed up, how much you gave the company. It only looks at one thing: is the value you create scarce? Is your ability hard to replace?
Let me give an example. More than ten years ago, Guanghua Market in Taipei was full of small shops making money by assembling computers. They worked hard,穿梭 (shuttling) between Xinguang and Bade Road, carrying boxes of parts, helping customers compare which memory was NT$50 cheaper, which motherboard had the best性价比 (performance-to-price ratio). They made money on information asymmetry and勤奋 (diligent) legs.
Then came e-commerce. Sites like原价屋 (Yuan Jia Wu) made all component prices infinitely transparent. The biggest profit source — information asymmetry — disappeared. Those who still worked hard hauling goods, comparing prices, and埋头 (burying themselves in) assembly fell one by one.
Who survived and thrived? Those who earliest转型 (transformed) into branded gaming rigs. Those who specialized in advanced techniques like water cooling and overclocking, providing customized solutions. Those who integrated维修 (maintenance), software, and service to build service壁垒 (moats).
See? Their effort shifted from physical repetition to cognitive升级 (upgrading). They went from being价值搬运工 (value porters) to价值创造者 (value creators).
Economist Tyler Cowen wrote a book called The Great Stagnation, with a concept called “low-hanging fruit.” In the era of high-speed economic growth, opportunities were like fruits growing low — you just had to stretch up a little and try hard to grab them. But today, in Taiwan and around the world, the low-hanging fruit has long been picked. What’s left is up high.
At this point, comparing who’s the best jumper is meaningless. What matters is: who has the longer ladder? Who can use drones? Who understands weather and soil analysis, knows which fruit is sweetest, and plans ahead.
This is the quality of effort. Cheap self-moved emotion is the most麻醉 (numbing) drug in the workplace. It makes you feel busy, feel充实 (fulfilled), but in reality you might just be原地空转 (spinning in place), burning the engine without前进 (moving forward) a single kilometer.
From now on, please stop using “I worked hard” as the借口 (excuse) for poor results. What you should ask yourself is: “Has my effort made me harder to replace?” The world only pays for your irreplaceability. If you can be easily replaced, then your price is approximately that of whoever replaces you — that person, that AI, that piece of software. It’s that simple, and that cruel.
Buying a House at 30: Using Your Most Expensive Asset to Feed a Depreciating Liability
When we discuss these grand concepts, many Taiwanese young people have actually already been提前 (pre-emptively) shackled by something far more concrete and沉重 (heavy) — locking up all the possibilities of their lives. The shackle is often a house.
Sun Yutong has a saying that’s especially direct, even a bit extreme: Taking out a 30-year mortgage to buy a house and car at 30 is using your most expensive asset — possibility — to feed a depreciating liability.
Let’s do the math. A young person working hard in Taipei: 28, master’s degree, lands in tech. He wants to buy his own small place in New Taipei City before 35. Total price NT5.4 million. Let’s假设 (assume) he’s very lucky — his parents empty their lifetime savings to help him make this down payment.
Then comes the 30-year mortgage. At current rates, monthly principal and interest payments come to about NT$50K.
What does this mean? It means from the moment he signs the purchase contract until he retires at 65, every month after deductions for labor insurance, health insurance, and tax, he must set aside NT$50K for the bank first.
NT100K — is a巨大的 (massive) shackle.
- Can he quit to try创业 (entrepreneurship)? No.
- Can he take a pay cut to join a more promising but still nascent新兴 (emerging) industry? No.
- Can he spend hundreds of thousands to study overseas for an in-service master’s to upgrade himself? No.
- Can he, when work is frustrating and the boss humiliates him, have the底气 (backbone) to slam a resignation letter on the desk and take half a year off? Even less so.
All his life choices have been compressed into one — keep this job, never let the money run out. His life模式 (mode) switched from “exploration” to “survival” with one keystroke. He used his life’s lowest-error-cost, strongest-learning, most vigorous decade — his golden ten years — to exchange for a concrete box whose financial attributes are rapidly depreciating beyond its living function.
Is this transaction really worthwhile?
Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae analyzed a phenomenon in The Low-Desire Society. Young Japanese people普遍 (generally) don’t want to buy houses or get married. This isn’t entirely “lying flat” — the deeper reason is that their generation亲眼 (personally witnessed) their parents excitedly taking on heavy mortgages during the economic peak, only to get trapped at the top of the bubble, losing all life possibilities.
They did the math. They discovered that taking on heavy fixed assets too early is equivalent to提前 (pre-emptively) closing off all future variables and increment entry points. When life’s freedom hits zero, growth stops too.
Of course, I’m not saying buying a house is wrong. Please note the most关键 (crucial) thing here is timing and sequence. Did you, after already building powerful increment abilities and拥有 (possessing) stable multiple cash flows, treat the house as a natural result? Or did you, like Lin Zhi-Min, when you weren’t yet strong enough, exhaust all your leverage and make the house your only source of safety — only to be bound hand and foot?
The差距 (gap) between these two choices in the ten-year life landscape will be beyond your imagination.
The True Definition of Financial Freedom
We拼命 (desperately) earn money,拼命 work,拼命 fight against the world’s uncertainty. What are we actually pursuing? Many people call this ultimate goal “financial freedom.” But what exactly is financial freedom? Is it having eight zeros in your bank account? Driving a Porsche and living in a Xinyi mansion?
Sun Yutong gives a very restrained, essential definition in his book: Financial freedom isn’t being able to buy whatever you want — it’s being able to do whatever you want without having to.
In plain language: you no longer need to do anything for money that offends you or goes against your values. That’s what freedom真正 (truly) means.
- It means when a high-paying job you despise is placed in front of you, you have the底气 (backbone) to say “thanks, no thanks.”
- It means when your family needs the best medical resources, you don’t have to beg others or humble yourself — you can directly choose the best option.
- It means when your child tells you they want to study a seemingly hopeless major (like philosophy or anthropology), you can发自 (wholeheartedly) smile and鼓励 (encourage) them: “Go for it. Do what you truly love. Daddy supports you.”
Charlie Munger, Buffett’s partner, told a story about himself. Back when he wasn’t yet wealthy, he insisted on carving out one hour each day from work — not for any client, but for himself, his best client. During that hour he did only two things: read and think. He said it was precisely these hours, which at the time generated no direct returns, that ultimately gave him the wisdom, wealth, and最重要的 (most important) qualification to choose later on.
You see, financial freedom was never meant to solve the problem of happiness. Rich people still have insomnia, still have anxiety, still go through relationship breakdowns. Life’s终极 (ultimate) predicaments of birth, aging, sickness, death, love, parting — none of these automatically disappear because your bank balance grew.
But financial freedom can solve a more fundamental problem — dignity. When you no longer need to bend your back for a bowl of rice, no longer need to fake-smile for a sale, no longer need to放弃 (abandon) a relationship worth defending because of survival pressure — then each of your decisions truly begins to belong to yourself.
This is the price of freedom. It’s expensive. But every bit of effort you invest in building increment abilities and提升 (enhancing) your irreplaceability is buying you that ticket to dignity — accumulating credits bit by bit.
The Cruelty and Tenderness of the Era
Lin Zhi-Min’s story continues. I heard he eventually放下 (let go of) his pride and joined a small company with a 30% pay cut, but where he could access brand new technology. That road is hard, but I believe he’s bravely turned off that stable轨道 (track).
The cruelty of this era is that rule changes never announce themselves to anyone. They won’t give you a permanent safety pass just because you’re kind, hardworking, and循规蹈矩 (follow rules).
But the tenderness is: it always leaves an upward window for those who stay清醒 (clear-headed), embrace change, and continuously learn.
This world淘汰 (eliminates) not the weak, but those who stand still. Every thought you have, every thing you learn, every tiny change you make — all of these are adding a new entry to your life’s balance sheet. Asset or liability — the pen is always in your own hand.
Lin Zhi-Min’s story is actually a缩影 (microcosm) of our entire generation. We all once believed that being obedient enough, hardworking enough, stable enough meant life would be smooth sailing. But eras翻篇 (turn pages) without warning. Rules rewrite themselves without asking your permission.
True safety was never in a job, a house, or a platform. It’s in your ever-updating cognition, in your refusal to stop growing, in your ability to stand back up no matter what happens to you.
Don’t let stability become the cage that traps you. Don’t let effort degrade into a performance of self-moved emotion. Your life shouldn’t have only one轨道 (track). May we all jump out of stock mindset, embrace growth, and become our own most reliable anchor in an uncertain world.
This article is a reflection on personal career concepts. The content is based on a fictional case and viewpoints整理 (organized) from writer Sun Yutong’s books. It does not constitute any investment, entrepreneurial, or career advice. Everyone’s circumstances and resources differ; please make independent judgments based on your own conditions before acting.
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