I want to honestly record my emotions and thoughts at this moment, without caring whether the logic is correct. This is more like a diary entry, but because these are some very fundamental views, I want to record them more formally in the form of a blog.
At the end of last year my Canadian PR came through smoothly, and I started the phase of looking for a job in Canada. I’ve already decided my current job at NVIDIA has no future; I’m basically in a “lying flat” state, just waiting to resign after I return from the US. In the process of looking for a job in Canada, I also indirectly came into contact with the current job markets in China and the US; the waves are bigger than I imagined. I’m also trying to plan my future career path.
Let me first talk about the job at NVIDIA. This job perfectly fulfilled my expectations of it: accumulate one year of work experience to apply for PR, big company helps with future overseas job hunting, tied to AI, part of AI infra. Objectively speaking, it’s a decent job in China right now: remote, not that much workload (on the premise of sacrificing internal career development), and the salary is acceptable. I can say this is actually the life I used to want, just located in China. But at this moment I really hate this job. I don’t like NVIDIA as a company—monopolistic; the skills I’m learning are not very transferable; I slack off but carry a heavy psychological burden (worrying I’ll disappoint my manager, because I think he’s a good person); I hate that my coworkers curry favor and play politics for promotion and even drag me into involution (if my output is low, it becomes especially conspicuous in the weekly meeting); the stock allocation is extremely unequal—people who joined one or two years earlier got 10x the stock (which makes it almost impossible for me to put in real effort); I hate the AI infra field because it’s hyper-competitive and all the benefits are captured by more “Party A”–type fields. I feel I no longer care about my gains and just want to escape.
Yesterday I saw the news that vLLM has founded a startup; Kaiyuan You is a cofounder. In his Zhihu post he said he turned down an annual salary of over ten million USD to start a company. sglang has also founded a company; Chenyang Zhao is a member of technical staff, and I suspect he’s probably financially free already, and he only graduated from undergrad a bit over a year ago. Some time ago CentML was acquired by NVIDIA; Daemond told me that a friend-of-a-friend of his was probably at CentML and became financially free because of the acquisition, and bought a big house in Toronto. There’s another case that’s relatively less dramatic: Yixuan Tan is at DeepSeek, and bought a house and a car in Hangzhou. I once had the chance to join all of these; let’s put DeepSeek aside for now because I wanted to go abroad. I contacted sglang at the end of 2024 because I was considering doing a PhD, but at the time I felt it would be too exhausting and I actually didn’t want to do a PhD, so I didn’t continue. I interviewed with CentML but felt the people there weren’t great, so I prepared very casually, and in the end they didn’t give me an offer.
I admit I’m very envious, but I can’t do what they did; it all seems to run counter to the “life I want.” It’s not like I gave up those opportunities without thinking. For example, I ask myself whether I’d be willing to go to sglang now. That would mean I’d have to grind hard; otherwise they could just fire me at will. That kind of job treats people as tools; there will inevitably be a lot of unfairness (for example, you yourself know what kind of person Chenyang Zhao is). The only compensation is money. I’m not willing to work there.
I’m still working toward the “life I want,” trying indie hacking, hoping to have an income source that doesn’t depend on a platform and a freer life. But because of all the envy I feel toward the above, I’m extremely mentally conflicted. At the same time, indie hacking is very hard; you could even say it doesn’t necessarily require less effort than grinding at those companies (especially considering it will likely exist as a side project, a double job). I suspect I’m only working for a kind of “ideology,” a so‑called ideology of “freedom.” Just as my current job at NVIDIA is already enough to satisfy my former fantasy of “slacking off at work and studying physics after work,” yet I loathe it. This makes me feel nihilistic.
I’m writing this with a lot of sadness and jet lag–induced dizziness. A casually proposed solution is to give up any pursuit of goals and live in the present. Can a person really live without ideology? These financially free people seem to have made a successful investment in a smart, rational, and highly executable way, but I think it was their ideology that allowed them to do these things naturally and without inner conflict. I’m not sure if I’m just defending myself: people always live for some “ideology”; otherwise, why keep living, why not commit suicide right now?
“After calculation, although these projects (startups) have high expected returns, their risk coefficients are severely inconsistent with the executor’s (my) risk preferences, so the decision to abandon them at the time was in line with the system’s optimal solution. Case file archived, no further review.”