A Year Offline: Betting on AI, Becoming a Dad, and Going Back to School at 34

The post captures the real cost of an AI pivot inside a SaaS company: constant tool churn that erodes technical depth while sharpening customer-facing skills. It also surfaces the credential pressure that still shapes career decisions in China's tech market, where a degree can gatekeep roles that experience alone cannot unlock.

A year away from writing reveals a developer stretched across three life-changing fronts. His company's SaaS business went all-in on AI, pulling him into a relentless cycle of tool-switching — from Copilot to DeepSeek — where model updates constantly invalidated hard-won experience. Technical depth stalled at the application layer, but soft skills hardened: translating customer pain points without jargon and building systematic knowledge of vertical industries. At home, a pregnancy reshaped every daily decision, trading personal hobbies and a social life for a healthy baby and a brief, low-revenue experiment in the maternal-infant content track on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Simultaneously, a blunt warning from an HR professional — "your educational background is a hard flaw" — pushed him into a part-time graduate program. The daily rhythm became dinner, one hour with the baby, then books and notes until late, sustained by a simple rule: if you're not smart, just put in more time.

The discussion splits over career strategy: one view questions why someone capable of getting into a top university wouldn't aim for a stable civil service job, while a counterpoint argues that the civil service exam is now harder than graduate school entry. A reply resolves the tension by suggesting a graduate degree makes the civil service exam easier, framing the author's path as a smart long-term play. Other comments are simple praise or requests for more detail on the author's background.