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.
Tool churn in AI is not just a productivity tax; it actively prevents depth by resetting expertise before it compounds, leaving engineers stuck at the integration surface.
The HR remark about a "hard flaw" in educational background reveals a hiring reality where credentials remain a hard filter, even for experienced engineers, pushing mid-career developers back into formal education.
Treating a baby as a child model and launching maternal-infant social accounts turns a life event into a low-stakes entrepreneurial experiment — a pattern of side-hustle thinking that surfaces even during personal upheaval.
The conversation circles around the author's educational background and the practical value of a part-time master's degree. A dispute arises over whether the author holds an associate or bachelor's degree, while the core debate pits the credential's market recognition against its cost in time and money. A cynical view that graduate expansion devalues the degree is met with the pragmatic counter that it still beats an associate degree.
I also want to take the postgraduate exam. Is this part-time master's considered a 'water master's'? I heard from friends that some companies don't recognize it. Not sure if I should go for it.
If your educational background is good, you might not need it. If it's not good, I suggest getting one. There are definitely companies that don't recognize it, but there are also those that do. During the exam, I saw many managers from state-owned enterprises and private companies with associate degrees taking it, which shows there is recognition. Also, passing it demonstrates your personal ability for continuous learning.
I don't know if it's a 'water master's' either, but getting into a 985 or 211 should be okay, right?
Now with the expansion of graduate enrollment, there are more doctoral students currently enrolled than all doctoral graduates in the past few decades. Getting in is useless.
At least it's better than just an associate degree now [cry-laugh].
Still, it's about having money and being idle.
It has nothing to do with being idle. If my educational background were good enough that my resume wouldn't be rejected because of it, I definitely wouldn't choose to study. Doing this consumes time, money, and energy.