A Naive View of Career in Storages

Update in 21/05/2023: It’s strange how things turn out to be like this. I have continued working on the project with the QEMU mentors’ help till now. In all those dark days of the last year, it’s something that gives me strength to go forward.


Fun fact, I learned the word CAREER from a friend when I was a junior high student and I mistook it for car. Ok, it’s off-topic.

What you want to do in the five years is a not easy question to answer for most people and so am I. At this stage, I am still trying things and find out what I like according to the experience. Luckily, I grow an interest in open source projects during this internship and decide to take further investigation on storage systems[1] afterwards. That leads to my answer. I would like to be an infrastructure engineer in storage systems and keep working on the open source projects.

Reality reviews

Generally, finding a job in CN is really difficult nowadays due to the pandemic and global economic recession. And finding a job with work life balance is even harder. Less job positions, more people. The situation can get worse in future because of various reasons. I do wish everyone can find the job they like.

Database is a hot spot and many companies work on it including most of the big domestic techs and several start-ups. As for the jobs related to storages that I know of, excluding the database techs, the handful techs open such positions like ByteDance, databend.

Finding a job abroad as graduates is a different question to ponder. A friend told me it’s difficult but possible and gave me some examples of success. So I will at least send a resume when I am ready for such interviews.

Personal review

I always ask myself one question for those years: Can I do it? I jumped into the university with the naive belief that I can study computer science by myself. It turns out way harder than I think :) However, studying open courses is fun as you learn more about it. My current goal is to finish some course projects left for so long. It is only for practice purpose since it’s more like toy project.

On the other side, I’ve become more confident to take the road I choose. There are some constraints that should not exist not only in school but also in work. In my school, one of the constraints that will not satisfy the threshold of transferring to Computer Science related majors is GPA lower than 3.6(4.0). The list can go on and on. However, I don’t think it can hide people’s interests and passion. What defines who we are, I think, is the actions taken and thoughts to change.

Later on

I will be graduated in June in 2023 and plan to work since then. What I am interested is open source jobs related to system programming and storages. Hope I can make it :)


  1. I am not sure “storage system” is a defined word but it is in this course page so I just go with it. ↩︎