IT逸事：中国小镇上的神奇农民程序员(A chinese villager who sells more software daily than you do)

我在这个中国小镇的商业区里徜徉，闪烁的霓虹灯勉强照亮了幽暗的街道。安静的氛围是如此沉重、绝对。这里和喧闹的不夜城——深圳不同，高海拔让这里 的空气也有了不寻常的味道。我看到了崭新的柏油马路，据说中央政府对少数民族实行了特别的优待政策，但这个云南山区的小村庄里却看不到多少汽车。这些马路 就这样静静地躺在那里，唯一的作用似乎就是让我的脚步声变成一种奇怪的旋律。

一群男人坐在自家门口，抽着烟，淡定地围观我这个老外从门前走过。我不由得加快了脚步；我想找间网吧，前面不远的地方应该就有。拐过一个弯，我终于看到了——在红蓝相间的霓虹灯光与大胸女海报的交相辉映之下，我终于到了一个可以休息的地方。

网吧的门口站着一对年轻情侣，他们手拉着手，看起来只有十几岁的样子。一条伤疤从那个男孩的额头穿过，我想他身上肯定有什么惊心动魄的故事，也许比还珠格格还惊悚；不过我没什么兴趣，我只想上网。

从略显狭窄的网吧大门挤进去之后，我被眼前的场景震撼了。数以百计的人蹲在电脑前玩着奇怪的舞蹈游戏，看起来就像是“Dance Dance Revolution”的山寨版；邋遢的男孩们看着五颜六色的网页发呆，叼着卷烟的男人不停地在新闻网站上下翻页；几个孩子凑在一台电脑前，时不时爆发出 一阵尖叫或者大笑。

在我们的国度早已消失的网吧，实际上并没有死亡，它只不过是进行了一次长征。在这个山上的小镇里，买不起电脑的当地居民已经习惯了来网吧上网冲浪。

我在柜台登记了一下护照，办了张包夜卡，坐在电脑面前打开了浏览器。有鉴于Facebook 和 Twitter 在这儿都不好使，我决定先打开 T echCrunch 看看有没有什么新动态。

作为这个网吧里唯一的老外，我早已有了被人围观的觉悟。孩子们荒腔走板的“哈喽”一次又一次地响起，我也没怎么当回事。突然，不知是谁在我的肩膀上拍了一下。我回头一看，我了个去，怎么是个叼着半根烟的中年大叔？

大叔笑了笑，张嘴飙出一句带着浓浓乡土气息的英文：“TechCrunch 也是我最喜欢上的网站。”

好吧，我承认我惊了。

我又抬头看了看他，这种情况下我也不知道该说什么才应景。不过还好，这位大叔已经开始滔滔不绝地讲述他对于 TechCrunch 最近几篇文章的见解。我完全插不上嘴，仅有的几句话还都是对他表示赞同——天知道这大叔是从哪儿冒出来的？而且他对于科技评论的见解还这么独到！最要命的是，看起来他这辈子从来没和什么人正经讨论过 TechCrunch 的文章，这次似乎是想把他所有的想法都一股脑倒出来。

半个小时之后，这位大叔的演讲终于告一段落。不过他似乎还觉得不够尽兴，问我有没有兴趣和他的朋友一起到外面来两盅。大叔看起来似乎挺激动，在电话亭打了几个电话之后就拉着我去了大排档。没过多久，大叔的朋友们也开着一辆崭新的比亚迪过来了。

他告诉了我他的职业：卖软件，而且卖的不少。靠这个，他每个月能赚 5000 多美元——天可怜见，这差不多是当地平均工资的 50 倍。

他是从一个朋友那学会如何编程的。俩人一起前往昆明谋生，但是当他父亲突然病重之后，为了一家人的生计，他不得不回家种田。他父亲已经病了快一年 了，这种情况下他最需要的就是钱。为了照顾家人，他没法出远门，于是他开始在 Odesk、Rentacoder 之类的网站上找工作——当然，也是他那位程序员朋友的建议。写了几个程序之后，他发现了一个真理：

“如果对客户的需求多加注意，我就能知道现在开发什么软件最赚钱。”

于是他开始把这个想法付诸行动。他不再给客户们编写专属的软件，而是针对各种需求写出软件并放在网上出售。最初他一天可以卖出两份拷贝，这样每天就 能挣20 美元——这让他的月收入几乎翻番；于是他继续开发针对不同需求的软件，不久之后他就已经有 10 种不同的软件上架销售。根据市场需求，他的大部分产品都是视频编解码软件。一开始的收入并不怎么样，但对他来说已经是一大笔钱了。

后来他又发现一个门道：把一些开源软件改头换面，重新打包之后再卖给别人。虽然有时会遭到退款和投诉，但大部分不明真相的群众还是欣然付款。他说有段时间他甚至试过出售 Firefox，可惜由于大部分“竞争对手”都是免费软件，销售情况十分惨淡。

到现在，他从事这个行当已经有 4 年多了。现在他每个月能赚 5000 多美元，同时也是视频解码软件市场上的巨头之一。

最后我不胜酒力，准备打道回府。他开车送我回到了我和我朋友所住的旅馆，并热情地和我握手道别。他说他会给我发邮件，不过现在天太晚了，他得回家睡觉了，因为明天还得早起打理农田。我惊奇地问他为什么还要种地，他乐了：“没有为啥！我就是喜欢种地。”

英文原文：

I was alone in the center of a small Chinese town, the weakly glowing streetlights hardly illuminating the streets. The silence was heavy and absolute. It was different from the eternal light and sound of Shenzhen, and the high elevation gave the air an unusual taste. Things were not the same up here in the mountains, and this strangeness seemed a bit menacing. The roads had been tarred, courtesy of the rich central government who gave special attention to the Chinese minorities, but the villages up here in the mountains of Yunnan province did not have many cars to wear down the roads. So they felt incomplete, and leaves lay about, their crushing beneath my feet giving my walk a strange soundtrack.

A group of men sat in a doorway smoking tobacco from a big bong, watching me walk past with impassive faces. I hurried a bit. What I was looking for was near, I knew. I turned a corner into a small side street, and saw it – the red and blue glow of the humming fluorescent lights, the pictures of the scantily clad lady with big breasts. I had found the local internet cafe.

I walked in through the narrow doorway, squeezing past a young teenage couple holding hands and staring out of the door. The guy had a scar across his forehead, I wondered idly what their story was, it may have been an amazing love story, it could have been endlessly tragic, perhaps they were completely boring. I’ll never know, because I walked into that room and was hit by the combined glow of hundreds of computer screens, different figures danced across many screens in some dance dance revolution clone, colourful websites reflected off the eyes of engrossed guys, smoking men scrolled through the news, cliques of teens starred together at a screen and shouted and laughed. The room was huge and it was filled with people surfing the internet and playing games. The internet cafe, long thought to be dead, had simply retreated here into the mountains, and it fed the local population with all the entertainment they could not afford to have at home.

After the necessary registration with my passport at the counter, I bought an entire night of internet surfing, starting off by checking what was new at techcrunch. I went through the usual schedule of websites I read, skipping only facebook and twitter, as they don’t work here.

Being the only foreigner in there, I was getting a lot of looks, giggles and yelled out “HELLOs” from the kids around. I expected them to come talk to me at some point, so when someone tapped my shoulder, I was suprised that rather than some spiky haired teenager, it was a somewhat middle-aged smiling man with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He introduced himself with the sentence: “TechCrunch is my favorite website, too”. His english was heavily accented, but good.

I simply looked up at him, unsure what to reply. I didn’t need to say anything, because he started talking to me about the last few articles he had read on TechCrunch. I got only a few sentences in, mostly in agreement with his somewhat unusual but pretty insightful opinions about what they wrote. He spoke as if he had never spoken to anyone about TechCrunch, and needed to get all his thoughts out.

After 30 minutes of mostly listening, he invited me out to have a drink with him and his friends. He excitedly made phone calls in the local dialect and we went out. We walked over to some local food place, and sat outside on plastic chairs, several beers quickly appearing on the table. Soon, several of his friends popped in a shinily new BYD car, and they joined me.

He told me what he does: he sells software. And he sells a lot of software. Every month, he makes more than $5000, which is more than 50 times the average salary where he lives. He told me how he does it, and it’s a bit unusual.

He had learnt how to program from a friend of his. They had both moved to Kunming and started working, but when his dad got sick, he had to go home and farm to keep the family alive. His dad was sick for close to a year, and they needed money. Unable to travel, he had started looking for jobs on Odesk, Rentacoder and such sites based on recommendation from his friend. After writing some software for a client, he noticed something important:

- If he simply looked at the list of software projects available for jobs, he would have ideas on what software to develop.

He did this, and rather than making software for clients, he created his own software products, which he put on the internet. He said that 3 days after he copied a simple idea from the rentacoder list on his website, he was making 2 sales a day. $20 per day, which basically doubled his monthly earnings as a farmer. He continued working on more products and copying more ideas, and soon he had 10 different software that he was selling. Sales were low at the start, but even then for him it was a lot of money.

He kept doing this, cloning software he found that people wanted by looking at open projects on rentacoder, most of his software being related to video encoding. Additionally, he would take open source software, change the way it looked and sell it online. He said he’d get a few refunds, but most people would purchase it without complaining. He said he tried selling Firefox for a while, but sales were very low due to the free competition.

At the moment he’s making more than $5000 a month, and he’s been making it for more than 4 years already. He’s one of the bigger players in the video encoding software market.

As I left, he dropped me off at the local hotel where my friends were. He shook my hand enthusiastically and said he would email me, but that he had to sleep now, because he had to go to the farm early the next morning. Surprised, I asked him why he still farmed. He shrugged and lifted his palms in that typical smiling manner that the villagers there have. “No why!” he said. “I enjoy farming”.

原文来自：Max Klein

译文来自：TechCrunch中文站