Don’t Ignore Your Career, continued
Continued from this post...
The execution section of Fowler's book is about day-to-day activity—how you're delivering value to yourself, your team and your projects. The emphasis here should be at the team and project level. Fowler suggests that sometimes we get wrapped up in ourselves and expect everything to revolve around us, which can cause our overall performance to decline. Instead we should be focusing on the quality of our job and deliverable—daily. Loving what we do, even the maintenance or drudge work, and truly embracing our profession. What a concept!
Other good points he makes relate to not burning ourselves out with overtime and learning to say "No" more often, and learning how to fail. Failure implies that we're stretching ourselves and taking risk—that we're trying to do things outside of our comfort zone and that with each failure comes a later, more experienced success.
Marketing -- Not Just For the Suits
This section makes the point that marketing is all of our jobs and it mostly relates to marketing ourselves. One of the valuable recommendations relates to communication. We all know the stereotype of the introverted programmer who has difficulty asking for coffee at the counter let alone conducting a thoughtful conversation with a business stakeholder. Well, there's a grain of truth to it that needs addressing. Programmers need to work hard on the soft skills—on their ability to comfortably and smoothly communicate with a varied audience, effectively and powerfully and to let their ideas, thoughts, motivations be heard.
He also makes the point that we need to create our personal brand, assessing how we are perceived within our companies and externally. How we're contributing to our profession. For example, if someone were to Google us, what would they find? And more importantly what perceptions would the findings yield?
Maintaining Your Edge
It starts with the realization that your skills are already obsolete. That you've lost your competitive edge and need to work harder at your craft. Another point focuses us towards not identifying too much with our jobs—not becoming too comfortable in any position. I've always felt this way myself. Perhaps because I've gone through several layoffs, I've adopted a view that any position I have is transient and that my security is based on my own abilities and not my job of the moment.
Fowler also spends some time here emphasizing the importance of your creating a map for your career goals and path�something to check progress against and to adjust. It also implies that you've watched where the market is going and crafted a map that matches your personal goals and that it is relevant.
If You Can't Beat 'Em...
The technical globalization and outsourcing phenomena is creating opportunities for engineers to take on non-development roles. As we execute more distributed projects, it creates the need for group leaders, project managers, business analysts, and architectural roles. Roles that offshore resources aren't particularly strong at and where you can truly differentiate yourself in supporting the execution of distributed projects.
Learning from open source development efforts is a wonderful way to improve your skills in this area. You can gain real experience in 7x24 development efforts, the challenges that different cultures bring into play, and how to effectively communicate across a broad team.
Ok -- So What?
I hope you see why I'm a fan of Chad Fowler and why I brought up the book in the context of my latest personal improvement themes. There really is a tremendous amount of wonderful advice here that I believe every developer should hear. We are more at risk today that at any other time in our professions history. And there are things we can do about it! 52 things to be precise :-)
And all of it also connects back to metrics. There's not truer way to understand our value than to review our metrics. They aren't afraid to face us. They don't lack communication abilities. There's no jealousy or hidden agendas. They simply are! It's the most honest assessment of our capabilities that we can receive. And underlying them are hints towards our strengths and strategies for improving them.
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Don’t Ignore Your Career!
