Episode #980 of .NET Rocks was an excellent 52 minutes on career management for developers. Since turning 40 this year, I’ve been thinking a lot more about my career and where I want to take it from here. The entire episode is well-worth listening to, but I would distill the essence of the advice from the guest (John Sonmez) down to this: market yourself.
When I gave a talk to some software engineering students back in February, I encouraged them to start blogs, give presentations and talks, and start podcasts (so far I’ve only done the first two myself). I suggested all of these things primarily as a way for them to improve their knowledge, but a higher profile on the internet is certainly a positive side-effect of doing those things. One point I didn’t add (which Sonmez brings up in his interview) is that consistency is very important. He recommends a blog post every week. That’s a goal I’m striving to meet (though not always succeeding).
Another related point Sonmez made is that developers need to set aside regular time to manage their career. The amount of time averaged something like an hour every two weeks. Consistency is especially important here as well–if not mandatory, given how quickly technology advances. I’ve recently started reading The Pragmatic Programmer, and it makes a similar point but uses investment terminology. Section 5 of the first chapter (Your Knowledge Portfolio) make this point:
“Your knowledge and experience are your most important professional assets. Unfortunately, they’re expiring assets.”
Knowledge about specific programming languages, databases, etc can age very poorly. Failing to consistently add new assets to your knowledge portfolio, to diversify and balance those assets among various technologies (of varying maturities), and to “re-balance” that portfolio over time can result in obsolescence. Given the prevalence of ageism/age discrimination that already exists in information technology, having old or irrelevant skills is a quick way to end up at the margins of IT, working in companies that are yoked to technologies that will make it increasingly difficult for them to serve their business goals (much less to serve your goals of having a fulfilling technology career).
I saw this first-hand in an unexpected way when I attended South by Southwest in 2013. One of the shuttle bus drivers I rode with regularly between my hotel and the various conference venues was actually doing it for income between short-term software development gigs all over the country. He was an older gentleman whose skills (at least on the Microsoft stack) hadn’t advanced beyond VB6. While there are still a ton of software systems built in VB6 (I certainly built my share of them in the late 1990s and early 2000s), his knowledge portfolio means that contract work maintaining VB6 code may be all that’s available to him.
In my own career, I’ve been working to broaden my own knowledge portfolio beyond the Microsoft stack. Microsoft itself is doing some of this by adopting external technologies like JavaScript, jQuery, and knockout.js for web application development. Angular.js is a framework strongly supported by Google that Microsoft has made sure plays very well with ASP.NET MVC. So building my knowledge of JavaScript, and platforms like node.js are also goals for me in doing what I can to remain an attractive candidate for hire–whether as an employee, or for a future of self-employment.