The one bit of advice I wish I’d received much earlier in my career is: Saying yes to one thing means that you are always saying no to something else! It seems pretty obvious when you think about it, as time is finite. So every little task you take on is consuming a part of that finite resource. When you’re starting out, you’re probably ‘time rich / cash poor’ which is probably the worst combination . . .
Last year, as part of a series of posts, I asked: “Are you investing in your own career?“. This, in part, came about from a great quote that heard: Do you have 10 years experience, or 1 year’s experience repeated 10 times? I think the majority of developers starting out are fired up and excited every day. Everything is new, everything is a challenge. Just getting something to work, no matter how is a success. . . .
I can still remember my first phone interview for a job. I had no idea what to expect so really wasn’t looking forward to it, but it can’t have gone too badly because I got the job. Now that I’ve been lucky enough to progress in my career to positions where I’m conducting the other side of the phone interview I’ve been quite surprised how little it takes to stand out from the crowd: 1. . . .
Sometimes, no matter how much you prepare, you’re just going to have a bad interview! I just wish someone had given me that nugget of advice when I was starting out. If you’re into fitness, as you’re probably painfully aware, some days you can be really looking forward to a run/swim/workout. But when you start you just can’t get into it! In these situations, people generally have no problem classing it as an off day . . .
In my previous articles I have written about are you investing in your own career and starting out in software development. But there is another important question, is your company investing in you and your career? In my current role, I am lucky to work for a great company that values its teams/employees and have been able to implement/roll out the following for my development and test teams: For the development team, individual PluralSight subscriptions. . . .
If you’re trying to begin your career in software development it might feel like all the positions you see are asking for previous experience and there are few opportunities to gain that required experience. In my opinion, as a relatively new industry, it feels like we’re currently going through some growing pains. Companies are struggling to find suitability qualified mid/senior developers but very few organisations have a plan in place to help train the juniors . . .
As developers we are in an interesting, potentially unique, industry where the bar for entry is extremely low. A large proportion of the population have access to computers / internet and many of the popular languages / IDE’s are free. In fact you can start your development career with just a browser and notepad/textedit, learning HTML/CSS and Javascript and extending to Node/Angular and many other JS frameworks. This low bar of entry continues throughout the . . .