Career Advice for Programmers
One developer’s journey to find the perfect job.
Abstract
Do you know how to remain a programmer? To avoid being “promoted” into positions away from technology and code? Did they teach you at university that you need social skills to be a good developer? What other skills do you need that aren’t technical? Did you know that all development roles are not created equal? Is it true that moving jobs a lot is a Bad Thing? In this session, Trisha Gee (Java Champion, 2015 MongoDB Master, 2016 / 2014 / 2012 JavaOne Rock Star & Technical Advocate for JetBrains) will share some lessons she learnt the hard way over nearly twenty years of managing her career as a Java developer. She’ll talk about what’s really important to developers when thinking about their careers, and give you tools for working out what your next steps are. If nothing else, you’ll get to laugh at the (many) mistakes she’s made in her search for The Perfect Job.
Brilliant start to day 3 at #prognet London 2018 with secret insights from @trisha_gee "To hack the system you have to know your place in it"⚡Hope you all have another interesting day of learning! @skillsmatter pic.twitter.com/zI8v7R6sxQ
— Melita Joy (@Willow640) September 14, 2018
This talk has been presented several times, each time with a different focus. All the talks below have overlap, but they’re effectively completely different presentations.
Videos
- Keynote: O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, New York: a short, 20 minute version aimed at architects and experts. This link contains a clip of the talk and a link to the full one.
- Keynote: O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference, London: a short, 20 minute version aimed at architects and experts. This link contains a clip of the talk and a link to the full one.
- Keynote: ProgNET: 101 slides of content crammed into less than an hour.
- GOTO Aarhus: this version of the talk covers a wide variety of topics
- YOW Australia: this version has a different focus, showing how to grow or change your career, via stories from my own.
Slides
Other links
Links and resources mentioned in the talk are mostly my own blog posts and talks
- Staying Ahead of the Curve (original blog post)
- Staying Ahead of the Curve (conference talk)
- Becoming Fully Buzz Word Compliant
- How to make your CV not suck
- Technical Tests: You’re Doing It Wrong, Part 1
- Technical Tests: You’re Doing It Wrong, Part 2
- Life on both sides of the interview table
There’s lots of other interesting stuff around this topic though. Here’s a handful of stuff that helped to influence the talk I gave at ProgNET.
- The New Best Engineer
- Career advice for novice software developers, IT pros, and tech workers
- On Engineers and Influence
- Being Glue I loved this slide deck and wish I’d seen the presentation
- Decision-Making Should Be a Required Course in Every High School
Books
- The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
Gives a lot of the history of programming as a profession. This is the book which made me realise that we have no idea how to figure out if someone is actually good at programming
- Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
Not specifically filled with career advice, but eye-opening - it helped me to understand there are lots of social pressures and cultural aspects that limit our careers, and they may be out of our direct control
- Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
If you work on anything that has users (so, all of us) this is a required read. Also useful for understanding how we learn (it made me understand why I was not improving at Spanish, for example).
- Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
I haven’t revisited this book recently so I’m not sure how well it has aged, but it does give an insight into how some people do technical recruitment
Gives a lot of the history of programming as a profession. This is the book which made me
realise that we have no idea how to figure out if someone is actually good at programming
Not specifically filled with career advice, but eye-opening - it helped me to understand there are lots of social pressures
and cultural aspects that limit our careers, and they may be out of our direct control
If you work on anything that has users
(so, all of us) this is a required read. Also useful for understanding how we learn (it made me
understand why I was not improving at Spanish, for example).
I haven’t revisited this book recently so I’m not sure how well it has aged, but it does give an
insight into how some people do technical recruitment