This article refers to those specialists who have already found their niche in the Tech field and have been working here for several years. This article applies to those who came to Tech not from a specialized university. It is possible that you, like me, came to Tech after completing an economic direction at a university. This type of people has one big problem: in the head there is only the knowledge that came with solving practical problems at work. There is a lack of a systematic approach to education, which means that these specialists have a number of "white spots" in education.
Example: ignorance of simple algorithms, basic data structures.
The examples in this article are for programmers, but the meaning of the examples is also suitable for other areas of Tech.
Rule 1 - Every six months we schedule interviews in order to find out what is our worth
Each person has their own bar for success. The person reaches it and stops. Someone just went into Tech and stopped at setting up users' computers, while someone wants his family not to need anything and raises this bar higher.
In addition to material success, some people are looking for fame. You can write articles for magazines, be a blogger, speak at conferences, participate and win at hackathons. Development gives you the opportunity to get what you want from life (provided that you really want more).
Some people, having read up to this point, will think: "I cannot find a better job than what I'm doing now." In a sense, this is true, since each person roughly feels at what level they are in the market. But many are mistaken at the same time, because they do not know what is their actual worth on the market. To find out, you need to go to interviews.
Rule 2 - We free up time and consciousness for our development.
Let's solve the following problem. Given that your day consists of:
These activities take 24 hours in total, and that is how many hours we have each day. The number of hours in a day is unchanged. Therefore, if we want to devote time to development, we need to change something in our daily activities. The options are as follows:
What do we get as a result? Moving to remote work is important as it gives you time to learn. Avoiding computer games saves not only time, but also keeps your brain less busy, providing more opportunities for learning.
Rule 3 - We read the documentation for your programming language, for each framework used.
Many programmers work with the technologies they only have to apply at work and do not know that other technologies exist in their stack.
Examples for the C# or Java programming language:
Do you know about the existence of Nested classes? That you can create a nested class inside a class?
public class Sales
{
private class Order
{
}
}
Or how do you answer the question: is it possible to change a class variable with the readonly modifier?
Answer options:
To know the answers to these questions, you need to read thematic resources.
So we have come to a new rule:
Rule 4 - We continuously work on expanding and maintaining our professional network.
I was surprised that many people even in Tech do not know what hackathons are. Hackathon is a Tech competition between teams, usually happening on Saturday-Sunday. A hackathon is an opportunity to learn something new in Tech, receive prizes for participation or victory, meet different people, and therefore expand your network of acquaintances.
Why meet other people? There is a relationship between a person's success and the number of people in that person's network. The meaning of the relationship is as follows: if you have no connections, then it is almost impossible to become successful. If there are many connections, then many problems can be solved, which means you can achieve the necessary goals.
Rule 5 - Develop your LinkedIn account
A good way to make yourself known to the world is to create a LinkedIn account, grow your professional network and share your achievements there. As you upgrade your account, you will receive an increasing number of job offers.
Rule 6 - We save all the developments in GitHub.
It's hard to imagine life without Git. If you program and do not use Git, then you can easily lose your code or make, at best, rare backups of your data. In addition to saving your code, GitHub provides opportunities for teamwork, as well as showing the level of your code to anyone.