Career Thoughts
Tips to keep in mind as your progress in your career.
<h2>Know your Business’s Goals</h2> <p>You should always be able to tie your work to a business goal or understand how your work benefits the customer.</p> <h2>Be Opinionated</h2> <ul><li><p>Voice your opinion and back it up with experience or findings when needed.</p></li><li><p>Understand not all decisions will go your way of course and you will be wrong from time to time.</p></li><li><p>Best practices are learned from experience so be flexible to them changing over time as you learn more.</p></li></ul> <h2>Be Reliable</h2> <ul><li><p>The most important thing here is being able to do what you say you can do, whether it's big or small.</p></li><li><p>Folks in technical roles need to be doers not talkers.</p></li></ul> <h2>Communication Tips</h2> <ul><li><p>Be direct and use an active voice.</p></li><li><p>Know whether the audience is technical or non-technical.</p></li><li><p>Prefer brevity. Keep emails short. Put what you need in the subject.</p></li></ul> <h2>Be a Learn-it-all</h2> <ul><li><p>Dedicate time on the job for learning.</p></li><li><p>Book your calendar off for focus time if needed.</p></li><li><p>Disable chat notifications if needed.</p></li><li><p>The more you learn about technology, the more you and your team will do without needing to coordinate with other teams. Prefer building over coordinating.</p></li></ul> <h2>Start Small and Improve</h2> <ul><li><p>Make incremental progress.</p></li><li><p>Develop proof-of-concepts in a way they can be deployed to production with a little more effort.</p></li></ul> <h2>Receiving Feedback</h2> <ul><li><p>Treat feedback as a gift. You don't keep some gifts so sometimes say thank you but discard the feedback depending on its origin.</p></li><li><p>Say thank you, focus on listening, and take time to absorb it. Avoid challenging the feedback.</p></li></ul> <h2>Salary</h2> <ul><li><p>I do not know whether this is still true but when I started working back in 2002, I needed to switch jobs from time to time to get a decent salary bump.</p></li><li><p>Internal policies may prevent raises of more than 5% for example.</p></li><li><p>Money is important but it isn't everything! Working with nice, smart people is worth a lot to me. </p></li></ul> <p></p>