On Career, Roller Coasters, and Surfing

When I was in university, I didn't give much thought to career. I knew what I wanted to do (write code), but beyond that, I was just riding the electrical engineering / computer science roller coaster wherever it took me. My idea of long term decision making was restricted to sending my resume to companies with cool sounding jobs, and eschewing the ones with terrible sounding ones. I gave no thought to improving myself for the next gig, or where my career would take me. I was very fatalistic about my career path -- what will happen will happen, so just go with it. Based on my interactions with the interns at work and talking to students at career fairs, I think a lot of college students are still this way. It is very easy because it takes little energy. But what if the track breaks?

When it comes to career, it's better to be a surfer and take control of your path as much is humanly possible when riding waves on the ocean of a career. Instead of just hanging on for dear life and seeing where the roller coaster track goes, you should direct your board across the wave. If the tide is out and the wave is going to crash on a reef, you should have the wherewithal to steer away from disaster, or end the ride on the current wave and paddle out for another. To do that, you need to keep your head up and see what's going on around you -- actually manage your own career.

Larry O'Brien has written many a column in Software Development Times on this very topic. This column made me stop what I was doing and read Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. DeMarco and Lister discuss how a company, and its managers should treat its employees. I agree with pretty much everything they state in the book. The corollary is, what is prescribed in the book is what every engineer should be looking for, if not demanding.

O'Brien's discussion on professional networking and career maintenance (Part 1, Part 2) was spot on as well. You're much more likely to find a gig through maintained professional connections than by submitting your resume to the human resources department of a corporation. Especially if that resume is filled with grammatical and spelling errors, or is just plain hard to read.

David Brady echoed O'Brien's opinions back in 2013, coming at it from a different angle in his posts on his blog, Heart, Mind and Code (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). He went a bit farther than O'Brien did, going into where your professional loyalties should lie.

There's no point in me regurgitating what they wrote, since you can -- and should -- click on the links and read the writings for yourself. Both O'Brien and Brady are much better writers than I, and will get you thinking about managing your career.