Career Thoughts

Tips to keep in mind as your progress in your career.

Know your Business’s Goals

You should always be able to tie your work to a business goal or understand how your work benefits the customer.

Be Opinionated

• Voice your opinion and back it up with experience or findings when needed.

• Understand not all decisions will go your way of course and you will be wrong from time to time.

• Best practices are learned from experience so be flexible to them changing over time as you learn more.

Be Reliable

• The most important thing here is being able to do what you say you can do, whether it's big or small.

• Folks in technical roles need to be doers not talkers.

Communication Tips

• Be direct and use an active voice.

• Know whether the audience is technical or non-technical.

• Prefer brevity. Keep emails short. Put what you need in the subject.

Be a Learn-it-all

• Dedicate time on the job for learning.

• Book your calendar off for focus time if needed.

• Disable chat notifications if needed.

• 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.

Start Small and Improve

• Make incremental progress.

• Develop proof-of-concepts in a way they can be deployed to production with a little more effort.

Receiving Feedback

• Treat feedback as a gift. You don't keep some gifts so sometimes say thank you but discard the feedback depending on its origin.

• Say thank you, focus on listening, and take time to absorb it. Avoid challenging the feedback.

Salary

• 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.

• Internal policies may prevent raises of more than 5% for example.

• Money is important but it isn't everything! Working with nice, smart people is worth a lot to me.