The One Skill Developers Need to Design their Careers and Break the Career Plateau
Speaker: Bruno “Javaman” Souza & Rodrigo Moutinho
@brjavaman and @rcmoutinho
For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents
For junior developers (less than three years)
- Most important is to do things
- If you don’t “do”, you don’t learn
- Can’t just read about programming
- Hard skills are precise. Do same way every time. Ex: typing, IDE shortcuts, Java language itself.
- Soft skills vary every time use them. Development is a soft skill. Rely on pattern recognition. Different each time. Speaking is a soft skill too.
For mid (3-10 years)
- “grow without doing anything”. People give you things to do and you grow by doing them.
- 2/3 developers think easy to get a job equivalent to one have right now
- Don’t typically worry about career at this point.
- Sometimes get stuck though. ex: job without opportunities to learn
Career plateau (10+ years)
This was most of the audience.
- Not bad. Means grew a lot.
- Now have to figure out what next.
- Don’t get discouraged that nothing happens for a few years
- Different for ever person
- We get comfortable and then realize something is wrong. So being comfortable becomes uncomfortable
Audience concerns
- Team uses legacy technology
- Not going to be marketable
- Got stuck doing something very good at, but how do something new
- Not growing for several years
- Complacency
- Take charge of career (vs having something happen to you)
- Be recognized (control how people see you)
- Don’t feel comfortable working with someone don’t trust
- Want to to be a manager/architect (when manager, dev skills atrophy(
- Don’t have opportunity
- Be relevant
- Stay on tech side without becoming a manager
- Discomfort on how to break through plateau
“You don’t die, but your brain thinks you will” – getting over fear of speaking/teaching
- Asked who was shy/scared of speaking in front of people. Then dragged one up on stage. Had a conversation with him up there and then him talk about a comfortable topic (what like about java) while looking at audience. Asked if could teach a student about Java. He said it was hard initially but got used to it.
- Then asked a second person to try. That person knew what was coming. This time, he emphasized looking at the audience as they spoke. Had audience intentionally ask a hard question. He did a good job saying would research and get back on it.
- All know enough to teach someone something. All don’t know enough to teach a different topic.
- People come to a presentation for a topic they want to learn about.
- Ok to recover after make a mistake
Know what want
- Often feel uncomfortable because don’t have new objectives. Think big.
- Need to know what want. Might have already achieved it.
- Infinite amount of things to learn. Will never get to 100% of knowledge.
- Know what want overall in life; not just about tech
Share what know
- Learning how to share is a skill common across everyone
- Testimonial from Rodrigo
- Helping enough other people helps you
- ex: you are stuck doing legacy code because nobody else knows what you do. or why new tech is important [seems oversimplified; maybe because ran out of time?]
My take: I like that they covered a lot of information before doing the intros. I also like that they tied the session to the audience. It was interesting hearing all the audience concerns/questions. Hearing the variety of problems and hearing your own is helpful. Even if it is “just” for dealing with imposter syndrome :). I think he could have spent a tiny bit less time on audience interaction and finished.