About careers

In this post I’ll write some things I’ve learned that might help you understand yourself better professionally and hopefully improve your (and mine) chances to get hired.

TLDR

• you need to have skin in the game
• you need to practice a lot
• you need external feedback (learn in public, colleagues, teachers, a mentor)

Career

A career is what you call an individual’s journey through learning and work. You can grow vertically or horizontally in your career.

Horizontally, you can be more technical in a specific field, like specialist back-end development.

Vertically is what people used to think about growing on an enterprise, like from being a janitor up until manager.

But one might not exclude the other, there are companies and especially startups that value professionals that are hands-on technical experts and managers altogether

Responsibilities

Now let me talk to you 🫵.

• You are responsible for planning your career
• You are responsible to guarantee that you keep up with the competition on the long term
• The company can but doesn’t have the obligation to help you develop yourself in your career

How to keep yourself competitive

Now that you now you are responsible and accountable for the decisions you take from now on, there are some topics that, if you keep in mind, they will help you to keep yourself competitive.

Look for tendencies

• what technologies are hyped at the moment?
• what do other employees do that makes the manager happier or give the company more profit?
• what can you post on social media that can get you more visibility?
• Have a non-linear line of thought: analyze your decisions; having more challenging decisions means you’re improving your value as a decision maker

Multidisciplinarity

• talk with different people from different places with different competencies
• work with projects you’ve never done before
• make decisions you never made before

Challenges over your career

These are some challenges you will face during your whole career.

• Volatility: things change all the time, you need to be resilient to keep yourself competitive
• Uncertainty: You need to be antifragile and flexible
  • I recommend reading The Drunkward’s Walk (by Leonard Mlodinow), Antifragile and Skin In The Game (both from Nassim Taleb) in order to improve yourself even more on matters of uncertainty
• Complexity
  • This is even more important nowadays with LLMs; it is way less important that you can code itself, but way more important that you are able to choose the best approach for that solves the problem most effectively
  • Multidisciplinarity can help you with it
• Ambiguity: You must make a decision (not deciding is still a decision); for that, you need to have courage

Competence - skills

Being competent is delivering high quality of execution and high quality result.

How can you be more competent? You need to be able to answer these questions about the situation:

• What are you doing? Why?
• How are you doing it?
  • what abilities you need?

And most of all, you must have attitude, true and honest desire for doing it.

Book recommendation: “The quest for competencies” by Scott B. Parry

There are technical competencies, called hard skills, and behavioral competencies, called soft skills.

You need hard skills since they are specific requisites for a profession or job you’ll be doing, yet, nowadays it is relatively easier to learn and actually build things faster.

Soft skills, on the other hand, are harder to develop and usually matter more when hiring or keeping yourself in a job.

Soft skills

But which soft skills are actually important? Well, if you’re talking about a specific company, there’ll definitely be different skills that they value most, that’s why you should pay attention to their values and their objectives as a company.

Generally speaking, there are a few soft skills you can develop that will definitely help you:

• Emotional intelligence
  • It is not about controlling your emotions
  • it is about understanding your own emotional processes
  • it is about understanding how can you change the way you act and react
• Assertiveness
  • being assertive is express yourself clearly without embarrassing yourself or others
  • what you gain from it
    • constructive relations
    • reduce miscommunications
    • avoid unnecessary conflicts
    • self confidence and self control
• Persuasion / negotiation
  • separate people from the problem
  • focus on each participant’s interests, not positions
  • get creative about creating options with mutual benefits
  • focus on objective criteria
• Collaboration
  • interpersonal relationship
  • are you a good person to talk to?
  • are you a good person to hang out with?
  • can you provide and receive feedback properly?
• Decision making
  • you need to be accountable for your own decisions to be able to make decisions for others
• Creativeness
  • new ideas
  • ideas that are realistically applicable
  • ideas that you make real (writing, doing)
  • being well rested or bored increases your chance of being more creative
  • fear of exposing yourself kills creativeness
  • fear of asking questions kills creativeness
  • fear of doing something wrong kills creativeness
• Strategic view
  • long term view
  • for this you need actual experience - the so called “seniority” - in order to foresee some events, define objectives and spotlight the correct path for others.

Hard skills

These kind of skills are considered simpler because it is all about practicing, making a course, whereas for soft skills you actually need human interaction, it involves way more variables for interfering your development, but mostly, it depends way more on how actually you unconsciously want to get better.

Hard skills being simpler does not mean that they’re easy, but each time (in a relatively short period of time) you do something, it does get easier.

In short, you need to do stuff (70% or more of the time), learn stuff (10%) and get feedback (10%).

For getting feedback, I recommend:

• learning in public
• building in public
• going to a good university
  • make connections with intelligent colleagues, professors, all kinds of people
• participate on communities (especially if you’re in tech)
• cultivate friendships that share your passions
• find a mentor

Conclusion

I wrote all of it so I could come back and remember it all. These writings are actually what I believe to be actually helpful for building my own career.

I hope you found it useful just as it is being useful to me.

If there’s any doubt, a thought you want to share, or if you just want to connect with me, make sure get in touch.