Thursday, February 26, 2009

Advices for Techies

A good article on "Things I wish I 'd been told", written in 90's but still very relevant. The original article is here.

Here are some points that I find useful:

Experiment

Your 20s are a great time to take risks and try new things. So feel free to experiment with different jobs. Your goal should be to learn what types of jobs you’d like to be doing for the next 40 years or so. Trying different jobs is an excellent way to learn.

Avoid Becoming a Manager

While you experiment, however, avoid management positions. It is very easy to become a manager. The technical field is always happy to find a new mid-level manager who is technical competent. And your pay will initially rise much faster than if you stay a techie.

But there’s a serious downside. It is very hard to stay technically competent as a manager. So once you move to management, in about 7 to 15 years, you’ll have no useful technical skills. You just be another technically weak mid-level manager with indifferent business skills (since you don’t have an MBA). When times get tough, companies work very hard to keep their technical staff (and may even offer raises) while they are laying off mid-level managers. And it is a lot harder to find a new job as a manager than as a techie.

Keep Your Skills Current

A common career mistake is to fail to keep your technical skills current. Indeed, as you get older, your set of skills should be continuing to grow. Take the time to learn new programming languages as they become important. Keep track of technology as it changes. The simplest way to do keep current is to join a technical society like ACM or IEEE and read the monthly magazines they send you for interesting ideas. Many conferences have good tutorials, which is another way to keep in touch with progress in the field. Another nice feature of professional societies is that they have a wide range of group insurance plans that can be used to supplement gaps in your employer benefits (especially if, say, you are with a startup).



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