[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What do you call technical debt, but for you...
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: What do you call technical debt, but for your career?
How do you overcome it?
Author : asasidh
Score : 10 points
Date : 2023-02-25 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
| surprisetalk wrote:
| _> How do you overcome it?_
|
| What an interesting way to frame it.
|
| Debt is not something to "overcome". Debt is generally a tool to
| trade time for value. If you're accruing career debt, it should
| hopefully pay dividends. This is what people call "career
| capital".
|
| Hard work does not automatically generate career capital. You
| have to be hard-working and/or smart and/or charismatic and/or
| lucky.
|
| The only honest way to make money is _to convince others to give
| you money_. My personal advice is to (1) learn what people want
| and (2) hone your ability to create useful goods and services.
|
| [1] https://taylor.town/make-money
|
| I highly recommend reading So Good They Can't Ignore You for more
| perspectives on building career capital.
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
| You/dp/03494158...
|
| Also consider reading How to Win Friends and Influence People for
| guidance on how to create charisma.
|
| [3] https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-
| People/dp/0...
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I guess a couple of examples of this could be:
|
| Having experience in some tech stack or industry that is no
| longer relevant but makes up a large part of your CV.
|
| Having some role (eg support or QA) on your CV that unfairly
| makes it seem like you are not as technical as other people.
|
| Being stuck in the same role for a long time with no progression
| - limiting then seniority of roles you can apply for.
|
| Being in an industry and getting pigeon holed - eg crypto,
| finance, insurance. Hard to get into a different industry as
| people will perceive you to be a certain type of developer.
|
| Not sure what it would be called - I guess "career limiting
| choices".
| warrenm wrote:
| re: "Having experience in some tech stack or industry that is
| no longer relevant but makes up a large part of your CV"
|
| I "solved" this for myself (switched from PS on a particular
| product line to an entirely different realm of PS about 6y ago)
| by formatting my [currently 4-page] resume thusly
|
| First page:
|
| - Summary
|
| - Recent Experience (show experience since my switch)
|
| - Featured Articles
|
| - Proficiencies
|
| - Certifications/Accreditations Held
|
| Second page:
|
| - Featured Speaking Experience
|
| - Education
|
| - Previous Career History (with less detail going back through
| my career history)
| channel_t wrote:
| In recent years I have definitely found my career history as
| technical tester to be a bit of a wart on my CV. Having
| originally come from scrappy fast-moving companies where the
| line between Dev/QA and even Ops to some degree get blurry,
| it's been a little bit of culture shock find that in many
| companies such roles are expected to operate in less-technical
| silos, and where even trying to have important technical
| discussions outside of the silo are often met with skepticism
| at best or outright dismissal at worst. I have also seen a
| strong trend towards outsourcing this kind of work, often
| further intensifying the silos. My awareness of this whole
| implicit sort of caste system has made me want to give up on my
| career in testing altogether and just try to climb the hill of
| selling myself as a traditional software engineer instead, even
| if testing/testability/test infra are still my passion and area
| of expertise.
|
| It's a tough call to make because I'm opinionated enough about
| how testing should be done that I also don't want to end up
| working as a software engineer in a company that treats QA like
| drones either.
| [deleted]
| dgunay wrote:
| A decent example from my own career (if we're going with the
| "debt as short-term gain, long-term loss" metaphor): I spent 3
| years at a DoD consulting firm for my second job.
|
| The pros:
|
| - Boost in pay ($40k -> $85k a year)
|
| - Boost in my credibility and resume (I had no STEM degree)
|
| - More professional development resources (I was able to do a
| master's while working and got to witness a lot of engineering
| in-the-large)
|
| The cons (at least in my mind, since I can't be sure what I would
| have done elsewhere):
|
| - A lot of the stuff I did there is unmarketable. No one is
| writing new code in Perl. And static analysis, while technically
| very interesting, is not a ginormous market.
|
| - I feel "behind" in the world of cloud computing since I didn't
| do much of it while I was there. Most of my next steps look like
| places that demand a lot of skill building big systems in the
| cloud. I'm doing it a lot right now but I feel like my team and I
| are learning a lot of lessons the hard way.
|
| - If I had succeeded in moonshotting my way into a top tier tech
| company earlier, I would have earned enough capital to take
| advantage of a couple critical periods (cheaper housing, various
| opportunities in the stock market, etc)
| [deleted]
| mooreds wrote:
| I've heard this called "10 years of work doing the same year 10
| times", but I don't know a catchy word or phrase. Maybe the
| Germans among us have a word?
|
| > How do you overcome it?
|
| How do you overcome technical debt in a project?
|
| * identify it
|
| * prioritize the issues; you can't tackle them all at once
|
| * work on one issue at a time over time
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-25 23:02 UTC)