Monday Links: Personal Moats, Unfair Advantage, and Quitting
12 Jun 2023 #mondaylinksThis is a career-only episode. These are five links I found interesting in the last month.
Build Personal Moats
From this post, the best career advice is to build a personal moat: “a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career.” It continues describing good moats and how to find yours.
About personal moats:
- “Ask others: What’s something that’s easy for me to do but hard for others?”
- “Ideally you want this personal moat to help you build career capital in your sleep.”
- “If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.”
Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content meant for other roles
This post is to build a competitive advantage by consuming content targeted to other roles. This is a mechanism to create more empathy, gain understanding, and better work in cross-functional teams, among other reasons. It also suggests a list of roles we can start learning about.
Career Advice No One Gave Me: Give a Lot of Notice When You Quit
This is gold! There’re lots of posts on the Internet about interviewing, but few about quitting. This one is about how to quit leaving doors open. It has concrete examples to “drop the bomb.”
My 20-Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated
Reading this post, I realized I jumped to companies to always rewrite old applications. An old ASP.NET WebForms to a Console App. (Don’t ask me why!) An old ASP.NET WebForms again to an ASP.NET Web API project. An old Python scheduler to an ASP.NET Core project with HostedServices. History repeats itself, I guess. We’re writing legacy applications of tomorrow.
Let’s embrace that, quoting the post, “Given enough time, all your code will get deleted.”
What you give up when moving into engineering management
Being a Manager requires different skills than being an Individual Contributor. Often people get promoted to the Management track (without any training) only because they’re good developers. Arrrgggg! I’ve seen managers that are only good developers…and projects at risk because of that. This post shares why it’s hard to make the change and what we lost by moving to the Management track, focus time, for example.
Voilà! Another Monday Links. Do you think you have a personal moat or an unfair advantage? What is it? What are your quitting experiences? Until next Monday Links.
In the meantime, don’t miss the previous Monday Links on Interviewing, Zombies, and Burnout.
Happy coding!