00:00 if you're just starting out in your
00:01 software development career you might be
00:03 wondering are there any things I need to
00:05 worry about that other people might tell
00:08 me about my career that really aren't
00:10 true or if you've been developing
00:12 software for a while you might be
00:14 frustrated in your career like I was and
00:17 try to figure out what's really going
00:19 wrong so in this video I want to give
00:22 you some tips about the five biggest
00:24 lies that I've been told and many others
00:27 are in the software industry right after
00:30 this hi I'm Jamie Edwards and a healthy
00:40 software developer I want to help you
00:42 have a sustainable career in software so
00:44 you don't get burned out you don't get
00:46 pushed around by people who don't really
00:48 understand software development and you
00:51 can just get back to having a great
00:52 career when I first started developing
00:55 software over 20 years ago I was really
00:58 excited about technology working with
01:01 many different people and getting the
01:02 opportunity to learn how to use
01:04 programming languages tools how
01:06 processes worked but the more years I
01:09 worked in the industry I really started
01:11 to realize that there was something
01:12 wrong about how I was going about
01:14 developing software and when I looked at
01:16 everybody else at most of the companies
01:18 that I worked at they kind of looked at
01:20 it the same way that I did and it felt
01:22 like something was missing or wrong so
01:25 in this video I'm gonna give you five
01:27 lies that the software industry I think
01:29 tells many of us about ourselves and
01:31 about our careers that if you can avoid
01:33 these lies and just refuse what people
01:36 tell you about them I hope it'll help
01:38 you be much more happy in your career so
01:41 the first lie is that your technical
01:43 skills are going to determine your
01:45 success while during the interviewing
01:47 process at most companies the thing a
01:50 lot of interviewers like to focus on is
01:52 whether you know the programming
01:54 language or the tech stack or whatever
01:56 discipline they're using I've been in
01:59 many situations at companies where we
02:01 hire somebody onto our team and they
02:03 pass the technical interview with flying
02:05 colors but they're basically a complete
02:08 jerk to work with and it doesn't matter
02:11 how great they are at the technology if
02:13 to work with them if they don't not to
02:15 communicate well and if they basically
02:17 piss off management they're not gonna
02:19 last very long so it's very important if
02:22 you want to get into software
02:23 development that you don't buy the lie
02:25 that just being really smart or really
02:28 intellectually ahead of everybody else
02:30 what the technology is what's gonna
02:32 create success you have to care about
02:34 other people and being able to
02:36 communicate and interact with them well
02:38 too the second lie is that harder work
02:42 gets more done it's so common in this
02:47 industry and software development that
02:49 many of us will drink several cups of
02:51 coffee throughout the day to keep us
02:53 amped up and have a lot of energy and we
02:56 might compare one day how productive we
02:58 feel we were to another based on how
03:01 many lines of code we wrote but you can
03:05 write fifteen lines of code that do the
03:08 same thing as several thousand lines of
03:11 code depending on how you structure it
03:13 and write it and think about it and
03:15 there's also code you can write that's
03:17 easier for other people to understand or
03:19 harder for other people to understand
03:21 and in my experience the best software
03:25 developers that I come across are the
03:27 ones who are the most creative and
03:29 creativity tends to take being calm and
03:33 having a clear mind about something when
03:36 you're going about doing it so one of
03:38 the big lies in our industry is that to
03:40 be a good software developer you got to
03:42 stay up late or you got to Jack yourself
03:45 up with stimulants and you got to just
03:47 crank out tons of lines of code this lie
03:49 is absolutely not true if you have
03:53 healthy boundaries you set for yourself
03:55 in your career and you learn to just
03:57 think through a problem at a comp ace
04:00 and come up with the exact right
04:02 solution you can actually save yourself
04:04 a lot of time and produce more for the
04:07 company that you work for when you come
04:09 up with the most creative and really
04:12 ultimately best solution without rushing
04:15 yourself the third lie that many people
04:18 buy about the software industry through
04:21 pressure and just the way many companies
04:23 are managed is that past success with
04:27 determines future results what I mean by
04:30 this is that many people are successful
04:33 on one project for one company and they
04:36 go to another company and they are not
04:39 successful because they look at that new
04:41 company and it's tech stack and its
04:43 problems and its people as though they
04:46 were the same as the first problem and
04:48 this is just something that I had to
04:50 through consulting when I was in
04:52 consulting the last decade I worked with
04:55 about 20 different companies over 20
04:58 different companies and when you go from
05:00 company to company the company and
05:02 develop software you really learn you
05:03 can take you know a stack like Ruby on
05:06 Rails or nodejs or you know something
05:09 with it written in C sharp or Java and
05:10 you can solve a problem at one company
05:13 and go to another company and try to use
05:16 that same set of patterns and it just
05:18 doesn't work and you can also take a
05:20 development process something like scrum
05:22 or Kanban or DevOps
05:24 and try to get it working at one company
05:27 and then go to another company and try
05:29 to use it the same way and it just won't
05:32 work because of the people and the
05:33 personalities so one of the big lies
05:36 that you need to be careful for is that
05:38 you become overly confident that just
05:41 because something worked in one
05:42 situation it's gonna always work in
05:45 others and this is a difficult lesson
05:46 because many people just don't realize
05:50 this and especially when hiring managers
05:52 and recruiters are bringing people in to
05:54 new companies they think just because
05:56 somebody has used the list of all the
05:59 same technologies may be that they want
06:01 that they're using on their product that
06:03 they're gonna be the right fit for that
06:05 project or for that team and every
06:07 person looks at things differently
06:09 everybody thinks about how to solve
06:11 problems with technology differently
06:13 they come from different backgrounds
06:14 they communicate differently so the
06:18 better job you can do to just be open
06:20 that everybody is going to be different
06:23 when we develop software will avoid you
06:24 from buying into this lie the fourth lie
06:28 that I often hear told in our industry
06:30 is that bigger companies have better
06:33 practices so if you go on to many
06:37 subreddits that talk about
06:38 people's careers and things like that in
06:40 the software industry there's a lot of
06:42 people trying to get jobs at the big
06:44 four the the big software company names
06:47 that most of you have heard of and
06:49 there's a lot of money that people can
06:51 often make to get into these companies
06:53 as their first job but the thing that
06:55 they often also are sold on or think is
06:58 well because these companies are so big
07:00 and they have such a large market in so
07:02 many products we're gonna deal with
07:04 scaling problems in other words you know
07:07 economies of scale so many users using
07:09 the system so much processing power
07:11 being used that we're gonna learn things
07:13 that we would never learn anywhere else
07:15 and while that's true that working at
07:19 one of the big force is gonna give you
07:21 some really great technology
07:22 opportunities and that might be exactly
07:24 what you're looking for in my experience
07:27 of working with very large software
07:29 companies not the big four but big
07:32 companies that you also would know the
07:34 name of one of the biggest challenges is
07:37 not the scaling of the technology it's
07:39 actually the scaling of the people the
07:42 more people that you have working for a
07:44 company though easier it is for people
07:46 I've worked at companies where there's
07:48 somebody who's been there for a year and
07:50 nobody even really knows what they're
07:53 doing I mean this is you could call this
07:56 an organizational dysfunction but I
07:58 think one of the things you just need to
08:00 be careful for is if you choose to join
08:01 a large company to not have the rose
08:05 colored glasses sort of on that just
08:07 because you're making a lot of money and
08:09 their hat they have big technical
08:11 scaling problems that that's gonna
08:13 actually be the best learning ground for
08:15 you and the biggest thing you might need
08:17 to watch out for is the fact that most
08:19 of these big companies because they're
08:21 either publicly traded or they have a
08:23 lot of investors they don't care about
08:25 the toil to their employees so much
08:28 meaning the working conditions how
08:30 overworked people are is less important
08:33 than making investors happy and these
08:35 bigger companies will often acquire a
08:38 whole bunch of smaller companies to try
08:40 to integrate their technology and they
08:42 create these giant masses of a whole
08:45 bunch of Technology challenges just to
08:48 continue to grow in profit at a scale
08:52 great on Wall Street but might not be
08:54 right for your career in the fifth lie
08:57 that the software industry especially
08:59 employers often tell and we see this on
09:02 LinkedIn we see this in articles when
09:04 people talk to you about your career
09:06 growth is that promotions are
09:08 proportional and what I mean by that is
09:11 if you've been developing software let's
09:13 say you're making about a hundred and
09:14 twenty thousand dollars a year doing
09:17 nodejs work or something are you doing
09:20 reacting on the front end or something
09:22 like that and you're working in a
09:23 company and you really feel like wow
09:25 this is great money but you want to get
09:27 promoted you want to become you know a
09:29 senior developer or a lead develop or an
09:32 architect and again depending on the the
09:34 company you work at and the city or
09:36 state or country you work in what you
09:39 make is gonna vary a lot right
09:41 but in my career and I've experienced
09:44 this many times and I also have had many
09:47 people I've worked with that have
09:48 experienced this often if you decide to
09:52 take a promotion you're really only
09:54 gonna get a bump let's say you get an
09:56 extra ten thousand dollars or maybe even
09:58 twenty thousand dollars to take a big
10:01 promotion well you have to look at the
10:04 percentage extra that is on top of the
10:07 large salary you're already making and
10:09 then also look at how many extra
10:12 responsibilities you're gonna take on
10:13 and I find many software developers that
10:16 are great with technology but they
10:18 really don't like working with other
10:20 people and they haven't developed their
10:22 communications or soft skills they are
10:25 not good leaders and so they often
10:27 sometimes will take these promotions and
10:30 make a little bit more money again ten
10:33 or twenty thousand dollars might sound
10:35 like a lot of money but proportionally
10:37 it's not and then they're frustrated
10:39 because their jobs way harder they have
10:42 less energy they feel burned out and
10:44 stressed out because they're trying to
10:45 deal with people and they don't really
10:47 like that so if you're someone who's
10:49 looking for advancement in your career
10:51 be careful that you don't choose to take
10:54 a promotion that has way more
10:57 responsibilities for not that much more
10:59 money unless you really want to do the
11:03 things that that new
11:04 motion takes and you want to grow and I
11:07 I can say I've done this some times in
11:10 my career where it's been a good choice
11:11 that I took the promotion and there's
11:13 been other times it's been a really poor
11:15 choice so this tip I'm giving you about
11:18 a lie to avoid it is very contextual and
11:21 it does depend a lot about the company
11:22 you work for and what the situation is
11:25 but it's something that I think many of
11:27 us in software development we just don't
11:29 think about enough so are you able to
11:32 see through the lies of the software
11:34 industry do you believe that you can
11:36 make healthy decisions about your career
11:38 so that you don't get swept up in what
11:40 other people are doing leave me some
11:42 comments below if you're new to my
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