Skip to main content

Just another career path

As a software engineer, I recently have heard of a lot of feedback from my colleagues and friends that they don’t see their career path or they don’t know how to move to the new levels in their company. No exception, I used to have that thinking before. 

In my opinion, there is a very important reason why people are struggling to find the answer because “career path is not always the job titles”. Normally, each company has its own job titles such as junior-level developer, middle-level developer, senior-level developer, teach lead, software architect, CTO, etc. Hence, it is not true that a job title is reasonable for every company.

The interview is often conducted hardly to find a candidate matching the company title. If we have a good enough job title standard, the interview would take place very easily, right?

Therefore, I prefer to define my own career path through what skills are gained under a job title.

But wait, why do I need a career path?

To me, a career is an indispensable part of my life (and anyone else, sure?). My career path helps me visualize the big picture which motivates me to focus on the right track to achieve my next level. After all, a good career should bring me the fullest life having the following conditions:

  • It gives me a chance to indulge my passion

  • It gives me a chance that my contribution is appreciated

  • It gives me a chance to earn good enough money

Anyone should have their own career path, here is mine:

I see each level as a step of a ladder. It is very risky to skip any step. It doesn't mean that you delay getting to know what to be learned in the next steps. Don't let it be a black box and then get "surprise!". For example, to achieve my long-term goal as an intrapreneur/entrepreneur, I don't run a business now but I keep practicing as it a real business when building side projects with my friends.

Detail of level in my career path

No matter what the job title is, I categorize a level by the following criteria:

  • 👷 Project/Product contribution

  • ✋ Ability to lead and mentor the team

  • 🕑 Years of working experience

Who are they?

Get recognized (example)

Apprentice

Try to do things right

  • 👷 Learn how to use tools

  • ✋ Learn to collaborate well with other members

  • 🕑 Usually 1 - 3 years

Journeyman

Keep doing the right things right

  • 👷 Know how the used tools work

  • ✋ Collaborate and cover/mentor some members well.

  • 🕑 Usually 3 - 5 years

Master

Keep doing the right things better

  • 👷 Know how to build a tool

  • ✋ Lead and mentor some teams

  • 🕑 Usually 5 - 10 years

Intrapreneur or Entrepreneur

Turn off the old and create new right things

  • 👷 Innovate tools

  • ✋ Lead and mentor the whole department/company

  • 🕑 Usually 10 - xx years


Leave a comment to share your opinions

Read more:

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Java Core - Top 10 Questions Every Developer Should Know

#RandomlyPickedByMe What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer? Why do I get "SomeType@a3fde" when I print my code? Why is String immutable? Why "equals" method when we have "==" operator? Is List<Dog> a subclass of List<Animal>? Why shouldn't we use raw type? Is Java “pass-by-reference” or “pass-by-value”? What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields? Why "double x = 0.1 + 0.2" and result of print(x) is 0.30000000000000004? 1. What is the difference between Javascript and Java? Holy crap! (Vietnamese: Thế quái nào lại có câu hỏi ngớ ngẩn vậy chứ?) "Java and Javascript are similar like Car and Carpet are similar." - Greg Hewgill (on StackOverflow) 2. Difference between StringBuilder and StringBuffer String is immutable. StringBuilder and StringBuffer are mutable. StringBuffer is thread-safe. String...
Post a Comment
Read more

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .
Post a Comment
Read more

Regex - Check a text without special characters but German, French

Special characters such as square brackets ([ ]) can cause an exception " java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException " or something like this if we don't handle them correctly. I had met this issue. In my case, my customers want our application should allow some characters in German and French even not allow some special characters. The solution is that we limit the allowed characters by showing the validation message on GUI. For an instance, the message looks like the following: "This field can't contain any special characters; only letters, numbers, underscores (_), spaces and single quotes (') are allowed." I used Regular Expression to check it. For entering Germany and French, I actually don't have this type of keyboard, so I referred these sites: * German characters: http://german.typeit.org/ * French characters: http://french.typeit.org/ Here is my code: package vn.nvanhuong.practice; import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Functional Programming Matter

What issues do we concern when implementing and maintaining systems? One of the most concern is debugging during maintenance: "this code crashed because it observed some unexpected value." Then, it turns out that the ideas of  no side effects  and  immutability , which functional programming promotes, can help. Shared mutable data is the root cause Shared mutable data are read and updated by more than one of the methods. Share mutable data structures make it harder to track changes in different parts of your program. An immutable object is an object that can't change its state after it's instantiated so it can't be affected by the actions of a function. It would be a dream to maintain because we wouldn't have any bad surprises about some object somewhere that unexpectedly modifies a data structure. A new thinking: Declarative programming There are two ways thinking about implementing a system by writing a program. - Imperative programming: has...
Post a Comment
Read more