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

When we don't see the sun, we see other stars

What are your motivations for creativity? - I want to make a change. - It makes me happy! It is a need of my mind. How to be creative for a thing? There are two steps: - See the thing as every people see it - Think about a new different thing from it How to think about a new different thing? There are two ways: - Forget all things you have already known. - A whack on the side of your head. ;) This was what I have learned from the following great book: source: Amazon.com Well! A physical whack on the side of your head is needed sometimes but the meaning behind is that you need to break these 9 following locks on your mind. Remove them! The lock #1: "The correct answer" We all learn from schools that there is only one correct answer to a question. For example, a proposition is only true or false in Algebra. In reality, there are always some answers to a question basing on a point of view. For example, number 6 becomes number 9 if you look it ...

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

Fulfilling Your Contribution Needs

Human resource management motivation Managing human today is quite different from the industrial age which treats people as just "chickens". Rather than people now are very important to the success of an organization. People are an organization's special resource. They should be encouraged to grow to contribute their effort and creativeness to their beloved working environment because the contribution is one of their most needs in life. Training people: getting rid of the ineffective model and adopting the new one The ineffective model of training people: Hiring new people --> giving them a crash course once --> expecting them working effectively. That somehow makes sense but you're about to expect a luck because you do not really spend your effort for mentoring them. If they can work effectively, well...lucky you! Otherwise, you will blame that these people are ineffective and you let them go and hire the new ones. What a waste of time! The new effe...

Installing NGINX on macOS

I have heard of a lot of NGINX recently. One of them was it can help for security issues; for sure, it much be more. It so happens that our team has got a ton of user stories from a security audit. It's time to delve into it. What is NGINX? In order to get a basic idea and have some fun , I've just picked some available posts from my favorite Vietnamese blogger communities as below: https://kipalog.com/posts/Cau-hinh-nginx-co-ban---Phan-1 https://viblo.asia/hoang.thi.tuan.dung/posts/ZabG912QGzY6 NGINX (pronounce: Engine-X) is a web server (comparing to IIS, Apache). It can be used as a reverse proxy ( this is what I need for security issues with configuration ), load balancer and more. How to get started? I found the below path for learning NGINX by googling "learn nginx": https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-online-resources-to-learn-Nginx In this post, I only went first step. This is installing NGINX on macOS and taking a first look at the confi...

DevOps for Dummies

Everyone talks about it, but not everyone knows what it is. Why DevOps? In general, whenever an organization adopts any new technology, methodology, or approach, that adoption has to be driven by a business need. Any kind of system that need rapid delivery of innovation requires DevOps (development and operations). Why? DevOps requires mechanisms to get fast feedback from all the stakeholders in the software application that's being delivered. DevOps approaches to reduce waste and rework and to shift resources to higher-value activities. DevOps aims to deliver value (of organization or project) faster and more efficiently. DevOps Capabilities The capabilities that make up DevOps are a broad set that span the software delivery life cycle. The following picture is a reference architecture which provides a template of a proven solution by using a set of preferred methods and capabilities. My Remarks Okay, that sounds cool. What does it simply mean, again? The f...

vhandit

Search This Blog