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

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

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Generating PDF/A From HTML in Meteor

My live-chat app was a folk of project Rocket.Chat which was built with Meteor. The app had a feature that administrative users were able to export the conversations into PDF files. And, they wanted to archive these files for a long time. I happened to know that PDF/A documents were good for this purpose. It was really frustrated to find a solution with free libraries. Actually, it took me more than two weeks to find a possible approach. TL, DR; Using Puppeteer to generate a normal PDF and using PDFBox to load and converting the generated PDF into PDF/A compliance. What is PDF/A? Here is a definition from Wikipedia: PDF/A  is an  ISO -standardized version of the  Portable Document Format  (PDF) specialized for use in the  archiving  and long-term  preservation  of  electronic documents . PDF/A differs from PDF by prohibiting features unsuitable for long-term archiving, such as  font  linking (as opposed to  font em...
Post a Comment
Read more

[Snippet] Generate a new unique "name" string from an existing list

Suppose that we have a list of employees. Everytime, we want to add new employee into this list, the name of the employee will be generated with the following rules: - the name of the new one is set to " [originalname] 1 " - in case the name already exist, " [originalname] 2 " is used, and so on. Here is my code snippet by Javascript: var employees =[ {id: 1, name: 'name'}, {id: 2, name: 'name 1'}, {id: 3, name: 'name 2'}, {id: 5, name: 'name 4'} ]; var commonUtils = { isExistName: function(_name, _collection, _prop) { for(var i = 0; i< _collection.length; i++){ if(_collection[i][_prop].localeCompare(_name)==0){ return true; } } return false; }, generateNewName: function(_name, _collection, _prop){ var i = 1; var searching = true; while (searching) { var newName = _name+ " " + i; if (!this.isExistName(newName, _collection, _pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one. Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was. I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings: There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they sta...
Post a Comment
Read more