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

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined

I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute " for " in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files. The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following: "Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel." However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel . The alternative by adding attribute " for " the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution. Fortunately, I came across a way if I cha...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Separate Constructing a System from Using It

I n the real world, in order to use a building (hotel, supermarket, etc) we need to construct it first. This concern should be applied for software development as well. Step by step, I would like to show you the issue about no separation of constructing and using it and then I'll give you some approaches to overcome this issue. | Note : you can find the  below  demonstrated code here    Take a Look the Following Simple Application Used tools and technologies: Eclipse (Mars), JDK 1.8 I had an App which uses Controller . Controller uses Service (an interface). Finally, Service has one concrete class is DefaultService . //package vn.nvanhuong.system.separationconstructing; public class App { public static void main(String[] args) { Controller controller = new Controller(); controller.doAction(); } } public class Controller { private Service service; public void doAction(){ System.out.println("doAction in Controller"); getService().execut...
Post a Comment
Read more

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...
5 comments
Read more

No difficulties, no discovery

Bill Gate had said that “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” In my opinion, that remark is so true in some cases. My team has tried to apply integration tests for our projects. Firstly, we had meeting to figure out what problems we met. Then, we decided to create a new project that is similiar to the current one and we called it a prototype project. Yeah, I and some members were reponsile for it. I spent a lot of time and took a lot of efforts for coppying the current project because its domain logic was really complicated. What a boring task! I smelt a rat and felt too lazy. At that time, I thought that I need a change. I discussed with others: "Why don't we just create a branch of curent project and work on it?".  We didn't need spending time for coppying anymore. Just forked it and modified on it. Therefore, it was really a good solution. Leave your comments about that. ;)
Post a Comment
Read more