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

Google I/O 2017 Notes

WOW! How meaningful this below video explains about the name of  "I/O". Sundar Pichai talked a lot of Machine Learning Machine Learning is a very hot trend these days. Google uses it for their products. Google Assistant: Easily booking an online meal by talking with Google Assistant like a staff of partners, for example. Google Home: Hands-free calling. Google Photos: sharing suggestion, shared library, photo books and google lens. Youtube: 360 degree video, live stream. Kotlin became an official programming language for Android https://kotlinlang.org I'm on the way to Kotlin! ^^ Reference: [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2VF8tmLFHw
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

JSF, Primefaces - Invoking Application Code Even When Validation Failed

A use case I have a form which has requirements as follow: - There are some mandatory fields. - Validation is triggered when changing value on each field. - A button "Next" is enable only when all fields are entered. It turns to disabled if any field is empty. My first approach I defined a variable "isDisableNext" at a backend bean "Controller" for dynamically disabling/enabling the "Next" button by performing event "onValueChange", but, it had a problem: <h:form id="personForm"> <p:outputLabel value="First Name" for="firstName"/> <p:inputText id="firstName" value="#{person.firstName}" required="true"> <p:ajax event="change" listener="#{controller.onValueChange}" update="nextButton"/> </p:inputText> <p:outputLabel value="Last Name" for="lastName"/> <p:i...
Post a Comment
Read more

JQuery - Fixed Element during Scroll

I want to keep the position of an element likes a component on right side when I scroll down because of a very long content. Please take look at the code by visit the following link: http://jsfiddle.net/p3unbmdy/ Javascript function: $("#container").bind('scroll', function() { var fromTop = 50; var scrollVal = $("#container").scrollTop(); var top = 0; if ( scrollVal > fromTop) { top = scrollVal - fromTop; $('#rightElement').css({'position':'absolute','right':'1em','top' :top+'px'}); } else { $('#rightElement').css({'position':'static','top':'0px'}); } });
Post a Comment
Read more