Comments by "Vincent Jenks" (@VincentJenks) on "Thriving Technologist" channel.

  1. This is gold - learning and playing the politics of the organization you're working with/for is key to being viewed as an expert and a solid professional, and not a non-team-player. A lot of younger devs (and I've been guilty of this when I was one myself) will come into a team project and immediately start criticizing the decisions that were made, the codebase, chosen libraries, and so on. This is an immediate red flag to me - this is someone who's going to be a real PITA and has a huge ego. It screams "inexperience" - someone who isn't thinking about the business or the value they're being paid to provide - just their personal satisfaction.
    2
  2. I've been a developer for 26 years now and in leadership, in one form or another, for the past 15 or so - never fully becoming a "manager who doesn't code". I love to write code and I love the creativity I'm able to express with this profession, but you hit the nail on the head - the industry has all but ruined the profession, starting with Google. Between every job I find myself spending countless hours re-learning all the things I had to memorize last time on the treadmill, which rarely get used in everyday software engineering to solve real-world problems. Algos, obscure data structures, 0(n) notation, mega-enterprise systems design, and a whole host of other things that only serve to get through interviews. This is why most of this stuff is useless in finding a great engineer! Add to that; as the market heads into another recession and layoffs have injected far more supply than demand, getting hired today is a truly painful, harrowing experience. I don't want to be a pure manager but the fantasy that I could, while also keeping my chops up while working on personal projects, is creeping into my consciousness more and more. The industry seems broken and I love people, love being in leadership, and am confident that I can definitely do the job well - I'm just not sure I'd be content. At that crossroads, for sure!
    1
  3. Another thought: One of your points is burnout from learning new tech. One thing I've avoided in my career, and always advise younger or aspiring devs to do, is to carefully consider how you invest your learning time. Time is money, and time, like money, should be wisely spent. You wouldn't willy-nilly invest a few pennies of every dollar into a bunch of assets of highly questionable or unknown value - at least I hope you wouldn't. So, like material investments or substantial new purchases, you'd do some research into what the market is doing before investing your hard-earned money. Usually, I hope. I've been careful to only invest my time into technologies that I know are valuable on the market and will have staying power. Too many devs I've met will hop around from one stack to the next, framework to framework, and so on. Every other day they're touting the new JS framework, or a new ORM, and converting entire codebases. All this tech does essentially the same thing. We're mostly just creating CRUD that we publish to other computers. I think it's a sure recipe for learning burnout if you're trying to learn it all, and you'll end up frustrated and only lightly skilled in any one thing. A jack of all trades and master of none. Focus and depth is better, IMO.
    1