Pro Developer - Improve Your Career in Any Economy

Like many other areas of business, the tech industry has weathered the occasional slump over the past few decades. It's only natural that the fate of techies is closely linked to the tides of the business. However, in any economy, weak or strong, some people prosper and advance while others suffer the consequences. Understanding why can make all the difference, whether you're looking for a job, trying to keep the one you have, or are audacious enough to want to advance your career regardless of the climate.

The conventional wisdom, typically unspoken, is that when times are tough you just grin and bear it. Merely surviving is the best that you can hope for. Advancing is just too much to ask. To that, I offer my own bit of wisdom. Nonsense! (I actually had a more colorful phrase in mind, but discretion got the better of me.)

The principles of business do not alter based on a strong or weak economy, and people will always be people. What this means to those of us with careers to manage is that what works when business is good will also work when things are slow. In fact, in many cases, they'll work even better. In order to understand why, let's strip this down to the bare bones issues.

Getting Down to Business

Businesses exist to make a profit. People work at companies to make a living. Although enterprises are run by a class of creature known as management, it turns out that the ranks of management are, in fact, populated by people. As we've already observed, people work at companies to make a living. So, making money, both from a personal and corporate point of view, is a top priority that does not change based on market conditions.

Human nature is another constant. People have a desire for power, the need for personal fulfillment, and egos to maintain. When you add all of this up, you come up with some facts that are immutable constants in the business world. Of course, we'll be taking advantage of these to make sure that we continue to eat on a regular basis and have the spare money we need to keep our families happy and our compilers up to date. So, let's take a look at some of the more obvious points. The following actions will increase your value in the eyes of the company and / or your superiors:

• Increasing company revenues
• Decreasing company expenses
• Helping your superiors further their career

These three points form the basis for advancement in every profession in the world, without exception, throughout the course of human history. However, you may be quick to point out that you've seen many examples of people who did one or even all of these things, and yet got no rewards at all. That's because addressing these needs alone is not enough to ensure that your personal career is well cared for. You need to address the following items as well:

• Be recognized for your deeds
• Be non-threatening to others
• Actively pursue your benefits

This last point bears emphasis. One of the ways that companies manage to reduce their expenses, or at least hold the line, is by not volunteering more money and benefits every time a worker does something good. That makes it unlikely that good things will fall into your lap just because you brought value to the company. You'll have to take action, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, to claim those benefits.

Nonetheless, before we look further into these points, it's worth emphasizing that the very foundation of career advancement as a programmer is built upon these principles. The best part of this is that it's true no matter what the economy is like. When times are good, companies want to turn a profit (by increasing revenues and decreasing expenses) and people want to further their careers. When times are rough, companies want to turn a profit (by increasing revenues and decreasing expenses), and people want to further their careers. It doesn't alter. If anything, when the going gets tough, there's an even greater emphasis on these topics. Either way, you have a frame of reference that isn't going to change with the weather or the latest stock market report. Learn to address these matters in all of your day to day activities, and you'll have the world eating out of your hand, even on those days when everyone else is struggling just to get by.

Taking It To The Streets

There are as many ways to implement these ideas as there are lines of code in that old legacy COBOL system that you're working so hard to replace, and the specifics will obviously vary with each company. However, when you learned to program, you didn't have to learn a thousand different language constructs to deal with a thousand different programming problems. Instead, you grasped a few basic concepts like loops, variables and Boolean logic, and then learned how to apply them to each new situation as needed.

Along those lines, let's take a look at each of our points in turn from the perspective of a front line programmer living in Cubicle City. Most developers are passionate about programming, and in truth would love it if the world would just go away and let them code. The things that get their interest and motivate them to action typically involve the desire to make the app cooler, play with new and exciting technology, get better hardware, and of course, more money is never a bad thing.

To better understand what we're talking about here, let's take a look at a typical example, that of trying to convince management to let you add that Really Cool Feature to the system. The following conversation will be familiar to anyone who's been in the business for more than a few months.

At this point, you have two people speaking completely different languages. To the flabbergasted programmer, it's obvious that better software is the benefit. However, management doesn't care about the artistic aspect of software development. Good thing, too, or we'd all be going hungry. No, managers, if they're worth the stripes on their suits, are concerned with the first three points we covered earlier. How will the feature increase revenues? How will it decrease expenses? And how will it advance my career? If you can't come up with honest to goodness answers to at least one of these questions, then you haven't made a compelling enough case to get your way.

Now, let's take a look at a different approach. Instead of an emotional appeal based on the fact that you, from a craftsman's point of view, simply want to create a better product, let's sell the benefits. As an example, let's say that you wanted to overhaul the current GUI front end that looks just like the mainframe green screen it replaced with something much more user friendly and productive. You do some research and find that the average time for users to complete a transaction is 3 minutes. Furthermore, you find that this department averages 1000 such transactions per day. Usability testing on a mockup demo you threw together indicates that with your UI improvements, the same transaction can be completed in 30 seconds. Your idea will reduce the time it takes to do a day's transactions from 50 person hours to just over 8!

Enthusiastic that you can demonstrate tangible results, you now present your findings to your manager and are immediately turned down because there's no benefit from your changes. How can there be no benefits, you cry? You've just reduced the time it takes to do a day's transactions by 84%!

Hey, I'm with you. I like improving the efficiency of a process as much as the next guy. However, before you beat your manager over the head with your empty pizza box, answer the following questions.

• How did your idea increase company revenues?
• How did your idea decrease company expenses?
• How did your idea further your superior's career?