teeang

Treat You Career Like You're Building a Startup

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(Early Career Software Dev Edition)

🌟 Understand your North Star 🔹️Build Your Minimum Viable Product 🛍 Understand your Market 📣 Market Yourself 💬 Seek Early Feedback

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🌟 Understand your North Star

e.g. “Become a Junior Developer”

Does the this thing that you’re doing move towards the North Star or does it move you away?

Use this to audit what goes into your focus time. But don’t neglect your health and relationships!

🔹️Build Your Minimum Viable Product

Focus on depth as a Early-Career Software Developer.

Pick a stack and stick to it.

Changing this can set you back.

• You don’t have enough time.
• You don’t have enough money.

It’s much harder when the candidate knows 4 languages, but has only gone 0-1 in them.

And much easier if they have already gone 0-3 in one language. Plus the 1-3 knowledge is more valuable.

🛍 Understand your market

The market (and customers) don’t care about what you think, the market will go where it wants to go.

(I may or may not have lost some money on the stock market)

Look up jobs to get a feel of the market. Use this when deciding your tech stack.

📣 Market Yourself

If you ain’t advocating for yourself, no one will.

Put yourself out there and get people to buy into you.

Helping others in with no expectation of anything in return works wonders.

(It’s a pretty good way to sell without selling. But I legit just want to help people.)

💬 Seek Early Feedback

Remember, the market (and customers) don’t care what you think.

So how do you figure out what they want?

Talk to your customers.

The earlier the better!

(You can also get feedback from your peers.)

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If you are an aspiring junior developer, I’d love to get in touch. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions.

P.S. This was a fun one to write.

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This originally a posted on LinkedIn on the 28th June 2023.

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