Career Advice for Programmers

One developer's journey to find the perfect job.

Abstract

Do you know how to avoid being “promoted” to a position that doesn’t involve technology and code? Did your university program teach you the social skills you need to be a good developer? Or the other “nontechnical” skills that are required? Did you know that all development roles are not created equal? Is it true that moving jobs a lot is a bad thing? Join Trisha Gee to hear some lessons she learned the hard way over 20+ years as a Java developer. You’ll discover what's really important when planning your career as a developer and get tools for working out your next steps. If nothing else, you’ll get to laugh at the (many) mistakes Trisha’s made in her search for the “Perfect Job.”

Brilliant start to day 3 at #prognet London 2018 with secret insights from @trisha_gee "To hack the system you have to know your place in it"⚡Hope you all have another interesting day of learning! @skillsmatter pic.twitter.com/zI8v7R6sxQ

— Melita Joy (@Willow640) September 14, 2018

This talk has been presented several times, each time with a different focus. All the talks below have overlap, but they're effectively completely different presentations.

Videos

Career Advice for Programmers - Trisha Gee from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Slides

Other links

Links and resources mentioned in the talk are mostly my own blog posts and talks

There's lots of other interesting stuff around this topic though. Here's a handful of stuff that helped to influence the talk I gave at ProgNET.

Books

Author

  • Trisha Gee

    Trisha is a software engineer, Java Champion and author. Trisha has developed Java applications for finance, manufacturing and non-profit organisations, and she's a lead developer advocate at Gradle.