5 Major Mistakes Indian Software Developers Continue To Make
Out of 18.5 million, 19% of software developers in the world are from the United States, China and India are near 10% each. There are professional coders and hobbyists. There are also workers who don’t code full-time and only code for a few hours a month to do some specific task related to their work or hobbies.
While working with a large off-shore development team for a long time you tend to forget to notice a few things, and those things are important for your long-term career. You need to look at how business dynamics is changing and what impact emerging technologies plays on your career?
1. Not getting into the business side of things:
You need to understand what the code does, sure, but what problems does it solve for your customers? Do you have a view of complete business /functional requirements? Do you think about customer’s customers? Can you run a coding boot camp and teach coding to a not so techie business guy and have a deeper conversation on the business side of things.
2. Not working towards a future relevant career:
IOT (Internet of Things), cloud computing, big data, and many more emerging technologies are changing customers IT roadmap. Enterprises are moving more and more operations to the cloud, be it public, private or hybrid cloud. They will need resources to build new applications in the cloud and there will be a huge demand for application consolidation, application migration, and application modernization. Speed to market is becoming the key factor in deciding the technology part of the business. Just programming language popularity isn’t always correlated with salary; you need to bring your career up to speed to match emerging market requirements. Just work won’t be enough. “Work is worship” won’t be a true statement when most of our jobs will be taken over by robots.
3. Not working on GitHub, but on Resume:
You don’t need to share propriety code, but any customized open-source code can be shared on GitHub. Have you put some sample and got any comment or feedback? Can you take a community project and deliver some quality code in your spare time? How about learning a new language and uploading your code for review?
The best way to learn to code is to code. The best way to prove you can code is to code. University Degree won’t help much.
4. Not networking enough:
How much networking is enough for a software developer I don’t but if you have recently said “I don’t know the right people to teach me this”, then you are not networking enough. You need to hook up to GitHub and LinkedIn more and have online mentors, reach out to them for their feedback and seek what best they know and can share with you. Visit Stackoverflow and make sure you respond to question every week. Join some brand-new hackathon and win some money within next two months.
5. Not doing self-marketing:
If you want to attract employers or clients you need to have an online presence. Showcase your portfolio with your certifications, technical artifacts, awards, GitHub links and blogs. Marketing yourself could be the most important thing you could do in your career to position yourself for better opportunities and life. You don’t have to spend money or hire a marketer, do it artfully and use your geek skills without compromising your values and comforts. If you are a freelancer have an elevator pitch ready.
So, it’s time to buy Raspberry pi zero and teach your kids how to have fun with programming and learn something new yourself to have a different perspective.
