Thread by @DudeWhoCode

Taking next step in your #software career is not so easy because there are no specific rules to follow, people usually talk a lot about getting into coding but what's next?
So here's a 🧵on recent talk I gave on lessons learnt from my experience/books. 1/17
#SoftwareEngineering

Career Capital: The skills & value you accumulate over time.
It's similar to capital gains in your financial portfolio, you won't see any gains unless you continously diversify & invest.
Find your career capital & slowly start accumulating.
How to gain career capital as dev? 2/17

In order to gain something, first you need to invest something. You need to invest your time & energy into things that matter.
Your skills & values should look like a splash of paint dripping on the wall. 3/17

Start expanding your skills breadth first. When you dabble with or explore more tech stacks, you will know which one to pick up based on the problem you want to solve in application level.
⚠️If you know only how to use a hammer, all the problems will look like nails to you. 4/17

Shallow knowledge is not enough, later you need to dive deep into the skill you learnt.
⚠️You might understand how F1 engine works without understanding how a 2 stroke engine work. But you can't fix problems in F1 engine if you don't know how 2 stroke engine work. 5/17

Dive deep into a stack, you will come across new stuff, then you will get curious & learn a new skill going back to increasing the breadth, then again you dive one level deep in one of the skills in your breadth, it's a cycle.
Breath & depth wise complement each other. 6/17

Both breadth & depth are important. Why?
Having a wide variety of skills will increase your odds of success.
People say "luck" is being at right place at the right time, but that won't happen by itself, it happens only if you have enough odds. 7/17

Having a wide breadth of skills helps you to increase your odds by combining them.

If you have 3 skills,
3! = 6 unique odds.

If you have 7 skills,
7! = 5040 unique odds. 8/17

(that's factorial:p)

But there's a catch, as you widen your skillset, your knowledge becomes shallow, don't allow that, remember the dripping paint. You need to go back to the skills, dive one level deep & let that paint drip on your wall of skills. This will create more adjacent possibles. 9/17

Adjacent Possible: The space beyond the boundaries of cutting edge where opportunities open up & big ideas tend to happen. You can't get to the cutting edge without diving deep.
10/17

Bonus: combining skills also creates adjacent possibles, as you are already increasing your breadth of skills, you combine a skill that you're average at with the skill that you're really good at, bam, you have a new adjacent possible with full of opportunities there. 11/17

Increasing your skillset breadth wise & depth wise to accumluate career capital is a long process. Remember, it takes only 20h to learn something new but 10,000h to master it.
You need to slowly master many skills, for that you need a systems mindset – Systems over goals. 12/17

Systems vs Goals:
Increasing asset to X $ is a goal. Investing & saving every month upfront is a system
Reducing weight by X kg is a goal. Eating healthy & showing up to workout is a system
Job in a dream startup is a goal. Showing up regularly to code & learn is a system. 13/17

Let's say you achieved your goal by geting your dream job - what happens now? You celebrate but you might feel that you've lost something which
gave you the purpose and now you have to set another goal for promotion or something similar to stay in that job. 14/17

But if you were more focussed on the system, you know that the system worked, now you
keep following & tweaking the system to become a craftsperson, it will automatically help you to progress in your job. 15/17

System to accumulate career capital and to take the path of Software Craftspersonship: You need deliberate practice, everytime you practice you need to stretch your ability by working outside your comfort zone a bit and then receive feedback for the course correction. 16/17

That's a part of it, I talked about few more stuff like compounding, software craftspersonship mindset etc. Here's the link to the slides and video for my talk at @GDGChennai 👇
17/17
dudewho.codes/talks/whats-ne…