Job-Related Reading for Geeks

Here’s some reading material for the geek who’s doing some thinking about his or her career:

10 Things Every Programmer Should Know for Their First Job

In the Apple Matters blog, the article 10 Things Every Programmer Should Know For Their First Job has these in its list:

1. Being liked is easy.
2. Being respected is hard.
3. Everything you learned in college is useless.
4. Never stop learning.
5. You live and die by your text editor, so choose wisely.
6. No one really cares what college you went to.
7. Silence never goes out of style.
8. You will meet odd, strange and unpleasant people, deal with it.
9. Make friends with IT.
10. You will never escape office politics.

How to be Happy at Work

In his blog Software Creation Mystery, Andriy Solovey borrows one of Kathy Sierra’s tricks by making a point succinctly with a cartoony graph:

The main point of the article How to Be Happy At Work. Short tutorial.: “Don’t allow other people to decide what you do, your career and your future – not your manager, company or even trends in your profession. Take charge yourself and consider yourself as a mini enterprise.”

Andriy presents a five-point plan for being happy at work:

1. Write your own job description.
2. Give yourself a performance review.
3. Define alternative paths.
4. Find gaps.
5. Put your work plan in action.

Rich Internet Application Job Trends and Salaries

At The Universal Desktop, Ryan Stewart uses Indeed.com’s “Job Trends” feature to draw some graphs of what the sought-after skills are in the rich internet application job market.

In one exercise, he does a search on jobs which list a number of rich internet app technologies. Here’s a graph charting job listings with “Flex”, “Silverlight”, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo and WPF:

Here’s the same chart, but with “Ajax” and “Flash” thrown into the mix:

The article also takes a quick look at job trends for programming languages as well as average salaries for jobs with rich internet app terms. “I’d take these numbers with a grain of salt,” writes Ryan, but if you’re doing some career planning, it’s good to keep an eye on the job trends.

Point/Counterpoint on Deadlines

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by,” said Douglas Adams. Here are a couple of articles on the topic:

In Deadlines Kill Inspriation, Veerle Pieters writes:

I like to think we are very flexible in working long days and most weekends, but such a thing can’t go on for ever and it comes at a price if I do. That price is burn out and that’s neither good for the designer or the client. It’s not that I don’t like deadlines. They are great sometimes, but what I am trying to say is that it sometimes happens that we’re not able to come up with something good at the given timeline.

Andy Rutledge wrote an article in response, The Tao of Deadlines, in which he says:

But whatever the case, don’t start looking at deadlines negatively. Deadlines are your friend. Deadlines are a necessary and beneficial component of professional work. Deadlines allow you to demonstrate, in some measure, your ability and your responsibility. Clients respect that. And even if one doesn’t, rest assured he will not respect you breaking your promise. No one does.