The One Skill Developers Need to Design their Careers and Break the Career Plateau

Speaker: Bruno “Javaman” Souza & Rodrigo Moutinho

@brjavaman and @rcmoutinho

For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents

For junior developers (less than three years)

• Most important is to do things
• If you don’t “do”, you don’t learn
• Can’t just read about programming
• Hard skills are precise. Do same way every time. Ex: typing, IDE shortcuts, Java language itself.
• Soft skills vary every time use them. Development is a soft skill. Rely on pattern recognition. Different each time. Speaking is a soft skill too.

For mid (3-10 years)

• “grow without doing anything”. People give you things to do and you grow by doing them.
• 2/3 developers think easy to get a job equivalent to one have right now
• Don’t typically worry about career at this point.
• Sometimes get stuck though. ex: job without opportunities to learn

Career plateau (10+ years)

This was most of the audience.

• Not bad. Means grew a lot.
• Now have to figure out what next.
• Don’t get discouraged that nothing happens for a few years
• Different for ever person
• We get comfortable and then realize something is wrong. So being comfortable becomes uncomfortable

Audience concerns

• Team uses legacy technology
• Not going to be marketable
• Got stuck doing something very good at, but how do something new
• Not growing for several years
• Complacency
• Take charge of career (vs having something happen to you)
• Be recognized (control how people see you)
• Don’t feel comfortable working with someone don’t trust
• Want to to be a manager/architect (when manager, dev skills atrophy(
• Don’t have opportunity
• Be relevant
• Stay on tech side without becoming a manager
• Discomfort on how to break through plateau

“You don’t die, but your brain thinks you will” – getting over fear of speaking/teaching

• Asked who was shy/scared of speaking in front of people. Then dragged one up on stage. Had a conversation with him up there and then him talk about a comfortable topic (what like about java) while looking at audience. Asked if could teach a student about Java. He said it was hard initially but got used to it.
• Then asked a second person to try. That person knew what was coming. This time, he emphasized looking at the audience as they spoke. Had audience intentionally ask a hard question. He did a good job saying would research and get back on it.
• All know enough to teach someone something. All don’t know enough to teach a different topic.
• People come to a presentation for a topic they want to learn about.
• Ok to recover after make a mistake

Know what want

• Often feel uncomfortable because don’t have new objectives. Think big.
• Need to know what want. Might have already achieved it.
• Infinite amount of things to learn. Will never get to 100% of knowledge.
• Know what want overall in life; not just about tech

Share what know

• Learning how to share is a skill common across everyone
• Testimonial from Rodrigo
• Helping enough other people helps you
• ex: you are stuck doing legacy code because nobody else knows what you do. or why new tech is important [seems oversimplified; maybe because ran out of time?]

My take: I like that they covered a lot of information before doing the intros. I also like that they tied the session to the audience. It was interesting hearing all the audience concerns/questions. Hearing the variety of problems and hearing your own is helpful. Even if it is “just” for dealing with imposter syndrome :). I think he could have spent a tiny bit less time on audience interaction and finished.