Overall 6/10 – Maybe a more junior/beginning developer would find this useful but for an inexperienced dev it’s mostly common sense.
I bought this book for the wrong reason. I saw it, looked at the index and thought that the content was exactly what I would have wanted as a beginning software developer. Problem being I’m no longer a beginning software developer so too much of the content is no longer useful.
Some Takeaways I did like:
- Think of yourself, as a business
- Consider what company long-term suits our goals
- Market yourself
- Climbing the Corporate Ladder (Big Company)
- Take Responsibility – If you take responsibility for something, credit will follow.
- Become Visible
- Quota System – Forcing yourself to regularly contribute small pieces towards a big goal
Quirky ideas I wouldn’t have considered but can’t discredit or find interesting include:
- Hire a professional resume writer. HIs argument is that you only write one and that you are not an expert. I think that could be a sound argument. I once worked for a consulting firm, where they “creatively wrote” the CVs for staff. They could remove parts that were factually true and replace it with what seemed like buzz-word bingo to a techy like me but it worked!
- Hard work is hard and boring. Sometimes there’s no silver bullet and you just need to put in the work. Sounds obvious but I agree with the author, often people delay or try to find a magical soltuion when what is really needed is hard work. Reminds me of: “..those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.” – Bill Turnpin
- Any action is better than no action
Ryan Hamilton 