Develop Yourself

#295 - Career Leverage For Non-Traditional Developers

• Brian Jenney

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I want to offer you some politically incorrect career advice that the gurus on LinkedIn won't share with you.

From job hopping to the #1 skill you need as a developer: I cover the things that helped me go from struggling bootcamp grad to engineering manager.

Resources mentioned in the pod:

My article outlining my salary jumps through interviewing: https://brianjenney.medium.com/i-used-to-suck-at-coding-interviews-then-i-quadrupled-my-salary-9d5260389a09

Here's your templates for writing on LinkedIn: https://www.parsity.io/learning-in-public


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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. I want to offer you some politically incorrect career advice, the stuff that's taken me years to figure out that the gurus on LinkedIn just won't ever tell you because one, it doesn't sound very good. And two, and listen really closely here, they just don't get it. These people are writing for college grads trying to break into Google, not the father of three who's trying to switch careers into tech. Now I came into tech as an extreme outsider. It's not just that I don't have a CS degree. A year before I got into my first coding job at the age of 31, I had an intervention. And if you're thinking, what kind of intervention? Yes, that kind of intervention. Very embarrassing story that I now share that I kind of didn't talk about for years because that wasn't something I really wanted people to know about me. But now, 12 years later, I feel more comfortable sharing this. And I just say that to say I know what it's like to be completely outside of the tech sphere and what it's like getting in there and then accelerating my career to go from lowly software developer into an engineering manager and working at senior roles at multiple startups in the Bay Area and beyond. Now, unfortunately, many of you are smarter than me. You're better coders than me, maybe even better looking, but you're not getting the kind of leverage in your career that you want. And you're probably following an outdated playbook, or you're following the advice of family and friends that have good intentions or are regurgitating things that they've read in mainstream magazines or books, and this just doesn't work in the real world. Hey, as you may know, Parsity is launching an AI developer cohort in January. There are a few spots left. I'm super excited about this program, and I'd love for you to be in it. This is for software developers who know a little bit of TypeScript and enough Next.js to be dangerous, and we're gonna review everything you need to know to either upskill within your current position, switch to an AI team, or even create your own AI startup. This is going to make you the go-to person in your organization or team when it comes to using AI on the web. We're gonna go deep into actually building agents, retrieval augmented generation, observability, and how large language models work just beneath the hood. If you're thinking about upskilling in AI and you're a web developer, this is the program you need to be in. You can go to parsity.io slash AI-dev to learn more, or just go to parsity.io and find the AI bootcamp in the nav bar. If you have questions, feel free to schedule a time with me or just find me on LinkedIn. Now back to the episode. The reality is that most career advice you read online is nicely packaged fluff. It sounds amazing, but it's usually written by people who either never really worked as developers, and this is more common than I expected, or maybe they work in a massive tech organization with very clear structure and roles, or they have a very traditional background. They have a CS degree and maybe they've been coding since their teens. This doesn't make their advice bad at all. It's just less likely to work for career changers. And those of us who are outside of big tech were coming from a very non-traditional background. So these people offer a lot of great value. I'm not trying to down them or anything. It just might not work for you or me. Over the years, I've made too many mistakes to count at this point. I've learned a hell of a lot by going from crime to coding in my 30s. Here's the stuff I wish somebody had told me. First one is it's okay to be a personality hire. I kind of hate when people say you don't want to be a personality hire or they're afraid that they're a personality hire. News flash, if you are a junior developer coming from a non-traditional background, you're kind of gonna have to be a personality hire. You're not competing with the mid-level people on your technical ability alone. And by the way, if technical ability was all that companies cared about, we would have competitive programmers dominating every organization in big tech. And that's just not the case. So you're competing on communication, clarity, adaptability, and energy. This is something people really hate, the culture fit thing. But in other words, it's completely fine to be a personality hire at first. In fact, I think you should be striving for this. And what people actually mean when they say likable or culture fit is can you explain your thinking clearly? Can you accept feedback without shutting down or getting super defensive? Do you make the room feel a little bit calmer? Now I met a guy two years ago that said he had failed a hundred interviews, and I thought there's zero way. It's just not possible. And so I said, hey man, look, I'll do a free mock interview with you. And we did. And he was so weird. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And I hope if he's watching this, no disrespect at all. I told him some of this feedback during our mock interview. And I said, Hey, you're a cool dude, man. But like somehow when we're interviewing, you clam up, you get kind of defensive, you don't say anything. It makes you unlikable. Now, no one had ever given him this feedback, and why would they? It's super duper awkward. But once he knew this, and I kind of talked about what I might do if I was him during the interview, like talk a little bit, maybe smile, just explain your thought process when you're working through a solution. And when somebody offers you feedback, don't argue against it. Or if you do, push back gently rather than saying, no, I don't want to do it, or hey, can you be quiet while I work on this? I've seen other people who are genuinely nice fall apart when an interview starts. They clam up, they ramble, they get defensive. This will kill an offer faster than any technical weakness ever will, especially if you're at the junior stage. Now, if you want to improve this, here's the thing I would be doing. In fact, this is what I have done. I will only ever give you advice that I've done that has worked for me or somebody that I know. Record yourself walking through a technical concept. The same way I'm on a video right now, record yourself doing the same thing. Watching it back is gonna hurt your feelings. You're gonna feel the cringe, but it's gonna fix your communication, or at least it's gonna illuminate the gaps in your communication. If you put yourself on camera often, you're going to get less nervous doing it. Next up is learn the language of software developers. When somebody makes a joke about Dykstra, you don't want to be completely lost or just not know some of the jargon and terminology, which is super common to other software developers. Just read one or two books, learn common design patterns. If you come from a non-traditional path, this is how you close that credibility gap. And those two books could be Clean Code, the Phoenix Project, even the You Don't Know JavaScript series by Kyle Simpson. Pick a couple really famous books, maybe designing data intensive applications if you're a masochist. And then you can understand some of the language that software developers use, and also some of the high-level concepts and some of the more computer science fundamentals that you probably skipped out on if you went to a boot camp or yourself taught. Now, let me be clear, likability is not enough. You can't just be a likable, terrible developer, even though at first I think this is actually okay in the beginning of your career. But more importantly, you need to prove to yourself that this isn't just a fluke. This means doing the stuff that nobody really wants to do, taking on assignments that are just outside your technical depth so you can leave yourself room to grow. And then doing things like studying on the weekends or building side projects to fill in all those gaps that you probably don't even know you have. This is not fun. This is not sexy. This first job you're gonna get is for validation and learning, not for coasting. If you're lucky, coasting will come later. Now, this next one is an unfair reality. Interviewing is the single highest leverage skill you'll ever develop as a software developer. Like it or not, it's just reality. Interviewing does something really, really important. It creates optionality, it gives you more confidence, it makes you lay off resilient. So if you do find yourself laid off like I was in 2023 and you do start getting interviews, you actually have a way to pass them. At least you're not completely screwed, right? I've met a lot of people that haven't interviewed in like 10 years, five years. And that to me would make me a bit nervous. You want to be in interview shape basically year-round. I know a lot of people think that's crazy. I honestly think it's crazy if you're not doing that. Interviewing is a game. Your pass rate is going to be low. Most developers pass well below 20% of the interviews they get. So getting one interview, you should fully expect to fail that interview. It's a volume game, it's a practice game. The reason I got good at interviews wasn't because I was naturally talented. It's because I did tons of mock interviews and invested thousands of dollars in learning data structures, algorithms, all the technical stuff I needed to know. But more importantly, I would argue, is going through mock interviews because your nerves are gonna get you way more than the technical stuff. You can learn the technical stuff. What's much harder is keeping calm under pressure. I am notoriously neurotic. So I had to learn how do I not have a literal panic attack when doing an interview? I suggest Pramp.com. I'm not sponsored by them at all. I've done tons of mock interviews on Pramp.com. You meet up with a stranger, you do a practice problem, you do this enough times, eventually it becomes boring, which is exactly how you want to go into your interviews. You don't want to have your nerves skyrocketing and have the coffee jitters and your heart's pounding a million miles per hour while you're trying to figure out how to BFS, DFS, or do a binary search. Not a fun experience. Now, getting good at interviewing was arguably the most important skill I've learned because that alone helped me increase my salary by 400%. And I have an article in the show notes you can check out to show that I'm not lying. In fact, Business Insider reached out to me and made me show the receipts to prove I wasn't lying. Hopefully, that article will come out soon and I'll link that whenever it does drop. Now, last thing when it comes to interviewing is I think you should be interviewing every six months. This is how you know if you're underpaid, if you're overpaid, if your skills still are translatable in today's market, if you're safe during a downturn, if you still have options when you actually need them. The best time to interview is when you already have a job. The worst time to interview is when you're laid off and desperately seeking a job. Next one, and people are gonna hate this, become an influencer. And I mean this literally and figuratively, but more figuratively than literally. Now, this is super weird because I've kind of become a tech influencer. I have a video that did 100,000 views and I have 35,000 followers on LinkedIn. I didn't really expect this, but it opened up a ridiculous amount of opportunity, obviously. Selling products, doing a business, monetizing some of my content, and becoming highly discoverable on LinkedIn. Now, being discoverable is one of the most underrated things that happens when you become a bit of an influencer, right? It also has downsides, right? Recruiters have definitely ghosted me the second they saw I either owned a business or that I was like writing kind of hot takes on LinkedIn. You would think this would have hurt me more, but it has not. In fact, I've gotten more offers this year to interview than literally any other year before, including that pandemic hiring spree. Here's the part that I think you really need to understand. You don't have to become a social media content creator. I mean, that's a little bit ridiculous, isn't it? You don't have to make content. But if you do want to try out doing social media or creating content, I have some templates in the show notes that maybe you'll find useful. I do think you should aim to have influence wherever you actually work. And you can take baby steps. This is exactly what I did. I started just by asking questions in meetings because I was notoriously quiet. In fact, I got called out by the CEO at one company for being super quiet. He's like, hey, you never say anything. It's like a five-person company. You ever gonna like talk? And I'm like, yeah, you got a good point, right? Volunteer to run something small, lead an epic, do some sort of big migration. Just volunteer to do something that freaks you out a little bit. You're gonna fail. That's part of the game, right? Shadow the people doing the critical work. If there's somebody really smart on your team and they're doing something cool, say, hey, do you mind if I just sit and watch while you do this migration or while you mess up this configuration on AWS and blow up our data pipeline? Can I watch you do this stuff so I kind of know how you do it in real life? Similar to that, emulate the best people on the team. Copy their habits and what they're doing. Look at how they write code, look at how they talk in meetings, pick what makes sense and leave what doesn't. If you see how they phrase something or how they've written something or how they do documentation or their peer reviews, just steal it. They've already figured out the game for you. If you ask enough questions, if you give enough good opinions, if you help actually shape the culture of the team, this is how you develop leadership skills without getting the title at first. This is how you become someone that the team actually trusts. And this is how you set yourself up for finally getting those titles that you really, really want. Now, once you have influence within the organization, your loyalty becomes a tool rather than an obligation. But remember this, and this is my last piece of advice that loyalty is overrated. Early in your career, I suggest you actually do job hop. It's the fastest way to lift your salary trajectory. Eventually, though, I think you need to stay somewhere long enough to see how your decisions play out. This is how you grow. If you go company to company, your salary might grow, but it will definitely stagnate at some point, and your title will definitely not keep going up either. You might stay at that junior or mid-level for much longer than you should because you're not really learning from your mistakes or watching as the code base matures or as you mature, because you're never staying long enough to see how the decisions of the team and your own code plays out. If you've never had to refactor code that you've written a year before, or you've never experienced the growing pains of the company, then these are experiences which are not only going to look really good on paper, but are just going to teach you a lot and elevate you and help you reach that next level. Also, if you get promoted within the same company, it's a lot easier to take that title to the next company. Now, here's my personal rule. I don't believe in arbitrary time limits to stay at any job. I think you can leave after you've delivered something impactful enough that you can write about. If you have a measurable outcome, a big improvement, cultural shift, a feature with metrics and results that you can show off. If you have one or two big wins, I think you can leave, even if it's only been nine months or whatever. Impact is impact. People care a lot more about impact than just time in the seat. I don't think resume driven development is necessarily bad. I think this can actually work for you and the company. If you wake up and you're going to work thinking, what is the most impactful thing I can do? And you're doing that, and then you're using that to pad your resume. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It means you're driving impact and value for the company and yourself, and you're putting down stories you can brag about that are going to help you get to that next level at the next company. Now, if you've got nothing else from this or you disagree with everything, just remember this what works and what sounds good are often diametrically opposed. All the stuff that I suggested doing is stressful and you need to consider if it's even worth it. The leverage you're going to build will come from three things how you communicate, how well you interview, and how much influence you're able to build within the organizations where you work. What I laid out is one way to play the game. There's no right track. You can't just pray to the code god for job security or playing it safe. You can't wait for somebody to just give you a shot. Most people aren't going to do any of the things I laid out. I don't think that's wrong at all. I just think you should be intentional with whatever you do. And companies need average developers a lot more than they'd like to admit. Now, if your goal is to be average, I think that is a bit of a dangerous path. You're the first one to get cut, you're easily skipped over for promotions, and you might just get that three to five percent increase a year, which just keeps off inflation barely. Now, is this wrong? Of course not. Maybe you have hobbies or other interests outside of work and code. I don't, and I kind of like playing this game. So it's a game I choose to play that I enjoy. It's a strategy that works for me in the real world, not in textbooks or some LinkedIn cringy post. I'm honestly rooting for you out there, and I wish that more people would share what's actually working for them rather than having to learn through trial and error. I sincerely hope you found this useful. And if there's any tips that you would give your younger self or younger viewers that are watching this, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Thanks for watching or listening, and I always hope you find that useful. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

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