Success in today’s IT domain requires viewing your career as a business venture. The Passionate Programmer, written by Chad Fowler and published on 28th May 2009, will teach you how to become an entrepreneur, guiding your occupation in the direction of your choice. The book lays out a strategy for planning and creating a radically successful life in software development.
HOW THIS BOOK HELPED US?
This book taught us how to become entrepreneurs, pushing our careers in the direction of our choice. The book also helped us realise that the options of technologies you focus on and the business domains to master impact your success because your technical knowledge doesn’t let those choices be coincidental.
THE BOOK EXPLAINED UNDER 60 SECONDS
- The Passionate Programmer is about finding fulfilment and happiness in your career. Satisfaction and happiness don’t come by chance, the call for thought, intention, willingness and action to change the course when you have made mistakes.
- The book puts attention on pursuing the desire to live a remarkable life. Strange how we all don’t set out on the pursuit of leading extraordinary lives.
- The author says what is certain is that with the focused goal of happiness as a primary motivator, better decisions can be made about the smaller steps we take to achieve that goal.
TOP THREE QUOTES
“Your leaders want you to have independence and ownership. Making, executing, and communicating plans will help you attain both.”
“The less replaceable you think you are, the more replaceable you are (and the less desirable you become).”
“You might be “just a programmer,” but being able to speak to your business clients in the language of their business domain is a critical skill.”
BOOK SUMMARY AND NOTES
PART ONE: CHOOSING YOUR MARKET
You have made a significant investment, it may not be a large sum of money, but it’s your time and life. Imagine you’ve established a company and designed what is guaranteed to be the company’s lead product. How much thought do you put into knowing who your target customers are? And before the actual production of the product, have you thought of what the product is? Usually, you’d not let such decisions be made for you but rather pay attention to every detail of the decision-making process. Surprisingly, most people don’t pay this kind of attention to the choices they make in their careers.
Lead or Bleed
When investing your money, there are many alternatives you can take advantage of. You could put it in a savings account or a government savings bond, but you won’t make much money because they’re safe bets. You must be careful when choosing the technologies to invest in because you cannot guarantee you’ll redeem your investment. The risk-reward trade-off is crucial for deciding the technologies and domains to fund. If you have many technologies prepared, tag those you regard as vital. Choosing a stable technology extensively used in production is much more secure but prospectively less satisfying than a new technology not yet deployed.
Supply and Demand
We believe supply and demand are associated mainly with what price a product can or will be sold. The supply and demand model anticipates how price variations affect the number of people ready to purchase and sell a service or product. When choosing a technology set to centre your career on, you ought to comprehend the consequences of increased supply and lower prices on your career expectations. Offshore companies do execute work that is in high demand. So, by concentrating on niche technology, you might alternate the competition’s attention from the price you can not compete on to the ability. One of the essential lessons from the demand and supply model is that with increased demand comes increased price competition.
Coding Don’t Cut It Anymore.
You won’t sit back and master a programming language or an operating system and let the business people handle the business stuff. If you desire to stay relevant, you must dive deep into the domain of your business. As a developer, you must understand the business domain well enough to design software and become one of its authorities. Being a programmer is a good skill, but speaking to your business clients in a language they understand is essential expertise. Like technology, business domains can be complex too; therefore, put the same vigilance when choosing which industry to serve as you put into which technology to master.
Favourite quote of Part One: “A generation ago, fun wasn’t a deciding factor when we talked about career choices. Jobs aren’t supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to bring home the bacon. Fun is what you do on your off days. The fun happens in the evenings and at weekends. But if your job isn’t fun, as we’ve realised, you don’t do a fantastic job at it.”
PART TWO: INVESTING IN YOUR PRODUCT
To have a great product on the job market, you must invest in that product. Ideas and talent are prevalent in business and have no particular value. The sweat, tears, and money you put into a product make it worth something.
Learn to Fish
Give a man fish, he feeds for today—teach a man how to fish, and he feeds for a lifetime. Education usually involves both a teacher and a student, but many often resist being students. Don’t be at the mercy of someone else in tools and technology utilisation; the most prominent place to start is learning the tools of your domain. Imagine how easy things would be for you if you understood the concepts of the business domain you’re in. You don’t have to master everything but rather concentrate on the fundamentals. Someone ignorant of their business domain gives room for silly mistakes to slip through, yet they could have been avoided with basic business domain knowledge.
Learn how the business works.
The fundamentals of business finance are one body of knowledge that almost everyone in a business must learn regardless of their position. It is neither technical nor domain-specific and will not become outdated anytime soon. As a developer, you can not expressively serve a business if you don’t know how it works. Effectively adding value to the company takes a thorough understanding of the environment. You can learn how the business is by asking a more professional person to take you through the core fundamentals of a business.
Be a Mentor
The best approach to learning something is to teach it to someone else. There is no recommended strategy to crystallise your understanding of something other than demonstrating it to someone else so they can comprehend it. Having or knowing information and data is not the same as understanding their causes and consequences; we evolve by teaching others through this understanding. When you teach, you must acknowledge questions that didn’t cross your mind while learning. When you’re in a mentoring relationship with someone, you create loyalty with each other. This kind of bond is a considerable place to circulate complex problems or sight for work. You don’t necessarily have to create an official mentoring relationship to get these benefits. Resort to being of service to people, and the rest will advance naturally.
Favourite quote of Part Two: “Without a role model, there’s no incentive to get better.”
PART THREE: EXECUTING
You’re not being paid to be wise but instead paid to be the prime specialist in modern technology. You execute work operations for an organisation that tries to make money, and your job is to accomplish something that drives the organisation to meet its goals. Many of us are reluctant to find our identities in our interrelation with the companies we work for. We are paid to create a competitive advantage, which means leaving our comfort zones and getting things done. To be successful, the raw ability will get you only so far. The endgame is populated by closers—people who finalise things.
Right Now
How will an application close to those you spend weeks working on in the office finish in a single weekend? There is no time to put jobs off when you have limited time to accomplish a task, so don’t. You can’t afford to delay making decisions, avoid tedious work, and execute the tasks as fast as possible. Parkinson’s law states, “Work thickens to fill the time available for completion.” The sorrowful thing is that, even if you don’t want it to be like this, you can fall into this trap, especially when there are tasks you don’t want to do.
Even a manufactured sense of priority authorises you to double or triple your productivity. You get it done instead of talking about getting it done.
Mind Reader
The mind-reading trick is not entirely safe; it is a strained rope you’ll have to keep away from unless you have left yourself a safety net. You may spend your company’s money trying to do work that no one asked you to do and drive negative results or lose the money. Start small; only execute guesswork that fits within the jurisdiction of your job so that the consequences are limited. Minding-reading applies to your managers and clients; if you consistently implement what customers ask for when they ask for them, you’ll drive satisfaction towards your customers. Nevertheless, you’ll charm them if you implement more than they asked. The mind-reading trick, if executed perfectly, urges people to depend on you. It’s a skill worth exploring and developing.
Daily Hit
To be sure that you’re doing a good job, set a goal that could be daily or weekly that you can track. This type of performance can change your behaviour. When you search for exceptional accomplishments, you naturally pass through the procedures of evaluating and prioritising your interests based on the business value of what you might work on. Tracking hits and achievements at a considerably high prevalence will ensure you get stuck. Moreover, you get addicted to achieving them daily.
You can’t spend two weeks formulating the ideal task if expected to generate a hit daily. Executing these tasks eventually becomes a habit instead of a large production.
Favourite quote of Part Three: “Your leaders want you to have independence and ownership. Making, executing, and communicating plans will help you attain both.”
PART FOUR: MARKETING… NOT JUST FOR SUITS
As a leader, you must create teams to achieve the highest value for the company. But to do this, managers should know who is in the organisation and what kind of work they can do. Employees prefer managers who focus on the broad picture instead of keeping close tabs on what each employee does daily. Leaders ought to understand their employees’ capabilities, and developers should market them, not leaving with the misconception that their skills are self-evident to the managers.
Perceptions, Perschmeptions
It’s okay to be the idealist and pretend not to care about what other people think about you, and you can’t let yourself accept it. It would be best to care about what others think about you because perception is reality. Yet, there is no way to measure without bias the quality of a well-informed worker or the quality of their work. Therefore, you’ll always be evaluated based on someone else’s perception of you.
Managing perception is practical; when you directly observe the factors that drive other people’s perceptions of you, you will strongly discover how to make them happy customers.
Adventure Tour Guide
The main feature of spreading the word in the workspace is your ability to communicate. Your job is to be the customer’s guide through the merciless topography of the IT world. You must ensure your customers are comfortable guiding them through an unfamiliar place.
In case of promotion and staffing decisions are being generated, the best advocate for you is a customer who can’t live without you. And, your customer constitutes the needs of the business you’re paid to generate. You need to be conscious that your customers may need topics quieted when explaining software-related matters.
Me Rite Reel Nice
More than fifty per cent of responding companies consider writing skills when recruiting and promotion decisions. And when you step back to observe the big picture, you realise that writing skills are both necessary and in short supply. Regardless of your excellent coding skills, you won’t be very productive in a distributed team if you can not convey yourself in words. Communication through writing is the bottleneck through which all your magnificent ideas must pass. You are what you can explain.
Favourite Quote of Part Four: “Don’t let yourself just be the best in the bunch. Be the person and do the things that people have to talk about.”
PART FIVE: MAINTAINING YOUR EDGE
You must research, invest, execute, market, and repeat during your career. Spending a lot of time inside any repetitive process puts you at risk of becoming suddenly outdated. It can crawl up to you if you’re not watching out for it carefully. And when it grabs you off guard, it’s usually too late.
Already Obsolete
The more your business becomes successful, the more you will become comfortable with your business model. Something that will make you amazingly vulnerable to those who come along behind you with revolutionary ideas that could make your winning business look like a worn-out sweater at a disco. The same applies to technology choices. If you master a relevant language now, you may feel comfortable, and it’s an excellent place to be. Take note; success brings arrogance, which breeds complacency. Ensure you conduct weekly research on the new technologies and begin developing skills in them. Execute hands-on work with these latest technologies, like building simple applications.
You’ve Already Lost Your Job
The position of employment you were hired to execute no longer exists. You might still be extracting a salary or adding value to the company, but you have already lost your job. The one unquestionable thing is that everything is changing. The economy is changing, and jobs are moving offshore and back on. Employers and employees are trying to work out how to adapt. If your environment changes and the work circumstances continuously move, holding on to your work generates a harmful dissonance that infects your work.
Path With No Destination
People always focus on the outcome of a process, whether learning or the career process, so centred on the results, we must remember to observe the scenery. Concentrating on results is the reverse of what you should spend your time on when you think about it. Usually, you spend all your time doing and little time reaching goals. When designing software, the development process is where you spend most of your time, not the finished software coming out at the end.
Favourite Quote of Part Five: “Spending too much time inside any iteration of the loop puts you at risk of becoming suddenly obsolete.”
HOW THIS BOOK CAN HELP SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS
“The Passionate Programmer” by Chad Fowler is a career guide for software developers that provides practical advice and insights on creating a fulfilling and successful career. The book covers various topics, including career development strategies, personal branding, networking, and building a portfolio. It also offers tips on improving technical skills and staying up-to-date with the latest technologies. The book can help software developers enhance their career prospects and achieve their professional goals.
