Pivoting - How to Embrace Change and Fuel Your Professional Growth

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are here. We are once again continuing the developer journey. I took an overly big breath before I started. That's okay. But those that are seeing it live are like, what do you have in a heart attack, stroke, what? And when they're saying that, they're saying, Rob, that's me, Rob Broadhead. I happen to be one of the founders of Developineur, also a founder of RB Consulting, where we take your technology sprawl and all of the pain involved with that. And through simplification, automation and integration, we find a way to like shrink that stuff down, get it working tighter, faster. And sometimes it's just in this century, if you're still working on like DOS systems from decades ago or even Windows XP from decades ago at this point. We have a good thing, bad thing. So good thing today that I'm going to say is that I have like, sometimes you have a work day where it's just like bam, bam, bam, stuff gets done. You're just like cranking through things. That was my good thing today. Bad thing is, I'm going to call them out. Michael was a little late on getting to this. And so now we're like scrambling a little bit going through our podcast. So there you go. I gave you like, boy, shots fired. But I'm going to let you go ahead and introduce yourself and give your good and bad for the week, for the episode. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mulash. I'm one of the founders of Developineur. I'm also the founder of Envision QA. If you're one of those software companies that are having buggy code, problems with releases, reach out to us. We'll help you write your integration test, your unit test, help you design better ways to test your software so that you have better software releases and happier customers. Good and bad this week. Good thing I was making very good progress on a recent project. Got almost across the board. Downside, I was so heads down. I forgot about the time and was late to this call. There you go. That works out perfect. So we've got matching bads, I guess, basically. This episode, we're going to talk about pivoting. This is one of those things that I think if you're in this world, in the IT world, sometimes you don't have to be in there very long before you pivot. Sometimes you do it early on. I think for myself, I had I've got multiple pivots through my career, which have actually turned out to help me quite a bit early on. Basically, what you would call maybe like a staff developer or something like that, where I was just like writing code. And then it was really in the first couple of places I worked and projects I worked on were all sort of the same-ish. And then I ended up doing a pivot and was actually ended up pivoting into management for a little bit. Actually pivoted back and went more into back end, like database administrator stuff. Once again, pivoted, got back into consulting, but now sort of getting into that side hustle. And it's just pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. I've had several of those along the way. Somewhere along the way, I pivoted into writing a book, somewhere I pivoted essentially into creating a podcast. And so I think these are things that we need to keep an eye out for, and they are not a bad thing. It is sometimes we get, this goes into that, the old idea of being a developer with 10 years of experience or a developer with one year of experience, 10 different times. Sometimes you're going to find whether it's within your company, whether you're, if you're a salaried employee and you work for this company and you work for them several years, or whether you're moving to a different job, you're in a consulting gig or doing side hustles, you're going to pivot and you need to pivot because you've basically plateaued where you're at. And there's a couple of different ways you can pivot. You can look into a different technology. So you may be, let's say you're a Java developer and you want to pivot into, you know, open up the .NET world and you want to go do C sharp .NET or one of the .NET technologies. You may do more of a tiered type of pivot where you maybe you've been doing a lot of front end and you want to go to middle tier or you want to do backend. And then there is also the role type pivots where it's maybe you are just a developer and now you want to be a lead or you want to be a mentor or you want to move into management. And then there's also, I guess, in the roles is more the technical roles where it's like you're really writing code, but now you want to design or you want to be an architect or or move up those ways. And so there's different ways. And some of these you can see as logical progressions of your career. But really at each of those points, it is some level of a pivot because you're really changing your focus. If you go from, you know, your let's say you start out your first couple of years, your writing code and you're you know, you get requirements and you write code and you turn those around and you're doing good at it. And now you want to be a lead. There's a pivot there because now your focus is different. You're not focusing on the code anymore. That's still part of it, which is what you really want to do when you pivot is you really want to grow out of what you are working with, because then you're not going from, let's level of mastery, maybe 100 percent mastery to zero percent mastery or something like that. Instead, you're going from that, you know, maybe 100 percent mastery or substantial mastery to something that may be zero. But ideally, you do it in that same area. So your pivot doesn't lose your momentum so that you're offsetting the the zero percent part of it with some of your other skills that allows you to at least start feeling like you're not starting from scratch. And we talk about these a lot with way back. I don't think we've spent as much time talking about them and probably in the last year or so. But it was things like there's referred to them as like complementary skills or tangential skills. If you go to the development or book, we talk about that and the idea that there are things that you can pivot into based on where you're at. And a lot of times it comes with going to a new project. Maybe it's you're moving into a new project in your organization and maybe even going into a new version of the project that you've been on because now they're making some substantial changes that allow you to embrace that direction that you want to go. Sometimes it comes from it. Sometimes it comes from like layoffs and things like that. Sometimes your team goes from very big to now it's smaller and you're still there. And now your role can change or you're you know, the problems that you're tackling can change. And it's really this one of those things that goes back to having that career roadmap and being aware of what is it that where you at? What are the skills and experiences that you've got? And then what are some of the things that you want to do? And if you're regularly looking at these, you're going to be able to look at what can what am I doing now? What can I do or am I doing? What are a couple of things that I want to do and see if there is a you know, where those complementary skills are? Where is it? For example, if you wanted to go from Java to dot net, is there maybe a migration project somewhere that you can get a hold of? Or is there something where it's maybe like as a cool thing that was part of the company I was at early, early on, as they had these. Some places have these lunch brown bag lunch sessions where you you learn about a topic. Well, these guys had these like kits. And so what you do is you would, you know, somebody would spend a little time, learn a technology, build this little kit that's basically like it's almost like a tutorial. It really ended up being a tutorial that was like, here's a little mini project built in this technology. Here's what it looks like walking through it. And this is way before, you know, record video recordings and stuff like that. Well, I mean, people recorded video, but we didn't have it on our computer. We didn't do screen grabs and stuff like that as much. You could do screenshots, but that's what you'd end up building is a nice little document that had some screenshots, maybe some sample code, not near what you can do today. But those kinds of things are great because you can say, hey, we're in Java all the time. I want to spend a little time. And so I'm going to go learn dot net. Or maybe it's like you go, go work on a certification to like round you out. Those are the kinds of things that you want to keep an eye on with the pivot and it don't think of it as a bad thing or as pivoting out of necessarily where you were, but instead almost pivoting into a better situation, maybe stepping up into a better situation. Those are my thoughts. Let's toss that over to you. So I like how you ended that particular piece, you know, stepping into a good situation. So I'm going to take it a slightly different direction. I'm going to talk about those situations where a pivot is necessary, not necessarily just for a career purpose, but when is it time to pivot because you're in a situation that you don't need to be in your overworked, underpaid, overstressed, things are falling down. There are other times when it's OK to make a pivot. I think Tim Ferriss was probably one of the best places I read is if you don't like what you're doing or you don't like a particular situation or you don't like the movie you're watching, stop wasting time. Go do something else. And the same thing applies to our jobs, to our careers, to what we're doing. If you are currently a front end developer and you are bored to death or you just don't like what you're doing, but yet you like writing database code, well, go look and see what other things there are in databases that you could pivot into. You can make a lateral move. Yes, maybe go not necessarily to that zero, but maybe to a 5, 10 percent, I know how to do this. You may go down a little, but very quickly will go right back up because that's something you're going to enjoy. You're going to be very enthusiastic about and you're going to run with it. Whereas your front end job, you're just, oh, do I really want to go to work? I don't like what I'm doing. Or you're in a different situation where the applications you're working on, you like what you're doing, but the house is falling in. Everything's on fire. You're in that constant firefighting mode and you've just you've been there for a couple of years, but yet like for the last six months, it's just fallen apart. Well, maybe that's time to look for something else. Pivot into a new role, maybe a management role, maybe something more senior or similar, but for a company that you want to work for. Maybe you want to work for Apple. Hey, there's a job open. Go apply at Apple. Go somewhere else. Look for other opportunities. Pivoting isn't just about where you're moving up the ladder or what you're doing. Pivoting could simply be a state of mind. I'm not happy where I'm at or I don't like what I'm doing. I need a change and you can pivot. Preferably, you want to pivot up into something that will continuously move you forward. But sometimes it's OK to pivot to the side, make that lateral move and then reset and then go back on that journey. Get back. Learn new things. Get happy again. You know, it's not necessarily all about the job. It's also our mental state. You know, we want to be mentally capable of doing the job. We want to be happy. We get to that quality of life thing we talk about all the time. So as you think about pivoting or as you're getting into situations, look at opportunities. Look at pivoting as an opportunity, not as a negative, not as, oh, you know, it's a bad thing. I thought about that for years. So when I first got out of college, I swore I would never go back to school. And the first thing I did was I got a teaching job and found out I loved teaching. And what was really cool about it was every semester I was teaching something new. So I was constantly learning, you know, that knowledge thing I constantly crave. But yet I later got into a health care job and it got stagnant. I got stuck. So for six years, I stayed at this company because everyone kept telling me, you know, you don't want to change jobs all the time because you'll be looked upon as a job jumper, that you're jumping jobs. You're not happy where you're at. So you're not going to stick around. That's a myth. I found that out later in life. Yes, you do want to do the job well. And you basically, if you leave a company, leave a company in a good state where you have a good handshake, you get good reviews. So when you do go to the next job and they do call someone for a referral, you're, again, progressing. You're not getting in that negative state. Now, if you're at a job three months and another job for three months and another job for three months, yes, that's going to look bad on your resume. So make sure whatever you're doing, you give it 110 percent and that when you leave, you leave in a better place than where you started, just like your code. If you touch it, make sure that it is in a better place than where you left it and that it's not on fire. What are your thoughts on that? Actually, there's a really good point in there that's the idea of sort of sometimes you need to step back to take a couple of steps forward. You know, like maybe you like and it's just like think of it from a very physical point of view. Sometimes you walk into walls like I got to step back side over and then I can start moving forward again. Sometimes particularly and this goes into some of our recent other episodes and some of the things we've brought up and even some things you brought up right there is that sometimes we need to actually step back or simplify because sometimes we step into something or we're in a situation, whether it's work or a project or something like that, and it's just wearing us out because it is too much. We're trying to get everything done. We're trying to spend too much time to get this across the finish line or to address all the issues or whatever it is. There's so many different ways things can go sideways. Sometimes it's easier to say, you know what? It's it goes to the like one day at a time kind of thing. You know, it's the biblical or the you know, the addict type approach of like one day at a time and say, all right, I'm going to instead of trying to solve this entire project that's going to take months and stuff, trying to solve all those problems today. I'm going to look at what do I need to work on today? What can I do today? And maybe even it's sometimes it's like, what can I do the first half of my day and what can I do in the afternoon, the second half of my day to move the ball forward? And maybe it's it's technically stepping back because you're not running at the same pace. Maybe it's something where you are a. I see this a lot, talk to a lot of people like this kind of situation, like maybe you're a manager or in some situation where you're dealing with a lot of meetings and things like that. Sometimes I say, all right, I'm going to block out. You know, three hours of my day and I'm going to go focus on a problem that needs to be solved. Maybe it could be you stepping back from your role, it may be that you're normally your manager, you're spending so much time, manage your team, but you're also you know, you have split requirements, so you also are split responsibilities and you also have some some sort of coding responsibility, or maybe even your team is struggling with something and you think that you've got a solution for it or maybe you do. You know, maybe it's one of those you've got some junior developers and you're a more senior developer where you're like, hey, I'm going to take some time, I'm going to go take a look at it. So instead of helping them help themselves by sort of say, well, try this, try this, try this. You can go solve that problem, hand that to them and go, here's a solution. This is how it works. And so now you've taken a step back, you've tackled sort of done their work for them in a sense, but instead of giving them a fish, you're now going to come back to them and you're going to teach them how to fish and say, this is how you do it. Now take this and move forward. So sometimes you have to step out of that role. Don't feel like you're too big for your britches, as they say, or don't worry about your title or your label as an employee, as much as what is the way to get the problem solved that you're facing. And sometimes it is like instead of looking at all of them at once, pick one and let's go work on that for a while. It does go back to focus is so often the best way to get to the end. Instead of trying to do 18 things at a time, take them, knock them down one at a time, just knock it down, knock it down, knock it down. But they focus on that one thing. So you're not split because we do not multitask to the level that we think we do. There's just too much involved there. Instead, get this focus like we've talked about in past stuff. Get that requirement done, get it nailed down, get it all wrapped up and then moved on to the next requirement. Instead of trying to tackle all of these at once, take it a step at a time and get through it. Thoughts? Yeah, I think that's a really good example. One of the best and kind of worst things about what we do is our ability to quote unquote multitask. And we get into situations, not necessarily pivoting our careers, but pivoting in our daily routines. We get into situations where we have so many different tasks we're trying to do at one time. We're pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. Nothing gets done. So you have to understand that multitasking is a lie. Multitasking is not getting the job done. Focus on one thing, get it done, then move on to the next thing, get it done. Yes, there can be pivots, but if you focus on one thing and get it done, then that's one thing off your list. Now you have the next thing. The other thing to be careful of when you're doing that is just make sure that you stay focused. And also this helps you batch things. So if you find out that you're pivoting and you have all these different tasks that you're doing, you can batch them together and that way you kind of pivot to one section of work, get that work done, then move on to the next piece. And that can be a different topic for another day. We can talk about batching again. But batching does work with pivoting. Batch your tasks, focus, work on one thing at a time. And the multitasking, this constant pivoting that you may have within your daily routines, gets simplified and you get happy again. You have a lot of weight gets taken off your shoulder. Well, hopefully this has taken some weight off of your shoulders and you can pivot back into your day from here and all of your tasks and things like that, taking them, hopefully, focused one at a time, knock those things out, get to the end of the day. You're a happy camper. If not, pivot, come back the next day, try it again. I probably am using too many of those words in too many wrong ways, but that's OK because I am towards the end of my day and I'm smelling dinner off in the end, off there and my stomach is starting to pivot me in that direction. So as always, if you're not too hungry and running off, wow, that was like sometimes you get a little squirrely. Shoot us an email at info at developinord.com. Let us know, like, what are your thoughts? What are some topics? What are some recommendations? What are some things you would like to hear? Maybe what are some pivoting strategies, strategies that you have used or other strategies you've used to, you know, put your hair out when your hair is on fire? Some of those kinds of things that happen that are just they're really part and parcel of our career of being a developer. Even as you become a better developer, those things still show up. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.