Developer Career Growth: Breaking Through Stagnation

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hola! We are back again. We are continuing our season where we're here doing a prior season, doing all of our topics that had to do with becoming a better developer, basically. And now we're doing it with AI. We're taking those topics and we are putting them through AI. We're getting its results, its recommendations, and we're basically telling it what we think about it. We're adding on to that conversation, just like we've added a new guest to talk about that subject. So far, it's been working really well. We'll see how it goes today. This time we're going to talk about breaking through career plateaus, tips to accelerate your growth as a developer. But before we do that, this is the Developer Nord podcast, Building Better Developers. Also our name. I am one of the founders. My name is Rob Brodhead. I'm a founder of Develop Nord, but also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you do technology better. Let's face it, technology is a big, ugly monster out there. If you go to developernord.com, you're going to see all these different topics, all these different things that have evolved over the years, whether it's AI, whether it's the latest in streaming technology, whether it's the latest in UIs, all of that stuff. There's a lot of technology out there. We've spent a lot of time with it. We've also spent a lot of time in businesses across a wide range of areas and lines of business. We sit down with you, help you really define your business. Make sure first that you get that stuff out of your head, get it on paper or digitally. And then we can talk through your processes, your procedures, and through simplification, integration, automation, and even innovation, we can help you craft a plan, special recipe. We're going to call it a road technology roadmap that comes out of this technology assessment that helps you get a good plan for today, but also for tomorrow and growing forward to match the needs of your business. Good thing and bad thing. Oh boy, this is like, I got to think of what has been going on lately because it has been, it has been a lot of stuff. Very much in the same. Good thing is, is that I have been, as I've been shifting gears a little bit at the RB consulting world and doing a little more working on my business. There are a lot of those things that I enjoy and that suck me in, even some of aspects of networking. I'm an introvert. I'm not normally, I'm not into the whole networking thing. Forget that. But there are pieces of it I do like. There is like the problem solver in me, the, you know, get to know the deep details of a problem, that kind of stuff. It's really fun. I've been doing a lot of that. And so I've been able to do some things that are different. As we've talked about in the past, helps me out because now I'm doing a little bit of different work. The downside is that is sucking up a lot of my time. And so like every day I will get stuck into something where I'm like, oh, I've got all these meetings that I've lined up that I really need to do. But also I've got this other work that I need to do. So I'm actually working on my business when at times I like, I really need some time to work in my business. So I'm getting into that good thing, bad thing. The good thing though, right now is that Michael is going to introduce himself and allow me to take a breath. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Mulash. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as DeveloperNUR. I'm also the owner of Envision QA. We help startups and growing businesses build software that works the way it's supposed to from day one. You've probably heard stories of software projects going over budget, launching late, or breaking once the user gets their hands on it. That's where we come in. At Envision QA, we make sure that your project is tested, stable, and ready for the customers. We handle the behind the scenes quality checks and support development so you can launch faster, avoid costly mistakes, and protect your reputation. In short, we help you build software that doesn't break your business. Learn more at EnvisionQA.com. Good thing, bad thing. Let's see. Good thing, bad thing. Well, I'll go with good thing this time because really I talked about the bad thing and thankfully so far nothing else bad has happened since that. Good thing, we finally got some rain yesterday. The grass was looking dead, looking dry. Got just enough rain, not for the grass to grow, but for it to be a little bit greener. So that was very cool. And then I got a little notification that in a couple months, Pokemon Legends comes out. So I'm very stoked for that. I am stoked to go through this conversation today because it started out with, okay, it recommended a different topic. So it recommended breaking the plateau, level up your dev career like it's the final boss. Opening hook, you've been coding for years. You're good at your job, but lately it feels like you're stuck on the same level. Today we're talking cheat codes for your career and no, not the kind that gets you banned from the server. Overflow, first part, setting the stage, the comfortable but stuck feeling projects are fine. Paychecks fine, but growth feels flat. Why plateaus happen? Routine work, lack of challenge or not marketing yourself internally. Analogy, your careers XP bar is filling, but the level up screen never pops. Now there's a lot of gamers stuff there that if you don't understand that, that's okay. We're going to question a little bit because most developers have some sort of gaming knowledge, but that is a different topic. This is part of why the developer nor site that kind of all of this stuff that we do exists is because we are knowledge workers. We, if we're going to be better developers, we have to be lifetime learners. We also need to be challenged ourselves on a regular basis to grow because if you're not growing, you're dying, especially with technology because technology is just marching, marching, marching, marching. And so you need to be able to keep up with that. You need to set a pace that you don't have to know everything, but if you can be regularly growing and learning new things that are available, it's going to help you out quite a bit. And this is this comfortable, but stuck. I was literally talking with somebody about this not too long ago that did a complete career change and was at a company that they left a good job. Part of it was because of this is there's a certain point where you're going to look at it. I'm doing the same thing I did last year or two years ago or six months ago, even sometimes to say I'm not really growing. Now, it doesn't mean that you have to like always be doing the latest whiz bang fancy stuff and be on the bleeding edge, but you do need to be growing. And that's not necessarily in technology. So it may be that you're maybe you're not coding as much as you were before, but maybe now you're doing more design work or maybe you're doing some mentoring or leadership or things like that. There needs to be a growth path for wherever it is that you're at, whether it's your company or whether whoever your employer is or whether you're doing it yourself through your side hustles and the things that you do it outside of work. Now if you're doing it outside of work, then that may be enough. You may be able to like just continue moving forward, which is maybe the best of all worlds is because now you have a safe, safe job, a steady paycheck and all that goodness and you're able to grow as well. The problem is that takes time. And if you're spending 40 to 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 hours of work, you know, on your regular job and you're trying to spend even 10 or 15 hours extra on your other job and you have, I don't know, this thing called a family, whatever the heck that is. I heard those exist somewhere. Stuff's going to fall apart. It is not going to work well. Just trust me on that. You need to be able to find that balance. And this goes back to come with things we've talked to some of the things we've talked about in the past. It's like you've got to change gears sometimes you're going to end up burning out or getting stuck in a rut. You're just not going to be as good. So you need to be looking for ways to steadily grow up your company. If your employer doesn't provide it, then look for some ways to do so. And if it's something that's too much of a strain, then maybe it's time to start looking for a job that will allow you to grow thoughts on that. Yeah. You kind of set the stage really well for this one. Interestingly enough though, you know, the comfortable feeling stuck. One of the things you have to be careful about if you are feeling comfortable in your job and not going anywhere, you may want to do a little bit of self-reflection first. Make sure that you are doing basically, are you doing the bare minimum to make to do the job or are you really trying to challenge yourself with the job? I've been in some positions where they gave me tasks and I got bored. I would get my work done and I would have hours and I'd have to sit there at my desk before the work from home situation helps. But you run into situations where you might feel comfortable in the job, you know, is it going anywhere? But are you being challenged? There was one company I worked for where the work was OK, but very quickly it got boring and I wasn't moving up. I wasn't going anywhere. So I actually started looking for problems to solve within the company. So instead of going external, I went internal and I was like, well, how can I grow myself within the company? So I actually looked for things within this company that were outside of my warehouse. I was a front end client server application developer. So I saw these new signature tablets were coming out. This was way before they're like everywhere. And I was like, hey, what's this company had one sitting in a storage room. I picked it up and I started playing around with it. And next thing you know, I wrote a little module app for our check in software. And then a couple of months later, the same type of software that they were, it was patient engagement. And it was like, hmm, we've got these webcams laying around over here. Can I make that work? So I went outside of my wheelhouse and figured out how to do things. Now, end of the day, that job went nowhere. I was I finally reached a point where I could not go anywhere within this company. I hit a ceiling. And the moment I looked outside that company, I found a job with a lot more pay, a lot more challenge and a lot more fun within weeks. It did not take long. So step outside of your wheelhouse. I would say start internally. If you have good relationships with the company or with start there, try to see if you can grow. If you start by asking yourself, are you doing enough or are you doing the bare minimum? If you're doing the bare minimum because you're not challenged, see if you can challenge yourself within the company. And that might help you move up within the company and get out of your wheelhouse. But like I said, if you reach that point where you aren't, it's time to look elsewhere. There's a lot of good points there. I'm going to move forward, though, instead of diving back, getting lost on a couple of those rabbit trails. So let's move on to the next one. So recognizing the plateau symptoms. Haven't learned a new framework, tool or pattern in six plus months. No increase in responsibilities or ownership. You can do most tasks on autopilot. Why this is dangerous. Industry moves fast and coasting is really falling behind slowly. I think this is actually my first job that I work myself out of a job is I think this is a natural kind of progression is that we had something and I helped them build a solution. We had the solution. We were using it and then started using the next phase of growth. The head is now refining that solution, simplifying it, automating it, doing the things that makes it easier to do and require less resources or at least human resources. And very quickly over a period of probably six months or so, we had something that took initially when I started, it took like 30 something days to get it done. And we got it down to like, I think under three days is basically where I think we got less. It seems like three days was the number that we got to. So that's a huge change. But it also meant when it was 30 days, it was a full time developer role. When it's three days, that means basically because you're doing about one of these a month, it had to do with release management. You had about one a month. Well, 30 days fills up your month really well. Three days does not. So very quickly it became, all right, I've got 27 days to lay around and do nothing. I don't want to do that and moving on. So I think that's very well a good example like your plateau is like, you may feel that you've plateaued, but part of it is like if you've ever worked entry level like restaurants, something like that, they'll always say, if you say, I don't have anything to do, manager will always be like, we'll grab a broom, go wipe a table, clean a floor. We can always, in a similar sense, we can always do some automation, do some code reviews, see if you like documentation, code review, maybe build a bit of some, you do a little unit test or some testing around that. And then finding ways to do it better, performance tuning and automation in particular, like make this not just a good solution, but like maybe an almost perfect solution, work on that for a while. Now, if you get that, if you've gone through that, now you've basically exhausted your, you know, what you can do within that area or with that application. And then, all right, maybe you need to move on, but there's definitely some things you can do to help you. If you're starting to see these little red flags of like, oh, I feel like I'm plateauing, those are a couple of things you can do to maybe get you off of that plateau and growing again, at least for a little bit. What are some of the things you've run into and how you've tackled them like that? Yes, I mean, this is actually kind of an interesting one for me right now, given that we are in kind of an AI revolution where software development in and of itself is changing almost daily right now. It really, I really struggle when I work with developers who tell me that, oh, I don't, I won't use AI, I won't learn it, I don't want to touch this. And they're like, what I'm working on is going to be around forever. So they're not learning those new frameworks, they're not learning those new tools. And they, well, they are perfecting their skills at what they have, they're going to run into a situation where they're going to be many fish in a very small pond of jobs. A great example of this was there was so many developers that went and learned like Cobalt and Fortran for the Y2K panic. And then the moment that was done, we had the 90s bubble where all these people got laid off. It's like, oh, hey, we don't need you anymore. We need real developers and new real skills. So not putting shade on Fortran and Cobalt because that language has evolved. But that's just one example. Or if you're like a DevOps or a network engineer working with old technologies is great. But if you don't stay up to date on what's coming out, what's new, eventually you're going to be working with tools that you're not going to know what to do with and you're going to be out of a job. And that is, I guess, another that we haven't talked about is sometimes just take the same thing and use a new tool. One of the things I ran into this is now a couple of years ago, I've been doing a lot of Python and I had been working with it in Visual Studio Code. And there was a project that made good extent that was some of the slotted doing the same sort of thing. But I used PyCharm. I was like, all right, I'm going to go do this. Or I also did a similar thing. I know you hate Tella J, but I'd use Eclipse. Way, way back, I used my Eclipse and I used Eclipse and I used Springs STS. So I'd done a lot of that. And I finally was like, you know what, I'm going to go do IntelliJ. I'm going to use their stuff because I'd use some of their other tools. So just learning those tools can be, in itself, can be a big change. Back in the day, there was a point where I was building some APIs and I used this tool called Postman that was sort of new at the time. And it's turned out to be something that I use all the time. Sometimes I'll change up my database browser tools and things like that. Those are helpful because it also will help you get better. You're going to pick the ones that work most like you and be able to be the most productive version of yourself. Breaking through, acceleration strategy. So stretch projects, volunteer for complex or cross team challenges, skill stack expansion, add complementary skills, UX basics, DevOps tools, leadership, mentorship 2.0. Not just finding a mentor, but mentoring others to solidify leadership skills. Visibility boost. Speak at internal brown bags, contribute to open source or write about your learnings. Those, wow, those are all like excellent, excellent ideas. We sort of talked about the first one about like volunteering or finding your own project somewhere else internally or anything like sometimes you'll hear about, like we're getting a research group together to think about doing this with a project or do this direction with our company. Those are great. Volunteer in a charitable sense, whether it's working for some local charity or whether it's mentorship, like you can work with, maybe there's like a local college you can work with. I combine that a lot with brown bag sessions and things like that. Find excuses, whether it's a brown bag session at work or maybe there's a meetup that you can go present at. That stuff is huge. If you go back to our mentor and mastermind stuff that we've done over the years, I don't know how far back you got to go now. I was like a couple of years old, but you can go back out on the YouTube site and you can find a lot of our old meetings and some of the discussions we had there and a lot of that did for quite a while talk about things like get out there. Whether it's you could write a book, you can have a podcast, you can now, I mean, like channel. But the things where you're out there presenting, talking about your ideas, even it's just a simple blog are in themselves a great way for you to really solidify your knowledge. And then hopefully you get feedback info at development.org.com. Hopefully you get feedback and you're going to be able to refine that knowledge and you're going to be able to grow that knowledge because you're going to have conversations with people and talk to them about what you know. They're going to tell you what they know and that's going to help you grow quite a bit. Before we pass this, you we've not talked enough about complementary skills in a long, long time, but that is something that it is all over the software development, the development or book. Talk about those, about how you can take the things you're doing and sort of shift into a slightly different area. And build management is great because whatever app you're building, you can find a way to deploy it and work on some way to, uh, to automate that process, whether it's through some pipelines, whether it's through ant, whether it's through batch and shell scripts, there's or write your own installer or things like that. Those help you stretch your skills. And also they are, you know, the bonus are based on something that you, you know, it's helpful to the project that you're building because now you've built a tool to help those that are deploying your tool, your application thoughts on that. So I'm going to stick with kind of the mentorship and the visibility boost because one of the biggest things that I found personally with my growth expansion over the years was I left college and I was like, I'm never going back to an education institution again. I am done. Five years of college, you know, shifting majors. I'm just done with teaching, done with teachers, done with everything. Six months later, I had to eat those words. I ended up getting a job at a vocational school, working with people that did not have that formal education. And it was a lot of fun. You learn so much more by teaching others and seeing their point of view in a way that you typically wouldn't look at a problem. The more people that you can be exposed to for teaching, the more demographics, the more, you know, just different languages or different, you know, whatever they know, you can kind of absorb that as you're teaching them. It really helps the more to walk in someone's shoes and then help them understand what it is that you're teaching is a viable resource. It helps you. It really can help you for your communication skills and it can also help you with your troubleshooting and debugging because helping someone debug something is you learn so much from that. It's like, oh yeah, I forgot about this or, oh, I didn't know that. So you can always try to learn something new. And the visibility boost. Yes, speaking internal brown bag events, things like that. You know, it's actually funny that stretch project and the visibility boost to me, I think of hackathons. I think go out to a hackathon, go out to like, heck, go out to like a hobby. So like if you're into video games, go out to like E3 or go to a local game con, go out and talk to people, go out and network and again, try to find people with similar skills, similar mindsets, and then you can work together to maybe build a project or hey, you might come up with the next, you know, Microsoft or Apple. I think those are, yeah, I think as we wrap this one up, you guys all probably know if you listen to us at all that I love side hustles as a way to grow your skills. I love like that's that's now granted. That's exactly how I learned best. I learned by doing so from the very start when I was learning new languages, one of the things I would do is I would look at a language and say, what is something this is supposed to do really well? And I would go build that app with that language and it forced me to learn the language. Usually it was like sort of learn it and then I go build another app and I would eventually I could say I sort of had mastered the language because now I've built a couple of things with that and I understand some of its ins and outs and then as you grow, then you're going to learn more ins and outs. As Michael said, if you start debugging stuff, that's I think the part best part about building that little side hustle project is you're going to have bugs. You're going to have situations and I have so many of these when I have screamed and custom done all kinds of stuff where it's like this worked and then you do something now nothing works and you got to go debug it and figure all that stuff out. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes it takes quite a bit and you learn that things get cashed or things didn't get loaded right or things don't have the right permissions or something moved. It's something is case sensitive or whatever. All the different things are that can cause code to not work. You start building up this list of like, okay, here's all the things I got to check. It makes you better. And so I cannot say enough about like find yourself a little side project like Michael said, you can do it internally. You can go find something. It's like find some work to do within your business where maybe there's something somebody's complaining about a little problem that you can solve or go out and scratch your own itch or if there's just something that you just are like, hey, it'd be cool if I had this tool, go build it because it's going to help you grow and get you off that plateau. That being said, it is time to wrap this one up. I've already mentioned, but I'm going to mention again info at develop a new com. Shoot us an email if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, recommendations, all that goodness we are getting towards the end of this. We got a few more episodes on this season. Not sure exactly where we're going with the next one because hey, that's who we are. Although this has worked really well. Maybe we'll just do like evergreen content and come back and do AI on some of these past topics because they are topics that no matter where you are in your career, you're going to bump into them over and over again because we have done so over and over again. You can also reach out to us on develop a new com. There is feedback forms. You can leave a feedback comment on any of the articles are out there. You go out to YouTube. There's a developer channel. Check out stuff there. Alan X. We are at the developer anywhere that you see podcasts or listen to podcasts. You can download podcasts. You can leave us a review and we will get back to you that way as well. We appreciate your time. We appreciate all that you've done for us and we just want to do for you as well. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a new 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.