This is for those of you who share with me the joy of learning new things! Use these reflections to build for yourself or for your employees, a way of thinking that not only gives you fun and new learnings, but also a great career in software development!
1. Google’s (now-famous) study of team productivity emphasises psychological safety, meaning of work, and impact of work as three of the five most important factors for team productivity. It has become a much cited study and what many companies strive for in setting up productive teams. But all of these three elements in the team start with you as an individual: you need to feel safe about what you enjoy, what you are good at, and be comfortable with the areas where you are not as skilled. Without this comfort, you cannot contribute to the team’s health and the feeling of psychological safety, that the team’s work is meaningful, and that what you do makes an impact. In my post on personal development, I share a model for personal development that can help you establish the foundational self-reflection that is needed to prosper also in team work.
2. In my career as a leader in software development, I meet a lot of junior developers who struggle with understanding what the difference is between a junior and a senior developer, and how to think about developing their skills and career. Indeed, many quite senior developers are also not very conscious of what brought them where they are, so it can be hard to navigate in all the advice on the Internet. As an introduction to one way of thinking about development, I wrote a blog posts about the five basic skill sets that I shared with developers reporting to me to facilitate a dialog about their development.
3. Many developers want to evolve towards becoming a software architect as one of several directions you can go as a developer. You may have learned about the classic software architect at the university. In a 2015 post, I reflected over how devops processes were changing the role of the software architect.