If you take a step back and think about how you generally end up selecting and assessing a career opportunity at present, you would find the following factors to be important:
- remuneration offered - peer presence - additional items that you can think of (viz. location etc) >From what I gather, freshers have more leeway (more than they think they have) in selecting a career opportunity. So, if you are a fresher, this mail is for you as well. Money is important. There are no two ways about it. It helps us meet our social duties, our family responsibilities, the occasional frivolity, our fascination with gizmos and what not. Money makes the world go round. So, how can you ensure that you get opportunities that hold the promise of more money ? By becoming worth it. By becoming technically valuable. There are two roads to such an objective: - attain proficiency as a developer/architect in the fundamental bits of technology that are consumed by companies - attain expertise in a niche technology that is valuable for a select group of companies who would be willing to pay for your acumen Irrespective of the path you take, the underlying principle is that you would require to make some 'smart' decisions. Your value (in money terms) would be somewhat related to the technical expertise that you possess. The increase in technical expertise happens only if you keep on constantly challenging yourself and attempting to solve problems that you have not met before or, solved before. Can you see a pattern emerging ? If you are selecting a career opportunity, ask yourself these following questions: - will this allow me challenges which I can use to make myself technically better than people around me ? - will the company allow me to work on parts of their core 'bread-n-butter' business and provide me with constant opportunities to excel ? - has the company made any significant technology moves recently (product introductions, acquisitions) working on which fits into my career objective ? - do I know anyone who has good vibes about this company ? For companies of bigger proportions, replace 'company' with 'team/business unit' and perhaps it would make sense to arrive at some reasonable assessments. The point I am trying to drive home is that just selecting an opportunity because it bumps your designation or remuneration upward with the aim of applying for a job with a higher designation in a year's time is not something that you will be happy with. Don't chase the designation, but desire the challenges. Challenges would make you reach outside of yourself and excel. They also compel you to start being aware of the technology actively. Through standards bodies, through RFCs, through professional groups and through groups working on Open Source implementations of them. You have invested enough time to educate yourself, made some small but significant sacrifices along the way. You owe it to no one but yourself to become a better software engineer/developer/programmer/architect. And, you know how to be one. Have fun, Sankarshan _______________________________________________ Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dgplug.org/listinfo.cgi/users-dgplug.org
