I’m sitting with a couple of interesting people. Dave Rosenberg, principle analyst of OSDL (the open source guys, he works with Linus Torvalds) and Rajesh Setty, author of Beyond Code. We’re sitting in the cafeteria inside the borg. Now you understand why I sit in the cafeteria.
He says that his work has hugely helped developers careers. He’s studied a lot of developers and what they do to sink their careers.
“For developers the technical skills are only part of the story,” he says. ”They need to build what I call the long term skills.”
Developers need to do things that will set them apart from the crowd, he says. Public speaking for instance. He pointed out how Chandu Thota set himself apart from the rest of his team by building the Feedmap over on the right side of my blog. Quick, can you name anyone else who works with Chandu? Does that turn into rewards, money, opportunities? You bet it does.
He talks about ROII - Return on Investment for Interaction. What we have less and less of is time, he says. People forget that time is the biggest investment that people can make. He looks at blogs as having ROII. But even blogs can set themselves apart from other blogs. How many blogs get return visitors? Why? Because the Return on Investment for Interaction for those readers is too small.
He’s identified nine simple things that developers can do to build their brands and move ahead in their careers.
Does this stuff matter? Yes. Even on a business level. Over and over I hear about business decisions made on relationships. Just this week I learned about a deal worth tens of millions of dollars closed on the strength of relationships.
