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DCR: Step 6 - Going Public

Published 11/7/2016

In today's episode, we talk about Developer Career Roadmap step 6, going public.

Today's episode is sponsored by Linode! Get your own Linux server in the cloud with full control in just minutes. You can also get $20 of Linode credit if you use the code developertea at checkout, or go straight to spec.fm/linode.

Transcript (Generated by OpenAI Whisper)
Hey, everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell in today's episode. We are talking about step six in the developer career roadmap. In case you haven't followed along with the developer career roadmap, I will lay out the steps that we've already covered very quickly and then we're going to jump in and talk about step six, which is Go public. Step one was to budget your time, create a budget for your time. Step two is to pick your base language. And of course we have episodes for each of these steps. If you go to spec.fm, you can listen to all of these episodes. In fact, some of them have two episodes for an individual step. Step three is start the learning cycle. And step three is one of those that will go on for the rest of your career. This isn't something that you get done with at any point in your career. Of course, the learning cycle is just that. It is a cycle. Step four, pursue and obtain an internship or another entry level position. We've talked about that quite a lot on this show. And in that particular episode, we talk about the importance of that position, the value that that will add to your career. Step five was cross-trained. This was a two episode discussion. We talked about cross-training both in your work environment as well as outside of your work environment. The idea of having a hobby and why that is so important to your career. Not only your mental health and your identity as a person, but also to your career. And number six, today we are talking about going public. Now, I want to preface today's episode with a little bit of a pro tip. If you are in this stage of your career, especially if you are younger, if you haven't had a different career before this, if this is your first jumping into the market, then I highly recommend you spend some time learning about yourself. Go and take every personality profile test you can find. Take some time to learn about yourself. Ask other people how they perceive you. Of course, on the show, we talked about how important it is for you to determine what your values are as a person, not as a developer, but as just a human being that goes beyond just your career and into your purpose. What you believe you are here to do and what you believe in doing. And really, step six is all about taking that information, the things that you know about yourself, all of that stuff that you have developed about your identity, about your skill set about what you believe you should be doing in your career and in your life. It's about taking that and showing it to people in a way that compels them to hire you. Let me say that one more time. Going public is about taking your identity, your skill sets, your values, all of that and putting it out for the public to see. And when I say public, I mean, for people that you want to see it and also for people you may not even know are looking at it. That is what we're talking about with going public. The average person will hold well over 10 jobs in their life, 10 jobs. Now if you think that your job right now is the last one that you're going to hold, you are almost certainly not correct. In fact, this one and the next one are almost certainly not going to be your last job. So you should view your entire life as if you are being put on display for being hired. And before you turn off the episode, let me clarify here, we're not talking about always coming across as perfectly professional. We're also not talking about being in a stodgy business suit for the rest of your life. That's not at all what it means to be hireable. Going public with who you are with your values and your skill sets and all the things that make you the person you are and the worker you are, those steps could be hugely beneficial to your future job. It can also be hugely beneficial to your current job, by the way, negotiating raises and that kind of thing. The things you share about yourself to the public create value. A lot of people don't realize this. When you share with other people the things that you've learned and the things that you believe that exchange of information and that exchange of ideas, that's important to culture. That's important to who you are and to the people that you work for. So understand this is going to add value to your career in many, many ways. And we're not going to be able to list all the ways that it adds value. But really what we want to talk about today is what does it mean to go public? How do you go public? I want to give you very concrete ideas of what this means because up until this point in this episode we're really talking about kind of theoretically what going public means. So I want to give you some actionable advice that you can take and act on starting today. So what does it mean to go public? This may seem obvious. Number one, this may seem obvious, but a lot of resumes that I've seen and probably a lot of your resumes. Ultimately, don't have this one thing. You need to go and simply buy a domain. This is a currency in today's information world. Just a web domain, hopefully something similar to your name and set up your own website. For something like 20 bucks a year, you can have a domain and point it to a GitHub pages account where at the very least you can have a static website. Now, this is actually where today's sponsor comes in. Today's sponsor is Linode and really we're just going to talk about how Linode can actually help with this going public idea instead of doing something like GitHub pages. You can point your domain to your Linode box. Linode obviously supports building websites, but it does so much more than that. As a developer, you should have a server somewhere that you can SSH into, that you can store things on, that you can create demos on and that you can ultimately build things with. Of course with Linode in just a few minutes, you're up on Linux, which means that pretty much any language that you're learning right now will probably run on a Linode server. On top of that, another great reason to have a Linode server is so you can simply learn how servers work. If you have to go through the process of learning how to SSH into a server, learning how to set up a Git repository on your remote Linode server, coming into an interview with that little bit of SysAdmin experience, that's going to be incredibly valuable to your future employer. What Linode does is it makes all of the things that should be easy, easy. You get your box up and running very quickly and you get root access. The rest is really up to you. Going back to one of the things that it means to go public, having your own website, setting up your own website on a Linode server, you have all the flexibility in the world to do whatever you want to do with it. You can use PHP or any other language. You can do all of that for $10 a month, of course, developer to listeners. In case you haven't heard this, you get $20 of credit on Linode by going to our special link at spec.fm slash Linode. What should this website look like? What should your personal domain, what should be at that website? This isn't about becoming a blogger or starting an online business and stopping your development process. That's not what we're talking about. This is about the fact that your future employer will do research on you and the tools to find out about you are just getting better and better. The better picture they have of who you are and what you do, the better off you will be. Without a website online, without some kind of way of showing who you are and what you do online, that picture is going to be much fuzzier. In fact, there may not be a picture at all of who you are and then you're going to get lost in the pile of resumes. This is why I recommend that you have a domain, but that doesn't mean that your website has to be what everyone else's website is. It also doesn't mean that you have to start a blog and start pouring a bunch of energy into that. Effectively, your website needs to be relatively aesthetically pleasing. Find a designer or someone online to review your site for you. You don't have to go and hire someone. If you want to invest in it, certainly not a bad idea to hire someone to design your site for you. If you have a little bit of design experience, I recommend that you exercise that design experience, express yourself through the design of your website and get some feedback from people who have more experience than you do. Talk to the folks in the Spek Slack community. Spek.fm slash Slack and ask them for feedback. It's better to have a few good things than one great thing or a lot of bad things. Let me say that again. On your portfolio as a developer, it's going to be better to have a few good things than to have a single great thing or a lot of bad things. This is about balance. We can and have talked about portfolio related discussions many times, but once again, the idea is to place yourself in the boss's shoes and as a rule of thumb, as a boss, I want to see a handful of good examples of work that you can do, as well as explicit descriptions of what you did on those examples. Don't put things in your portfolio that are not representative of your skill set. Don't put just one or two things in your portfolio as this makes it look like you have little to no experience. Over in our previous steps, we discussed doing side projects in the learning process. These side projects can go into your portfolio if you have nothing else to put in it, but only choose the cream of the crop to show. Now, again, if you only have one thing in your portfolio, even if it's very good, then that's going to be a little bit less valuable than having a few things in your portfolio. Yes, absolutely. Put the great things that you have done in the past into your portfolio, but also include the things that are good enough to show your skills. Most employers are not looking for perfection in portfolios. They're looking for potential, right? Perfection is not what you should be shooting for in your portfolio potential. So, that's the first thing you can do to go public. The second thing you can do to go public is make your voice heard. It's not enough to simply put your face and your name up online. Your portfolio, while it's a good step towards going public, having an active voice in the public sphere, that means mostly online, having an active voice is much more valuable than simply having some content up that you created in the past. This may be through a blog on your website or on Twitter or another social outlet. It could be by recording talks at a local meetup, or maybe you decide to shoot a screencast series to throw up on YouTube, or maybe, like me, you decide to create a podcast. Whatever it is, sharing your voice in your opinion by publishing it in some way online will greatly increase your chances of getting hired simply because it increases your perceived authority to your potential employers. This shouldn't consume all of your energy, rather this should be a reflection of your interests, your learning, and your opinions. This is something you can take with you no matter where you go. Having conversations about the work that you do with other people who do similar work that is incredibly valuable. So make your voice heard. That's number two. Number three, take a regular inspection of your digital profile. How often do you look in the mirror? Well, especially if you were going to an interview or you head into work for a day or into a client meeting, you'd probably look in the mirror because you want to make sure you are presentable and your hair isn't doing something weird that day. You need to take a regular look into your digital mirror. What do you see there? If you were to see yourself from someone else's perspective, what do they see? I recommend you take some time to simply Google your own name. You can run by a local coffee shop and use an incognito tab so the search engine can reasonably act like you are a stranger, but Google your own name. Ask other people to investigate you online and figure out what they can find out without giving them any other info except your name and maybe your portfolio. The things that would be on your resume. Really what you're looking for is their initial impressions. You can offer to do the same thing for them because this could be a little bit time consuming and make sure the person that you get to do this is willing to be 100% honest with you and they're not afraid to tell you brutal honesty if you need it. Because the reality is a lot of people don't really have a full grasp on what they look like online. There's stuff that they've left online for years. Maybe they've forgotten to take it down. There's profiles online that are not representative of who they are. Or maybe there's some confusing name collisions with other people online that is marring somebody's reputation. There's all of these things that can be happening and unless you take some time to look yourself up to Google your own name or ask someone else to explain to you how they perceive you when they first see you online. Unless you take that time then you may never know that this is the thing that is holding you back from getting hired. So some things to consider as you are looking at your digital profile. Number one, what is your tone? Do you come across as hostile or otherwise difficult to work with or do you come across as pleasant? Does your online presence match your personality? Do you seem lazy or do you seem like a hard worker? Do you seem like you have balance or do you come across as a workaholic? These are all things that you can reasonably assume about someone by reading through their last 50 tweets or going to their Facebook profile and looking through some of the pictures they posted or looking at their Instagram. And you can be absolutely certain that your future employer will go down these same pathways. Your future employer is going to be interested in what kind of person you are and the best way they can find out is to look online. So walk those same paths, walk down the same paths that your future employer may walk down. Pick three adjectives and describe your online presence and then describe what you would like it to be. And if those things don't match up, you can start taking steps towards making them match up. And the really the final thing on this is that there is a huge blurred line between your personal life and your professional life when it comes to your public profiles online. And really what that means is that you need to consider how your unofficial activity, meaning the things that you do online that have nothing to do with your job, how that may be reflecting on your professional appearance online. For example, maybe you tweet a lot about politics, but you don't really tweet a lot about anything else. In fact, in real life, you aren't all that interested in politics. It's just something that you engage with on Twitter. This specific thing can be a very divisive subject. And as an employer, regardless of which view you hold on a given political policy, I would see warning signs when a potential employer is heavily vocal about politics. This isn't to say that you shouldn't voice your opinion or certainly that you shouldn't be interested in politics, but rather to say that your voice and your tone and the volume of things that you choose to talk about online that these are all going to have an impact on how you are perceived by your future employer online. So take a regular inspection of your digital profile. Once again, number one, go and get a domain. This can be well before you are actually higher. Go and get a domain where you can put some of your information and some of your work on for people to view. Number two, make your voice heard. Start discussion online. Number three, take a regular inspection of your digital profile. We talked a lot about these different subjects on Developer Teain the past. Go and search some of those at spec.fm. You'll find a lot of information we've discussed, for example, branding with Jon Sommez. Quite a few episodes that are relevant to today's discussion, but ultimately going public is about sharing your values, sharing the work that you do, and sharing your personality online. This is going to help your employability immensely. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea and for engaging with the developer career roadmap. We will continue with the developer career roadmap in the upcoming episodes of Developer Tea. Thank you so much again to Linode for sponsoring Developer Tea. If you want $20 of credit for your personal website or really anything else you want to do with a Linode server, you can go to spec.fm slash Linode. If you don't want to miss out on future episodes of Developer Tea, make sure you subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. Thanks again for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.