How to be an Average Developer
If you’re looking for an inspirational piece all about how to become a wiz-bang developer working on the latest and greatest technologies, this is not it. Silicon Valley is chock full of startup dreams where an elite few spend their lives chasing visions of technological fulfillment. So, if you need a hype piece, go look there.
This is a post for the rest of us — the average developers. If you seek the quiet, fulfilling career of someone who enjoys solving interesting problems and still gets to go home at 5, then get ready for these above-average tips!
A normal, 40 hour, work week is plenty of time to create the career that you want. You don’t have to be the guy that goes home and cranks away on side projects until 2am just to feel like you are building expertise. You just have to optimize the time you’re already putting into your career.
Here are my tips for staying sane and trending toward average:
Work with what you love.
The tech industry is both wide and deep. Find a specialty or generality that you really enjoy. As a developer, you have all the choice in the world of what to work on and where to do it, so make the most of that. Allow your passion to drive your focus at work.
Do you love fighting with CSS and tweaking javascript? Then get into front-end web development.
Do you love pouring over heap dumps to troubleshoot performance issues? Then learn some Java and get to it.
Figure out what you like and then find the job that matches it. Right now, there are way more tech jobs than viable candidates to fill them, so a best-fit job is out there somewhere. Don’t be afraid to look in another city, either.
Continue Learning
Use your 40 hour week to sneak in extra learning. When you catch yourself “in between projects”, play around with new technologies and write some tools that help you do your job better. Focus on automating all your boring tasks. You’ll learn while building something useful, and you get an additional bonus of making your life easier. Plus, you never know when you stumble upon a really great idea that will transform how you and your colleagues build software!
Read up on what’s going on in the industry. Sites like Medium and Dev.to have great, tech-focused articles. This will keep you engaged and give you perspective on what is going on. Keep an eye out on new methodologies that you can incorporate to your workflow. Always bring up anything interesting with your colleagues to see if these new ideas will work for you.
Engage with /r/programming and subscribe to the other tech-focused sub-reddits that interest you. Running across new ideas will spark creativity that you can use later on. It’s good exercise to engage with online communities that share your interests because you force yourself to get outside your local circle of ideas. You also get to be fun at parties by discussing that new bitcoin thing that is taking the industry by storm.
Favor Proven Tech
Cobol is still alive and kicking, so if you really want to be average, then stick to creating solutions with proven technologies instead of what’s trending. PHP, Java, and C# don’t sound as sexy as they used to, but there are a ton of jobs out there for these tried and true languages. Just because something’s mature, doesn’t mean it’s disappeared from the landscape.
Mature technologies offer stability and keep you from having to relearn how to reinvent the wheel (much like the current state of npm glut). Enterprise software tends to stick around due to the underlying, proven technologies. You’ll always have a job that doesn’t involve rewriting everything all the time (which is not always as fun as it sounds).
Also, developing expertise in proven technologies will give you the advantage later in your career when Java replaces Cobol for the title of most hated legacy codebases.
Find a Hobby
Programming is as much of a science as it is an artform, so take some time to unplug your brain and stimulate those creative juices. Go travel the world. Hike up a mountain. Get your friends together and play some D&D. Just do something that you really love and that you can work to become an expert in.
Mastering a skill is, itself, a skill. Learn how to tackle new and exciting challenges so that you can better deal with challenges on the job. Once you push yourself outside your comfort zone, you’ll find it easier to figure out new technologies.
Life is not all about working yourself to death. Remember to have some fun along the way. The tech industry is in a unique position to offer you the work-life balance you want, so get maximum fulfillment.
That’s it, folks! Forget everything the Internet taught you about being exceptional and go be average!