I spent 6 years of my 20s as a web designer at an financial services company in L.A. The people were good, the work was occasionally not horrible, and the pay was better than I thought I would ever get with a BA in History, but I had a problem. My portfolio was crap.
For too long I had worked at the same place on sites that looked and worked all the same. Even worse, most of my work was on intranet or “customer only” applications. Even worse than that, my professional network was limited to people I already worked with. Without realizing it I had made myself invisible.
There was no way I could plod along there (or someplace like it) and climb the ladder for 40 years. The work wasn’t interesting enough.
Like most office bound 20-somethings I completed most of my work by 11am and then surfed the internet the rest of the day*, dutifully sitting in my cubicle in case someone needed something. There was no way I could fake it like that for the next 40 years. Pretending to work is far more exhausting than actual work.
So, how did I make my escape?
I worked on my own projects, GTDTiddlyWiki, and then Newshutch. Neither made me an internet billionaire, but those two apps taught me more about business, technology, and community building in 6 months than I could have learned in a decade at my day job. They also immediately led to consulting work and a more well rounded portfolio. Last summer my independent consulting slowed down so I worked for a consulting company that placed me at an entertainment behemoth. Every interviewer was blown away, not by the work I did at a huge financial company, but by what I accomplished on my own. Even if you have no intention of being self employed or an entrepreneur you’ll find that building your own thing makes you much more employable. Doug, my partner from Newshutch, can back me up on this.
What if you’re a veterinarian, financial analyst, lawyer, or even an office temp instead of a web developer? Just sign up with a blog service and start writing about your experiences. You’ll sharpen your thinking about work and you won’t be invisible anymore. If you’re worried that blogging could hurt your career, don’t. Any employer that is turned off by a potential hire with a thoughtful blog is an employer so mired in the 20th century that you’re better off without them.
* Not that all that web surfing was wasted. I owe a huge debt to writers like Zeldman, 37signals, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Merlin Mann, and many others. I suspect that even though they’ve achieved amazing things in their own careers, giving away their knowledge is the most significant work they’ll ever do.
3 Comments ↓
I wonder how long it will take before a “My own projects” section in a resume becomes something to look for when hiring top software developers?
So far it is relatively infrequent… isn’t it?
It may be infrequent because so few developers do anything on their own.
The last time I sought a big corporate job my entrepreneurial experience and open source contributions were at the top of my resume, and that’s what my interviewers wanted to talk about. Even though they were a Java/CVS shop they were more interested in asking me about Rails development and SVN.
In interviews as on store shelves, potential customers are interested in the new and different. Any employer scared by a free thinking or entrepreneurial streak is not a place you want to be anyway.
Of course they still want to see that you’ve got boring long term corporate jobs on your resume, just as a signal that you know how to play according to their rules.
I believe knowledge workers have something to learn from artists here. If you think of an even moderately successful artist, that person has a unique body of work/voice. For example, a magazine might pay a book author to write a particular article because that writer has just the right spin or approach or audience. A producer chooses to cast one actor over another because that actor brings something specific to the film — which might be in her look, her style, echos of a past role, even her biography.
Talented (and I mean small “t” talented as well as big “T”) people, in my opinion, should not regard themselves as fillers of slots but as unique contributors. Companies will seek out So-and-So because of the particular value he brings to the table.