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233. 3 Ways To Stand Out From The Crowd in Software Development · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you're trying to get a job, get a better job, or get that promotion you've been wanting, standing out from the crowd is important.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you're just like everyone else, you'll be treated like everyone else.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to get ahead and get more and better opportunities, you need to identify how to not just be a better software developer, but also get notice for your skills as well.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode of Dev Questions, we're going to talk about the three ways to stand out from the crowd as a software developer.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Software development is more than just writing code.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the rest of it.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically, let's talk about the three ways to stand out from the crowd as a software developer.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, number one is have deeper skills in your primary language.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: So what I mean by this is that oftentimes people learn the top level of a language, meaning they know how to, let's just pick C.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: They know how to write an if statement, a for loop, and they know how to create classes and instances and even interfaces and implement those interfaces and maybe dependency injection.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's great stuff.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of the top level still.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's the bare bones of what you need.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: The more important thing is to know how and when to use something.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just I can implement depansi injection, sure, but when?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: I can do a singleton pattern, great, but why?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you use that?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: When would you use that?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: How is it important?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: What's the alternatives?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And knowing how to look at a given situation and evaluate those things.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that the more you know, the more you say it depends.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because you have more options.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: When you only have one option, that's the thing you choose.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: But you need to be able to have more options.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So learning your language more deeply, especially through lots of practice and building real-world things, is going to be important.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: The crowd chases trends.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: So when you look at what everybody else is doing, and remember, you want to look out, look differently than everybody else.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: You want to stand out from that crowd.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: The crowd chases trends.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you're going to see when a new framework for JavaScript comes out, everyone's going to be studying that, everyone's going to put that in your resume, everyone's going to tell how great it is.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's that's great.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And there are some benefits to those things.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, what they're gonna have is a couple of things.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, they're gonna be putting themselves in the category with everybody else.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to lose yourself in the crowd online, say you're a front-end developer who knows React.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who say the exact same thing.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to be able to stand out from that crowd.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it can't just be saying, I know React.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, that shows a little bit of depth.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you know React really well and you have a lot of depth in it and you've built really powerful things in it, and you've seen how to implement to be most efficient and work well with SEO and all these other things, well, then you're gonna stand off in the crowd.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: But if you just say, I know how to build web applications in React, that's not gonna be good enough because so does everybody else, because you chase the same trend everybody else did.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't want to just chase trends and go from language to language or framework to framework.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: You wanna be able to sink your learning depth into one primary language and know it really well, because that will help you stand out from among the crowd of people who have all the buzzwords on their resumes, but can't really work in the real world at any depth.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's they're also going to, the crowd also will give up on things when they get hard.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: This is another common thing that people do, is they want to learn a new thing and they learn the basics of it, but then you know they try and implement a real project and they're like, oh, it's really hard to do, and they move on to the next shiny thing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very common thing.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: For you, you need to push through the hard thing.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Get past the hard thing, learn how to debug it, learn how to figure out those weird edge cases, learn how to push through the difficulty because that's gonna make you better as a developer.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna give you more debugging skills, and it's gonna give you more depth than others have because you push through when everybody else bounced off.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So standing out from the crowd means going deep into a primary language, making sure that you don't just chase the trends, and making sure that you don't give up when things get hard.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's number one in my list.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, number two for standing out from the crowd is to add key secondary skills.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this is important because I key is a key word here, not just any secondary skills.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: So don't just chase the glamorous skills.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: So again, let's say that you want to be a you're learning C sharp, you've got a pretty good depth in C sharp, and you want to be a C sharp web developer.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, okay, I'm gonna learn C sharp web development, I'm gonna learn API and Blazor, and now I'm gonna add secondary skills.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's add React, let's add Angular, let's add you know, Vue, let's add, you know, these other things.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, is that really the best choice?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's those are glamorous skills, but again, remember, the marketplace for people who know React or Angular or Vue, it's pretty saturated.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And how does that actually add to a company?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, you're thinking about how do I become most valuable to an employer?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So when you think about that, you think, well, those skills could be useful.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it may be useful for you to add one of those frameworks or two of those frameworks even, but probably not two.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: At least not if you're targeting one specific company.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now you may say, well, I'm gonna add two because I can you know choose which one for whatever company, you know, I can get twice as many potential companies.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, but then you're kind of forgetting about the other skill when they hire you.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna look at and say, okay, you know, Angular and React, great, we only do React.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you're not gonna use Angular at all at this job.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: So throw those skills away.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, we have Blazor and C sharp, cool.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if you add key skills, not just the glamorous skills, you're going to add differently.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, if you're learning C sharp, you should learn database development.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Every application.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure I know of an application that's an exception to this.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm including games in this application bucket.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Every application relies on and focuses on data.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: That's the whole reason it exists.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you start thinking through every app you've ever built or every app that's ever been in the marketplace, it all revolves around data.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so when it comes to working for an employer, what are you going to have to do?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to have to work with data.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the more you can be confident in working with that data and making sure that you're efficient in it, making sure that you're making good choices, making sure you're setting yourself up for success as well as your company, the better off you will be.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, adding the skill of database development to your portfolio, well, now your employer looks at that and says, okay, we're hiring a C sharp web developer.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: You need to know C, you need to do web development.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: But we work with SQL Server, and you know SQL Server, that's gonna be really helpful because we don't have very many people that know SQL Server well.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've added a key skill, not just a flashy skill.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Knowing how to work with Git source control.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: You might say, well, but I want to work with a different source control.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but was mostly industry use, Git.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: So knowing how to work with Git is gonna be important because not just the I know how to commit, I know how to push and pull.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably not enough to work in a workplace.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you know Git to a higher level, meaning you can work with cherry picking, you can do rebasing, you can figure out how to work with a team and make sure that they're the most effective and efficient possible.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know how to set up branching strategies so that you can have multiple versions going on at the same time and know how to do those deployments using your source control, that can be super helpful to a company who says, yeah, we want you to be a C sharp developer, but if you could help out and make sure we're more efficient with our use of source control, that'd be great.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: You see how you're adding a key skill, not just a flashy skill?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And DevOps automation.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Here's another one.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: So every application needs to be deployed.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And every application needs to be deployed multiple times and really should be deployed in multiple environments.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: This is one thing that's still lacking in a lot of companies is the idea that their deployments are more manual or they're messy.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so by knowing how to automate and knowing how to improve those processes, you can cut down the amount of time that developers spend deploying their code, or that developers spend not deploying their code and so they're not integrating, so they're not finding those problems early enough, which means the problems get further down the road before they're discovered.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another key skill that will allow you to be more helpful at your job than just your primary skill.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: So again, talking about standing out among the crowd, the crowd is gonna chase after the flashy things that they like, the flashy things they think that are awesome.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: People have to get the job done.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you can be a person that can be relied on to get the job done, meaning work with the database, make the database more effective, more secure, and get in your code and out of your code better, that's be great.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: If you can work with source control, make sure that your team is more efficient and effective with their source code and protect that source code and allow that source code to integrate more often.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you can work with a CICE process to make sure that the code is getting integrated more often so that bugs are exposed more quickly, and so you have multiple environments and it's automated so that you have take less time as a team to work in these systems, you're saving the company time, you're saving the company money, you're making a better product more quickly.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you can come in with these skills that will allow companies to move forward, to launch forward better.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that is better for the bottom line, which means it's better for your employer, which means your employer is more likely to appreciate it as a compared to I built a UI that works the same way, but it's a different back end.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's it's React instead of a Blazor.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Does your management care?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not, because they don't care about how it's done, they just care that it's done.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so instead of just doing something that that's different, and maybe it does add a few more features, but is that enough compared to I've automated this process, I've made this team more efficient, I have reduced the number of bugs that are coming out of our department.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Those are things that might not be as flashy, but are definitely going to help you stand out among the crowd.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's number two.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Number three is prove what you can do.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So this is mostly about portfolio, but there's other ways to prove as well.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you want to put together a real-world-focused portfolio.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: I've looked at lots of portfolios.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've looked at a lot of developers who don't have a portfolio.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll tell you what, when you look at a resume and it says all the right keywords, how do you compare?
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if you have a portfolio, I can look at their code and go, ooh, no, I don't want that.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or you can look at their code and go, that's pretty awesome.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I want that.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So putting together a real world-focused portfolio is going to show employers what you can do.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a show, not just tell.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you want to create examples that are as close to what the companies want you to do as possible.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: An example of this is let's say you wanted to work for a company that built websites for small businesses.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if that's what you want to do, well then build a website for a small business, a fictional small business, or even a real small business.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where your portfolio doesn't have to just be sample projects.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: You could go to a small business and say, hey, can I create a free application for you or a free website for you?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then build something for them and show them and say, hey, I did this for you for free.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to use it or not?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's up to you.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: But now you have a real working example that's a real world example, so that when that company goes to hire you, you can say, Yeah, I do what you're looking for.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And here's an example of that.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: The closer your portfolio items are to what they're going to ask you to do, the more easy it is for employer to look at that and say, Yeah, I want that.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I've looked at portfolios where I've been hiring for a developer, a C developer, and I've seen portfolios that are, you know, building things in Unity.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Unity is awesome.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing a whole course in Unity, but that's not very close to building line of business applications for a company.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's harder to look at that code and say, okay, I can see how they write code.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: I can see how that might translate into line of business applications.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's harder to do than if I see a line of business application.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: If I see a very small CMS, or if I see a hotel management system, or if I see something like that where I can look at and go, yeah, I can kind of see how that's a lot closer to what we're looking for, and see more things that relate to what I want them to do.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Even as a bonus, sometimes you'll have employers that look at that and say, I want that.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I want.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a real big bonus, which is why you want to get as close as possible to your general area of what you're applying for.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because if employers see something and they say, I want that exact thing, or very, very close to it in my application, who are they gonna come looking for?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna come looking for the person who already did it.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: So showing that off is really important.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you always do the same thing as everyone else, you'll be treated like everyone else.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Standing out from the crowd by doing the hard work, not just the fun stuff, having a deep skill in your primary language, having skills in strategic secondary technologies, and by being able to prove what you can do for companies will set you apart from the crowd.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: So think of it this way: if you're hiring a person to cut your grass and you have four applicants that could all cut the grass, how would you choose between the four?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now you might say, well, price.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it's probably different than that.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because what if one of those candidates talked about the different ways to cut grass depending on the season, showing that they not only have experience cutting grass, but lots of it.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And if they talked about how they also fertilize a lawn and kill the weeds while they cut the grass, and then they show you pictures of great-looking lawns that they had maintained.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think the odds are of them getting the job?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Probably really good.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because three people are saying, Yeah, I cut grass.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: And one person says, Yeah, I cut grass a certain way versus at this time of year, and this is the kind of stuff I use to protect and treat the lawn while I do it.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And here's some pictures of me doing that and the results, that's almost a no-brainer choice.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you want to do.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's what you want to do for employers, is when a bunch of people say, Yeah, I do C sharp, and you say, Yeah, I do C sharp.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I also know how to do these other things that support that C sharp.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And here are some examples of me doing just that and how it works.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: That sets you apart from the crowd.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's the type of person that you need to be in order to stand out from the crowd.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for your question.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a question that you want to see answered in episode of DevQuestions, go to suggestions.iamtimcorey.com.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And as always, I am Tim Corey.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us for this episode of DevQuestions.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcorey.com and enroll in a course.