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282. Making Luck - How To Get Ahead in Software Development · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Does it sometimes feel like everyone else is getting ahead while you stay put?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Do you never feel like you get a lucky break?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: There can be a lot of reasons for that, but let's talk about how to make your own luck in today's episode of Dev Questions.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Software development is more than just writing code.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the rest of it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Specifically, let's talk about making your own luck as a software developer.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I have had a very lucky career.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: I feel very blessed for how things turned out for me.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I look back at every lucky break I've had, they all fall into one of three categories.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let me recap my life a bit and hopefully you'll start to see the pattern.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: When I was 17, I met an electrical engineer at church.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: When he found out that I wanted to be an electrical engineer, he gave me a tour of his plant and eventually hired me to be his intern.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: While as intern, as intern for him, I worked at a lot of boring jobs.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: He gave me stacks and stacks and stacks of papers that were essentially handwritten Excel spreadsheets that I had to put into Excel.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: I had to do that over and over and over again.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: But as I worked through it, I figured out how to make it faster and better and even automate some parts of it to the point where he ran out of work for me to do very quickly.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: As a result, he gave me new and more interesting work, including starting to build my first commercial applications.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: I had only dabbled in software development, you know, personally before that, but this is where I started building real applications that really went into production.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, after my first year of college, I dropped out because I didn't want to go into debt for college, and I was looking for a job.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I was hired by one of my fellow interns.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he was an intern in college when I was an intern in high school.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: He had started his own software development consulting agency, and he knew the kind of work I did and wanted me to work for him.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I worked for him for a number of years and learned how to be an even better software developer.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, after a while, my old third grade teacher reached out to me and said, Hey, I know you're a software developer.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: My husband works for a college and needs a software developer.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you should apply.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: That got me past a lot of the line and put me near the front of the pack right away.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, I was hired as a software developer at that college.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I didn't just focus on being a software developer there.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I learned to expand beyond that and worked very hard to help out in other areas as needed, whether it be networking or servers or even just PC maintenance and figure out how to make things better.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because of that, I expanded my knowledge even more, learned even more about the entire infrastructure at the college.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then when the position of director came up, I was named director.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I moved up and spent a number of years after that as the IT director running the entire infrastructure for technology for the college.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, during that time, I was asked by multiple people, multiple professors, to help out, teach a class or two, maybe cover a topic that they weren't as good at.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I covered databases and networking and software development in general where needed.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that's how I started to teach.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, through that, I was also doing training on my own and going out to places to be trained further in software development and in other areas of technology.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: In one of those places, I met and connected the person who later said, Hey, we've got an opening for a job.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like to become a software developer for this company?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how I changed from being an IT director back into software development, which was my goal.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And while I was there, I was introduced to the head of the chair of the department for technology at a local community college.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they needed a teacher for C Sharp.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started working on the side on Wednesday nights for three hours.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: I would teach C Sharp at the local community college.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And because it was once a week, I realized my students were struggling to remember from week to week what we covered.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started a YouTube channel that was just there to help them remember what we learned in the past week.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, at that same time, my brother-in-law knew someone who needed someone to help with software development, needed a bit of consultation, a bit of just software development work.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so we connected and I started working for her and started doing some side jobs, both to earn some extra income as well as just to help her out as well, kind of building that relationship.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as I decided to as I transitioned out of that job of working at full-time, I called that person up and said, hey, you know what?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have more time.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: How about we do more consulting work?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, I launched into a consulting business.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I added more customers based upon people who I knew or who knew me.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then during that same time, I started creating YouTube videos for the general public because people started requesting it.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I started to help out.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started to realize that I could replace some of my consulting income and spend more time on YouTube if I was able to bring a little bit more money in from my training.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started creating courses to supplement my income, which means I could spend more time creating free content.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, when I decided, you know what, I want to have a steady full-time job so I don't have the ups and downs of consulting anymore.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: I got to choose the job I wanted.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I interviewed with jobs where they wanted to hire me.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: They liked me, they had a great salary, they had a great, you know, position for me.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, it's not the right position for me.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I had pretty high standards.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I said, you know what?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going back to the office.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to work from home.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not going to work 50, 60 hours a week.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to work 40.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the things I want.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I was able to find an employer who fit that criteria.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, I really got an ideal job for a number of years.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that job only went away because I was spending more time creating content online and realized that my income from those courses allowed me to quit my day job and spend more time creating free content.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of a recap of where we are up to now.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a full-time content creator because I have the opportunity to sell courses and make up that income and thus spend more time doing these kind of free things for you.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, again, it's abbreviated.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot I left out of my career, but those are the highlights of some of the things that, you know, my transitions I went through and the different jobs I went through.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what do you notice in there?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's some common threads.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So there's three common ways that I generated luck.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I am not saying this was a master plan by me and I knew exactly what I was doing.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I stumbled through this.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: For the most part, I didn't know what I was doing.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: I learned after the fact.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: And as I have taught my sons, there's two ways to learn in life.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Either you let somebody you let somebody else learn the hard lesson and then you learn from them, or you do the hard thing yourself and figure it out yourself.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I did the hard thing, I stumbled through it, and now I've learned the lessons and I want to make your life easier.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: So here are the three ways that I generated luck that hopefully you can do intentionally where I stumbled through it.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, hard work inside of work.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a popular topic.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: People don't want to hear work hard.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to hear do more.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying spend an extra 10 hours at work a week.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying, you know, slave away a job that is thankless.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying those things.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're at work, don't slack off.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: When you're at work, see how you can make things faster and better.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: See how you can make a better working environment, whether it be automating something, whether it be learning how to be more efficient at something, learning how to document things so you don't have to re-remember things.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there's lots of ways that you can make your work inside of work better.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: But my hard work inside of work, well, that's what got me my second job, my real job from internship to being a software development consultant.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: That came about, that transition came about because I worked with an intern who saw the work I did, the hard work I did, the I pushed through the boring stuff and got to actually building things.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And he saw, you know what?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: I like him to build stuff for me.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that came about because I pushed through the boring stuff and didn't just do the bare minimum.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because I could have stretched that work out over two summers and gotten paid, and my boss would have been happy.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: But because I went a little above and beyond, because I pushed during work hours, I only worked when I was getting paid.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was there, I was present.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was working hard.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And because of that, I was able to transition into a full-time job.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: The same thing is true when you look at other jobs where I worked hard, people recognized that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was transitioning to other jobs, it they said, hey, I want that person.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: When I worked at my the last full-time job I worked for, um, there were times where my coworkers kind of flamed out or had problems or even got fired.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yet I was promoted and I was leaned upon and I was given more freedom and more opportunity because I worked hard and pushed to make things better while I was on the clock.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I did not work extra in overtime.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that's number one is my hard work inside of work really helped generate some luck for me.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: But number two, things I did outside of work to help others.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was, you know, creating content, creating YouTube videos for my class, it was not for this purpose.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was not to create a YouTube channel, it was not ever with a thought that maybe someday I'll be a famous YouTuber.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Still not.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: But it was not that purpose.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: The purpose was to just help my class out.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was an accident that anybody else even saw it.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: All of my videos started off with CIS 163-101.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that was like every one of them.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was, there's no search engine optimization.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was not easily discoverable.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I was working to help people out.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: The people I consulted with, oftentimes, they were people I helped out or met or worked with in other contexts where they go, you know what, I want that person to help me.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, you know what?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a job.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: You want some money?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: That really helped.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And number three, and this is one that also is not popular, it was people I knew.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: So luck number three, or area I generated luck number three was knowing people.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not what you know, it's who you know.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And people often groan at that and they say, oh, it's horrible.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is life.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: When I am looking for anybody, when I'm looking for a designer or a developer or a person who writes good copy or a person who does, you know, good social media, the first person I'm gonna think about is the person that I know can do it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: If I know somebody that I know does a good job, then I'm gonna think of them first.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's just how it is.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're that person, then they're gonna think of you first.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that happened where I met someone, you know, who then later gave me a job.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, my brother-in-law, well, I knew him.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's a you know, a default person I know, but that got me a consulting job, which led to many others.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: There's a number of times where somebody I knew turned into a job or a consulting thing or something else positive.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: So these are the three areas in which I generated luck.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard work inside of work, things I did outside of work to help others, and people I knew.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the three areas that really elevated my career and really made a lot of this possible because I did not just get jobs from applying randomly.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I had some opportunities that I ended up turning down where I applied randomly.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but for the most part, that's not how I got a job.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, my last job, yes, it was a random application, but it was one where I curated it and said, you know what, these multiple jobs that offer me positions, no, I'm not gonna go there.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go this position.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was mostly about who I knew, about the hard work I had done in work, and the people I had helped outside of work.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So these three methods will work for you as well.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Doing good work at work, helping others, and getting to know more people will almost certainly lead you into many, we'll call them lucky situations, but it's really hard work situations in the future.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would encourage you to identify how you can take one step in each of these three categories.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Figure out how to be better at work.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's automating something or it's documenting something so you can be faster at it next time.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever it is, figure out one thing to do to be better at work.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Then identify someone you can help.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Teach someone something, help point someone in the right direction, maybe do a bit of free consulting, or a little bit of software for free.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Take a younger developer under your wings, or even take a high schooler and say, hey, let me let me show you what this software development is all about if they're interested.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, meet new people.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: For that last one, join a user group or a meetup for developers.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's a super easy way to accomplish one of the most important steps in your career.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just going out and meeting fellow developers, talking to them.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: At first, just go and show up.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: But start talking to them, start having conversations.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because what you'll find is when you share stories, when you start to talk about what you're doing and what they're doing, you'll find commonalities and you'll find new ways of thinking about things.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: When I taught and I helped others, what I found out was I became a better developer.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: So even though I am helping others, really it was helping me as well.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: These things will help you become a better developer, they will grow your career, and they will make you more lucky.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And as always, I am Tim Corey.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to IamtimCorey.com and enroll in a course.