The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career

Yes, I said improve your programming career, not your programming prowess. And by career, I mean all of it in any form, whether your career is working for BigCo, launching a start up, consulting, whatever.


Let’s assume you’re already as smart as Steve Wozniak, the über-engineer. Do you want to hack part-time for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world? To change the world, you must create the new, but you must also show people why it matters. And that’s why…

The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is improve your ability to communicate.

To program, you must elicit ideas from other people and share your ideas with them. Sharing ideas comes in many forms: explaining how you did something. Suggesting a new practice for the team. Demonstrating how something works. Convincing everyone to switch programming languages. Persuading a brilliant engineer to join your team. Persuading your manager to get out of the way and let you do your thing.

Advancing your career is entirely about communicating. Getting a job. Turning down a job. Asking for a promotion. Turning down a promotion. Getting onto a good team. Politely extricating yourself from a good team. Persuading a brilliant engineer to co-found a company. Helping a brilliant engineer understand why co-founding a company isn’t the right thing to do. Asking for funding. Turning down funding. Getting clients. Turning down clients.

It’s all communication. Now you know, I have a background in Sales and Marketing. So I worry that I am holding a Golden Hammer and suggesting to you that your career is all about nailing things. But here is the short and obvious truth: Human beings are all about physical communication. It’s a huge, huge part of what makes us human, this talking and listening jibber-jabbering thing.

Frankly, there is no substitute for actual speech with visible body language. We do not react to the written word the same way that we react to a speech where we can see the speaker. So let’s skip right past learning to write well. It’s phenomenally important, but learning to speak well trumps everything. At Mobile Commons we talk about technical things all the time, and the remote members of the team switch out of Campfire into iChat or Skype to hear each other’s voices and see each other’s faces at least once a day.

If you take just one thing from this post, let it be this: To improve your programming career, the single most important thing you must do is improve your ability to communicate your ideas face to face.

What to do right now

Would you like to improve? I have deliberately avoided suggesting what specifically you might want to improve: My Latin teacher said we crave the three Ps: Power, Prestige, and Pecuniam. But the nuänces of aspiration are many. You have ideas you want us to understand. You have people you want to associate with. You have things you want to build and you need to harness other people’s efforts to build them.

Here is what to do today to shorten the line between where you are and where you need to be: Volunteer to give a presentation that you can entirely control, and invest the time and effort to do the best possible job.

Now, you may already be giving presentations. Maybe it’s part of your job already. But I am still recommending you add one to your workload, one that you entirely control. This is crucial: if you don’t control the subject, the content, the audience, everything, it may not be the very best way for you to improve.

I recommend you find a venue that is begging for presentations—local programming users groups are ideal—and sign up to give a talk. Pick a topic. If you don’t have a burning desire to shout something across the roof tops, you can always fall back on giving an “Experience Report.” That’s where you discuss something you did or tried to do and how it worked out.

Or go with one of the ideas I suggested for blog posts: “What I learned from Language X that makes me a better programmer when I use Language Y,” “Something surprising that you probably wouldn’t guess about Language X from reading blog posts,” or “My personal transformation about Idea X.”

By the way: If you already have a certain degree of comfort with presenting to an audience and you really want to ignite your career, try doing a “Fish out of Water” presentation: Present to a group with whom you have very little in common. For example, give a presentation about how to work with programmers to a business networking breakfast club. Learning to present ideas to people who are not just like you will make you a superstar.

Here is what to do today to shorten the line between where you are and where you need to be: Volunteer to give a presentation that you can entirely control, and invest the time and effort to do the best possible job.

Now put together a presentation deck¹ for your talk. Do not give a talk without a deck, you will lose valuable experience giving presentations and this is about your experience. Furthermore, presentations are tougher than speeches because the presentation medium gives you many, many opportunities to screw it up (like having what you say and what’s on the screen be the same thing).

Then give the talk. And then give another one. And keep going. And never stop, because presenting well is a skill that helps you from where you are now right up to when you are presenting the numbers to the Board of Directors or presenting a new product to a hall full of cheering customers or, or, or anything and everything.

See you there!

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1. That would be a “deck of slides.” Nowadays it’s a keynote, open office, or that-other-thing file, but once upon a time it was a set of 35mm transparencies you would load into a carousel.
   
   Stacked up, they looked a little like a deck of cards, thus the nickname “deck.” You can probably find one (and someone old enough to remember when they were called decks) in a museum somewhere.
   
   [back]

  ¶ 8:02 AM