Computer Careers Advice
Here're two mutually exclusive pieces of advice for
anyone taking up a computer career now.
It's not really directed toward career changers
so much as young people, who do have more options.

For instance, my niece, Catherine, who's about to enter
her third year at Brown University as a Computer Science
major. Naturally, she has never asked me for advice -- she's
doing what she wants to do. I of course am not consulted.

So you may consider this as the advice I would give her if
she actually asked for it. Which she won't, but you may benefit
from reading this.

First --

Be more than a techie. Be a techie+. By that I mean,
you'll have a lot more flexibility and career options if you
broaden your understanding of business. You'll be working
for a business large or small, and business skills are
important to every employee.
Don't get me wrong. You can have a good and satisfying
life's career as a techie just by concentrating on your techie skills.

But you may not. Because to the business, you're a tool.
Just like the punch press machine, the photocopier and the
corporate jet. You'll be there as long as you're useful and no
longer. If you wear out by allowing your skills and/or your
attitude to get rusty, they'll find a new tool to replace you.

This also applies to other technical experts such as lawyers
and accountants, but their expertise is not so quickly out of date.

So, along with your computer courses, squeeze in as many marketing,
accounting, finance and management courses as possible. Learn
how to listen and communicate effectively with customers so they
understand the benefits your company provides and you
understand their needs. That is the essence of marketing.

You also need to know how the IT department fits into business
financially. For some companies, IT is the business.For others,
it's just another expense of creating widgets.

Learn how to work with others in teams and how to manage projects
and the team members working on them. The skill of making
everybody involved with a project happy is difficult, and so
valued by wise businesses (not that all businesses are wise.)

You want to get rich like techies such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and
Larry Ellison of Oracle? Then you have to do what they
did -- add business skills to your technical expertise.

You know that Bill Gates is not the world's richest man because
he's such a great programmer. He became wealthy by learning
how to harness the programming skills of many other good to
great programmers. Learning finance, accounting, management
and especially marketing, along the way.

If you're the type of techie who says, Yechhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
I don't want to be involved with selling stuff, or handling money it's
dirty. Manage people? I like computers because I'd rather not deal
with people.

Then my advise to you is to stay with the technical stuff, but going
VERY deep into it. Don't be just another programmer. Be the best
software engineer in the world. Be such an expert in your field
that companies pay you the big bucks for your advice and even
put up with your eccentricities, because they need you. Don't
just read all the books in your field - write the best one.

If you can't give the best speech or presentation of a paper at
a professional conference, don't go. Don't be just another
MCSE -- come up with the next Windows networking breakthrough.

Don't write Java programs -- design the next generation of hot
computer languages.

Don't keep up to date on your field -- you must be the pioneer
who blazes the path to creating the next new hot computer
language or other technology. Make everybody else struggle to
keep up with you.

Catherine, I know you'll never read this. The rest of you -- hope it helps.

The computer programmng to learn as a foundation for all the others is:

C++ for Not Yet Techies

- posted by RickStooker @ 10:42 AM