Re: Career path in the third and fourth decades? (take II)

[David Castro <thejavaguy -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On 11/22/05, Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> wrote:
> That's a much tougher question. I've always been a strong advocate of
> the "wear many hats" role, so that many influential people know and
> value what you're doing.

I just had an example of this yesterday. I was working with a coworker
finishing up a documentation project when the subject of her moving on
to a project management role in a new internal project came up. I
started prompting for information on the project: what language is it
being written in? have the specs been written yet? and so on.

Once I got enough information, I pitched myself for a role on her
yet-to-be-formed team. I told her that I had written specs at my last
place, and written prototype GUIs in Java, and run the build, and
coded the installers, and other quasi-development tasks. She didn't
know that I had any skills outside of technical writing. I'd imagine
few at the company know that I can do all of these things, so I
decided to actively promote myself.

This worked well at my last employer, as well. It was because I did
all of those things (installer, build, prototyping, feature
specifications) that I made it through the first round of layoffs. It
wasn't until they cut the team down to only the four developers and
one scientist that I didn't make the cut. I still get IMs asking me
how to make changes to the build script or the installer code, and
it's 2 months later. :-)

-David Castro
 thejavaguy -at- gmail -dot- com
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