Don’t Be a Product — Build Your Career On Your Own Terms
In software just like in acting, typecasting ends careers.
Yes, it feels good to be top-dog, the go-to person everybody looks up to with problems, the person everybody praises even behind their back. Executives want them by their side at meetings and recruits don’t get in without their approval. These honorary board members are in techie heaven!
Techie Heaven
But whenever fame is enabled by proprietary technology, it will come tumbling down, without your approval, insight, and even awareness.
It’s all fun and games until that product, whatever you’re a specialist of, becomes obsolete. You went from hero to embarrassment, from executive meetings to break room birthday parties and I’m talking from experience.
I may be dramatizing things a little, like the heights of your peaks and the lows of your troughs, and the speed at which it comes tumbling down. It’s never really this evident. You go from a position of power which slowly erodes, you barely notice, like the frog slowly boiled alive, this comfort, those memories make you placid it’s only when you’re left with nothing that you wake up. And that’s the point you either start all over again, from zero or succumb to burnout and retire. It’s a never-ending cycle until you unmask it and start protecting yourself.
Professional Certifications
There is nothing wrong with professional certifications. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce love to offer them. They’ll throw in bags and hoodies emblazed with big logos. As long as you understand that you are advertising for those companies and your employers, you’ll be a step ahead of the game.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that as we all need to work and there’s some good money in these certified jobs, but always remember this is nothing more than a branding game.
Play the Branding Game Right
Whether you chose to become a product specialist or things evolved naturally that way there’s plenty of ways to protect yourself. Document your every move. Blog/Vlog/GitHub/Tweet about your thoughts, your work, your certifications, your thoughts about your industry, where things are going, etc.
Imagine you are about to write about what you do, but the tools and the platforms you work on every day don’t exist, how would you write about it?
You are the brand, not the product! Remove the weak link from your brand and push “you” with all your might. If they accuse you of self-promotion, you’re on the right track and thank them for their positive feedback.
If you’ve got the energy, get certified in the competing technologies — and that would make for a great blog post!
You are the Product
Don’t confuse the product that goes by your name versus the myriad of others. Certify yourself constantly around it. Wear hoodies and backpacks emblazed by its name, yours!
In this ideal state, you may not be the specialist cornering a technology at your company, let somebody else be that temporary hero, but you will survive and be valuable as long as you want. This is your brand and it will never go out of style or become obsolete as you own 100% of it.
