Category Archives: Career

Why I think development in IT is the least important skill?

IT has many job profiles such as Developers, Testers, Business Analyst, Writers etc. I feel among them, development is the least important skill for the following reasons:

It uses no human skills

Development is simply coding. You already know what you need to do (it doesn’t take a great deal to plan what you need to do), and you know the code that will make it happen. You can google the code if you don’t know it. If the code is right, the job gets done. It is so simple. You do not have to do anything else. Compare it with the role of say, a business analyst, who interfaces with a client and manages all the turbulence that other humans (particularly clients) can bring to his work.

It is a language that can be mastered by anyone

To code, you need to learn a language. It is a pretty much like learning any other language with its own semantics. Is it difficult to write in say, English language? No? So, how it can be difficult to code?

Most of the coding is not development

Most of the coding is simply using methods of a language and calling them to accomplish a task. The actual development means when you create additional methods for accomplishing tasks and make them available as part of the language itself. That work is difficult, I can understand. Everything else, however, is just using (and not development) classes, libraries, and API methods. And you have very well-crafted API documents explaining how to use these bits.

Coding is like math. It is simple.

Coding looks daunting; however, it is simple. Off course, when you see the entire code, you get scared, but the thing is that you never have to work on or manage the entire code. You just have to use few functions and the functions do their job pretty well. And, if you have a complex use case that you need to code for, it would have already been handled by someone, and the fix would be available in stack overflow. There cannot and there has never been a use case that is not already covered. This makes development very easy.

Development is becoming easy with each passing day

With the advent of UI driven IDEs and frameworks, the development now is not more than designing. Every IDE now has drag and drop features for creating the UI. Now, there is even less coding than before as everything is being moved under the hood. The tools have become over-simplistic.

Development is largely an autonomous activity

In IT, there is interdependency between different departments. Everyone is dependent on others for keeping the goods moving in the conveyor (so to speak), however, development is largely autonomous and has least dependency on others. The other ancillary activities such as testing, and documentation are heavily dependent upon development, making them complex tasks to perform because of the increased dependence.

Developers have a superiority complex

Since code is the building block of a software, it is understandable that it is very important. However, everything else like testing, documentation is also equally or probably more important. Developers do not have this vision and they create psychological barrier around themselves that diminishes their overall value.

When should you resign from your job?

I Quit Job Motivation Aspiration Concept

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The world seems to be grappling with “The Great Resignation”; a fancy term that has caught everyone’s attention. For the uninitiated, the great resignation is a phenomenon where employees leave jobs in large numbers across industries. This can happen when employees look for better job opportunities or when they think that they can live a job free life. For the Indian IT sector, the mass resignation that we are witnessing is primarily fueled by the former. The market is filled with job opportunities and employees are finding it hard to ignore such opportunities. The perks and increased salary being offered is making employees jump on the bandwagon of this great resignation. While it is important that you look for growth and grab any opportunity that uplifts you in your career, you also need to tread these resignation waters carefully. Here are my tips that you can consider while switching your job.

Assess company by its pre-covid image

Do not just consider the employee benefits that have emerged as part of response to the pandemic. Assess what the company had always been like to its employees. Companies have now adopted a flexible work culture and brought about changes; however, you must understand the core values of the company and its work culture that was in place before all the recent changes.

Money is not everything

Nobody is underestimating the power of money. However, the switch should elevate you professionally and personally. Do not change jobs if the only benefit that you are getting is in terms of money. Your next job should have more money, better work, better people, and better everything.

Research about the company

Do proper diligence before joining any company. Read reviews, talk to existing employees, and find what people are generally talking about the company. If you get overwhelming feedback of a similar kind, it is most likely be true. Do not ignore the feedback. The job market is not speculative and is largely true.

Find out about the work

Figure out the kind of work you will be doing. The technology you will be working on. The kind of tools you will be using. Knowing about the work beforehand would help you in taking the decision. One of the major reasons of employee dissatisfaction is the lack of quality work. You must ensure that you are not signing up for something that you will simply not want to do. Do not underestimate what a boring, run of the mill work can do to you professionally as well as personally.

Find out about people

First understand that there are good and bad people. A more subtle way of putting it is that there are people that we are comfortable with and that there are people, we are not comfortable with. You must research about the team and find out how it is. A good indicator would be the attrition rate. If a lot of people are leaving the team in quick succession, then there is something fishy. You better step back then.

Why resign in the first place?

Sometimes our resignation does not make any sense. We see a lot of people leaving for genuine reasons and decide to follow them. To begin with, you should have a strong reason for resigning. Having this clarity is essential and it will also help you during your job interviews. Some of the good reasons for leaving your job can be lower pay, toxic work environment, excessive workload, meaningless work, alienation etc. If you are sure that your next job can fill all these gaps, then you must accept the opportunity.

What to do when you are smarter than your manager

Often we find ourselves in situations where we have to work under people who we think are less smarter than us. These situations can add to our stress because we tend to see hierarchical success as directly related to competence. Here, I would like to throw some light on how we can navigate through such situations.

Understand that growth is a function of time

Success in any organization is greatly related to the time spent by an individual in the organization. So, if your manager has spent more time, then he/she is a more valuable asset to the organization than you, regardless of the competence that you bring to the table. For an organization, values such as greater understanding of the organization, loyalty, people skills, etc. are of great importance and they cannot be substituted just for greater competence.

Understand that management is a skill

We need to understand that management is a skill that requires great investment on the part of the individual who seeks to develop it. The way it takes dedicated effort to develop a technical skill, managerial skills also demand great efforts. We should stop valuing one skill over the other and consider that all skills are unique in their own way. Trust me, technical skills are much easier to develop and harness than almost any people skill.

Simplify your ideas

When we are smarter than our managers, we tend to get frustrated that our points are not understood. We think that our ideas are not valued, and we have to put in unnecessary explanation every time we are talking to drive home the point. We should look at such situations as an opportunity to improve our communication and people skills. Try to simplify your idea and present it in a lucid manner. May be your ideas are good, but they are embedded in technical fluff. If you make your ideas easy to understand, it will not only attract more takers, but you will also develop the art of simplifying complex communications.

Look beyond your shell

Most of the times we compare people wrongly. We compare different profiles and create judgments about competence. We might also have age bias which makes us think that young people are smarter than older peers. In an organization, everyone is essentially doing a different job (even if the profile is same) with its own set of complications (uniqueness, dependencies), so we should avoid creating judgments about competence, because they might not be actually true.

Success is not only a function of competence

You might feel that the system is not fair. But you must understand that success is a complicated phenomenon. People who are talented individual employees, might not become great leaders. At times, we might overestimate our capabilities and underestimate what others do because of our biases. We should understand that leading a team is a very difficult job then excelling in isolation. We should generally develop more respect for the leadership or managerial skill, which I believe is looked at by young generation as something that is a no-skill.

Also see, https://writesblog.in/2022/02/03/understanding-working-from-home/

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