Ship Something Yourself, and Help Your Career (Part 2)

Erik Dietrich / Wednesday, July 29, 2015

In my last post, I urged you to start something that earned you money and get it to market as quickly as possible, talking about how it would start to change your life outside of work.  Today, I'll talk about how doing this in your spare time can actually help you with the work you're currently doing.  This happens in a few ways.

Diversifies Your Skillset

As a programmer, the majority of your time is spent pitted against an adversary that is sometimes frustrating, sometimes infuriating, but entirely predictable, at least with enough knowledge and practice.  Compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and runtimes are your delighted or frustrated, they’re always doing exactly what you tell them and you use silent, objective simultaneously your tools and your foes, but whether you’re feedback to wrangle them to your will.

 

Sure, you may have the occasional support ticket or feature request that involves dealing with the less predictable and subjective universe that is user interaction.  But, at the end of the day, you solve their problems by diving back into your world of silent, objective feedback and writing code.

 

But with online entrepreneurship, the world gets both messier and more interesting.  You make changes and those changes cause you to add or lose readers, users, viewers, or even money.  Put a “buy now” button on your product site, and observe that suddenly you’re making more money than yesterday.  This drives you to learn about new things like user psychology, marketing, and business strategy, but you get to learn about them in a very programmer-friendly way: with automated feedback like changes in views, hits, or money.  In a very real sense, you’re hacking the business world.

Encourages Empirical Thinking

In the world bounded by your IDE and debugging tools, your day is a series of experiments.  You’re thus no doubt wondering how I can say that things get more empirical when you charge into the arena of online entrepreneurship.  Well, the reason I say this is that, while code compiling and tests passing may be pretty cut and dried, most things beyond that kinda aren’t.

 

Who in your group has the title “senior” and who doesn’t?  What is that based on?  Who is the team leader or manager and why?  What was your last performance review like?  Was it fair?  Was the compensation adjustment based on it fair?  Was it tied to business profitability or was it arbitrary?

 

Organizations are large and complex, and with that comes a good bit of indirection when it comes to pecking order, titles, compensation and career.  Citizens of the corporate world learn that to get ahead, they need to pry their fingers away from the keyboard and pay attention to office politics, soft skills, and even things like how they dress.

 

Contrast that with what it means to get ahead when you’re earning money via online sales, readership or advertising.  Which font is the ‘right’ font to use on the landing page for your web app?   Only one way to find out – run some A/B testing for a week and see which one makes more money.  Run good experiments, get good results, get paid.  Your financial incentives are directly aligned with your ability to execute the scientific method and not with your ability to laugh at the boss’s jokes.

Imparts Business Sense Like No MBA Program Can

 

And finally, if you want to augment your development skills and advance your career, this is a trial by fire way to do it.  When you do this, you will, literally, be running a business, if a rather small one.  That means that you, as the proprietor, need to understand all aspects of how a business works.  But don’t worry, because it’s a just-in-time education that never overwhelms.

 

As you go on this journey, you’ll find that you suddenly understand previously foreign concepts such as market research, payment collection, accounts receivable and payable, advertising, P&L, and bunches more that I’ll elide for fear of boring you.  The point is that there’s no better way to learn the ins and outs of business than by running one.

 

Even if you don’t see middle management or running a startup in your future, the savvy can do nothing but help your career.  Whereas you might previously have shied away from it, you’ll now be able to feel comfortable going toe to toe with project managers and salespeople in company meetings since you will understand their worlds while they do not understand yours.  Even if you wish to remain entirely technical for the entirety of your career, this knowledge will serve you well as promotions are considered and leadership responsibilities doled out.

No Time Like the Present

So what are you waiting for?  Go out and get cracking.  It won’t take a whole lot of time to do something at least.  You can get going with relatively little effort and absolutely no risk, so why not give it a shot?