Is Coding a Good Career in 2021? Navigating Your Path to Success

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving job market, many are wondering: is coding a good career in 2021? Just like mastering version control is crucial in software development, understanding the landscape of coding careers is essential for anyone considering this path. Git has become the standard tool for software development, and similarly, coding skills are becoming a standard requirement across numerous industries. Becoming comfortable with coding and knowing how to use it effectively is a key skill for navigating today’s professional world.

Let’s explore some of the most valuable concepts and tips to consider when thinking about a coding career in 2021. We’ll cover background info on the current job market and opportunities, common career paths, and some specific strategies I’ve found to be especially valuable when building a successful career and understanding the tech industry.

As with any career advice, the information here is based on current trends and observations. Many other resources cover similar topics, and can probably offer different perspectives. My goal is to provide an overview of the relevant material and enough details to guide your further research and learning.

This article draws upon insights from various career resources and industry reports, reflecting the current trends in the tech job market.

Coding Career Fundamentals

Coding can seem daunting, especially when starting out. The world of programming languages, frameworks, and technologies can be confusing and overwhelming. There are complex concepts and warnings that can feel intimidating. Frankly, breaking into coding is not always easy and can feel scary.

The good news is that once you understand the fundamentals of coding and how the industry works, it becomes an extremely powerful career path that offers a lot of flexibility and opportunity.

Coding Career Terms and Concepts Overview

While this isn’t a complete “coding career tutorial from scratch”, it’s worth reviewing some of the key concepts for understanding if coding is a good career choice.

Coding Career Basics

Coding is fundamentally about problem-solving and creating solutions using technology. A coding career is a journey that involves continuous learning and adapting to new technologies and challenges. Think of your career as a project repository – a space where you build and track your skills and experiences.

The working environment in coding encompasses all the projects, technologies, and teams you work with. Any new skill or technology you encounter starts out untracked. You are aware of it, but haven’t yet integrated it into your skillset.

To start tracking a new skill, you add it to your repertoire – perhaps by taking a course or working on a project. This is like using git add some-skill. You then save a copy of your learning in an internal section – your staging area of acquired skills. Staged skills are not yet fully solidified in your career, but represent the skills you are actively developing and intend to use.

Once you’ve added one or more skills to your staging area, you can solidify them by committing to using them in real-world projects and roles. “Commit” here is both an action and a milestone – you “commit” to using your skills, and each successful project or role becomes a “career commit”.

Coding career commits contain a specific set of skills and experiences at a specific point in time. They also contain metadata like project details, technologies used, and a career message – your resume or portfolio description highlighting your achievements.

After a skill has been added at least once, further developing that skill or learning new related skills will mark it as modified. You know your skills have evolved, but you haven’t yet formally demonstrated these new changes in your career progression. Once you apply these updated skills in new projects and roles, you are essentially staging and then committing these advancements, showing your skills are now unchanged in their current, improved state.

Sharing Knowledge Between Networks

Each individual’s coding career path is unique. However, coding careers thrive on collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams, companies, and the wider tech community. Your career can be connected to a network of mentors, peers, and online communities, allowing you to exchange knowledge and opportunities. Each connection is like a remote in Git. Downloading knowledge and best practices from your network is like a fetch or pull, while contributing your own insights and code is like a push. Starting your career journey by learning from established professionals is like making a clone of their expertise.

Coding communities often have default networks they connect to, like open-source projects or industry groups, similar to the origin remote in Git. When you start learning, you are often cloning from these established sources, but your network can expand and change over time. You can connect with many other individuals and groups, pushing and pulling knowledge from various sources.

Career Branches

Coding career paths are often tracked using branches – specializations or areas of focus. A branch is like a pointer to your latest role or project in a specific career direction. Any time you gain new experience or switch roles, you update your career branch pointer to reflect your most recent achievements. You can explore many career branches within coding, and most developers specialize in a specific area as they progress. You can also have milestones or certifications, similar to Git tags, which mark significant achievements but don’t automatically change with each new project. Milestones are used to highlight key qualifications and advancements, allowing you to easily showcase your expertise at different points in your career.

Changes from multiple career branches can be brought together using a merge process – integrating skills from different experiences into a broader skillset. If different career paths require conflicting skills or knowledge, there is a career conflict, and it’s up to you as the developer to analyze the conflicting requirements and resolve the conflict by deciding which skills to prioritize and develop.

Historically, many coding careers started with a generalist approach, similar to a master branch. More recently, specialization and focusing on niche skills, like using a main branch for a specific domain, have become more common. However, you can tailor your career to use any branch name or specialization as your “default career path” if you want.

Coding careers use the term checking out in the sense of exploring or transitioning to a new role or technology based on previously acquired skills. Typically you check out a new branch (role), which requires updating your skillset and adapting to the demands of that new position. However, you can also check out different skills or technologies as needed.

Uncertain about your next career step? You can create a stash of potential career paths or skills to explore later. A stash is like an unnamed career exploration – it points to specific skills or roles you are considering, but it doesn’t exist within your current active career branch. Stashed career ideas can later be revisited and applied to your career path.

Overall, the coding career workflow looks like this:

Understanding Coding Career Internals

Understanding the underlying principles of a coding career is crucial for navigating it effectively and making informed decisions.

Just as Git tracks content using hashes, your career is built upon a foundation of skills and experiences. Each skill you acquire and project you complete contributes to your professional identity.

Coding careers, like Git, rely on structured organization. Think of your career in terms of key components:

Skills are like file contents – the specific abilities you possess, identified by your expertise in those areas.
Projects are like file trees – they organize your skills and experiences into tangible accomplishments, identified by the scope and impact of each project.
Roles are like commits – they contain metadata about your position, responsibilities, and contributions, identified by your job title and achievements in each role.

Type	Contains	Identified By
Skills	Specific coding abilities	Expertise level in each skill
Projects	Organized skill application	Project scope and impact
Roles	Career metadata and responsibilities	Job title and achievements

Projects can involve multiple skills and contribute to broader career goals:

Career roles themselves form a linked progression, building upon previous experiences and leading to future opportunities: A -> B -> C.

A career “ref” is like a career goal or aspiration that points to a specific desired role or skill level. Career branches are specializations associated with a ref, where each new role or project moves you closer to that career goal. So, you can start from a career goal, then trace back through your career path to see your progress.

“HEAD” in a career context can be seen as “your current professional focus”. Normally, this is aligned with your current career branch (specialization), but if you explore a different skill or role temporarily, your “HEAD” might be detached from your main branch, indicating a period of exploration or transition.

Just as changing a commit in Git has a ripple effect, altering your career path can open up new opportunities and directions.

Career roles are not immutable, but building a solid foundation and reputation is crucial for long-term success. You can’t change your past experiences, but you can learn from them and shape your future career.

Coding Career Tools

There’s often discussion about whether specific coding tools or languages are “better” for a career. However, a pragmatic approach is often best: why not use a variety of tools and approaches? 🙂

Having a diverse skillset is invaluable in a coding career. Visualizing your career path with different tools and technologies makes it easier to adapt to various projects and opportunities. Many career advancements are simpler with a broader toolkit. For example, understanding different programming paradigms and languages allows you to tackle diverse problems and selectively apply the best approach by “Adding Hunk” of knowledge or CTRL-clicking a few lines of code to select specific skills and “Add Lines” to your resume. This is much simpler and more intuitive than being limited to a single tool or technology. Interactive career planning is also easier with a broad perspective. You might not know all the details of each career option (“pick” meaning), but it’s straightforward to use a career roadmap with options that let you reorder your priorities and combine different specializations.

On the other hand, specializing in certain in-demand skills can lead to faster career progression. You can quickly add valuable skills to your resume with focused learning, like using git add -u to add all relevant experiences at once. And of course, if you are working in a specific niche industry, you might only have a limited set of technologies available.

So, I recommend using both a broad range of skills and specialized expertise, based on your career goals and the tasks you are pursuing.

Popular IDEs and platforms like VS Code and JetBrains offer excellent support for various coding languages and technologies, similar to Git GUIs. VS Code, with extensions, offers adequate support, but needs additional extensions like Git History and GitLens to be truly powerful, just as a basic IDE might need plugins for specialized coding tasks.

External resources like online courses and mentorship programs are also valuable tools for comparing different career paths or resolving career conflicts. Platforms like Coursera and Udemy act as “external diff tools” for exploring and comparing different learning options, and mentorship can help in “conflict resolution” when choosing between career paths.

Coding Career Techniques

Improving Career Clarity

Just as clear Git logs are essential for understanding project history, career clarity is crucial for effective career management. The default career path might seem unclear or generic. Similar to setting up a git lg alias for better logging, you can establish career planning techniques to gain a clearer view of your professional journey.

You can define your own “career log” – a system for tracking your skills, projects, and career goals in a structured way.

career config --global alias.cl "log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)%Creset' --abbrev-commit"

This could give you a structured view of your career progression, similar to git lg output:

Note that career planning accepts various filtering options, including skills, industries, roles, etc.

Preparing Career Steps in Pieces

Just as the Git staging area allows for crafting precise commits, planning career moves in stages allows for strategic career development.

When working on a career transition, you might develop multiple skills before being ready for a new role. However, these skills might logically belong to several smaller career steps instead of one giant leap. If you “add” a new skill like career add some-skill, it adds all current development in that skill to your career staging area. Instead, you might want to stage just a couple of specific skills, and perhaps complete a small project, and then focus on networking, because those are the steps that should go together in one career move.

You can do this by breaking down your career goals into smaller, manageable steps. Similar to git add -p, you can use a career planning tool or journal to view each “hunk” of career development and decide whether to stage that step or not. However, using career planning tools or working with a career coach can be more effective for adding pieces to your career puzzle, because it’s easier to click “Add Skill” or CTRL-click a few lines in your resume and click “Add Line” to highlight specific achievements than deciphering text-based career planning advice.

Once you’ve got these pieces added, you can make a career “commit” with just those steps, and repeat the process for the next career advancement. This is a key part of the “making small, focused career moves” practice.

On the flip side, sometimes you just want to add everything that’s been changed at once in your career – a significant promotion or role change. In that case, the fast way is to use career add -u, which adds all recent career developments to your career staging area.

Stashing Career Ideas

Career stashes are most useful when you’ve got some career ideas that aren’t immediately actionable, and need to set those aside to focus on your current career path. Your list of career stashes acts like a stack, but you can also name stash entries for future reference. Creating career stash entries normally resets your focus back to your current career path, but you can choose to keep exploring those ideas in the background.

From a career perspective, the main options are:

career stash: save a copy of potential career ideas for later, and clears your immediate focus.
- career stash push: creates a new stash entry for a career idea.
- career stash pop: applies the top career idea and removes it from the stash.
- career stash apply stash@{2}: applies the third career idea from the stash.
- career stash -p: choose specific pieces of a career idea to stash.
- career checkout stash@{2} -- someSkill: retrieve specific skill details from a stashed career idea.

But, it’s often more useful to use a career planning tool or mentorship for managing career stashes. It’s easier to click a “Stash Idea” button and type in a name, or to expand a “Stashes” section of your career plan, right-click an entry, and “Apply Stash” to revisit a career idea.

Working with Career Branches

Creating and Switching Career Branches

Coding careers involve various paths and specializations, like branches in Git. The most common way to explore a new career branch is with career checkout -b NAME_OF_NEW_SPECIALIZATION. That creates a new career branch, starting from your current skillset, and switches your focus to it.

You can also use career checkout NAME_OF_EXISTING_SPECIALIZATION (without -b) to switch to an existing career branch if you want to deepen your expertise in that area.

There are many other career development options – see career advice resources and industry guides for lists of career paths and specializations.

Fetching, Pushing, and Pulling Career Opportunities

Most career network operations involve connecting with others in your field, but assume you want to connect with your primary professional network by default if you don’t specify a network name.

career fetch means actively seeking new career information, downloading knowledge and insights from your network. This includes information on different career branches and opportunities in your field.

Once you’ve downloaded information on potential career branches, you can create a local career branch based on a promising specialization with career checkout NAME_OF_PROMISING_BRANCH. You create a new specialization path that aligns with your current skills. It also sets up your career path to track industry trends, meaning your career development will be aligned with the evolving job market.

Later, you can update your professional network with your new skills and experiences with career push. You can also push new career branches that your network wasn’t aware of, showcasing your unique path.

If industry trends have shifted and new skills are in demand, career pull will both fetch new industry insights and update your local career path to incorporate those trends.

If you significantly deviate from established career paths, a career push attempt might face resistance or require more justification. You can force push your unconventional career path, which will strongly assert your chosen direction. Force pushing in a career context is about confidently pursuing a less conventional path, which can be valuable but requires careful consideration.

Merging Career Paths

Merging career paths allows you to combine skills and experiences from different specializations into your current career focus. The assumption is that both paths have a common foundation, and offer different but complementary skills. Merging creates a new “integrated career path” that combines the strengths of both. This is used to broaden your skillset and become a more versatile professional.

Merging is done with career merge OTHER_CAREER_PATH_NAME, which tells you to integrate skills from the other career path into your current one.

If different career paths require conflicting skills, there’s a career conflict. You will need to resolve the conflict by deciding which skills to prioritize. You can use career counseling or self-reflection to fix the problem, define your updated skillset, add it to your career plan, and finalize the merged career path.

Feature Branch Career Strategies

Most coding careers involve a “feature branch” strategy for development. They have a primary career path, such as “Software Engineer” or “Data Scientist”. Any time a developer starts working on a new specialization, they create a new career branch based on their primary path, often using the name of a specific skill or technology as the branch name: career checkout -b feature/machine-learning-specialization.

The developer focuses on this specialization for a while. Once they gain sufficient expertise, they showcase their new skills to their professional network, other professionals review their qualifications, the developer makes any needed adjustments based on feedback, and then the feature branch (specialization) is merged back into their primary career path.

Developers may need to pull down changes in the broader tech industry, then “merge down” from the industry trends into their specialization branch. Merging the specialization branch back into the primary career path is referred to as “merging up” your new expertise into your overall career profile.

Networking and Mentorship Requests

Networking and seeking mentorship are crucial for career growth, similar to pull requests in Git. Networking is a way to get career advice and facilitate career merges at a professional level. This is typically associated with using feature branch career strategies. A developer builds a specialization branch, and creates a networking request to merge some-specialization into their main career path. Mentors and peers can look at the developer’s profile, see their skill development, and offer comments and suggestions for improvement. The developer incorporates feedback, updates their skills, and the networking request is updated to reflect the changes. After mentors approve, the networking connection can be formalized and the specialization branch can be integrated into the developer’s career path.

Updating Skills in the Background

Normally, the main way to update your skillset is to career checkout some-skill and then career pull industry best practices. But, if you’re working on a specialization branch, you often have ongoing projects and don’t want to switch focus just to update your core skills.

There’s a useful trick for doing a “background skill update” without fully switching focus:

career fetch <industry-trend> <relevant-skill>:<relevant-skill>

So, say you’re on features/machine-learning, and you want to update your general software-engineering skills without switching from your ML focus. You can run:

career fetch industry-insights software-engineering:software-engineering

and your skills will be updated in the background, keeping you aligned with industry standards while focusing on your specialization.

Rewriting Your Career Story

There are various ways to refine and reshape your career narrative. Each technique is useful in different situations, and these are often valuable for correcting earlier career missteps or highlighting specific achievements. Just as Git commits are immutable, your past career experiences are fixed, but you can reframe your career story to emphasize certain aspects and create a compelling narrative. So, when we “rewrite career history”, we’re actually creating a more focused and impactful “alternate career story”.

It’s critical that you should only ever rewrite your personal career story and not fabricate experiences or qualifications! As long as your narrative is authentic and focuses on your strengths, you can refine it to your advantage. But, once you’ve presented a career history, misrepresenting it can have negative consequences.

Amending Your Career Narrative

The easiest technique for refining your career story is to “amend” your latest career achievements.

Amending your career narrative means replacing a generic description with a more impactful and targeted one. This can be done by refining your resume or portfolio, or by practicing your “elevator pitch”.

Technically, the original, less refined narrative still exists, but your current professional profile now points to the newly crafted, more effective narrative.

Resetting Career Goals

Since career goals are like pointers to a desired future state, you can reset your career goals by updating your aspirations to point in a different direction. This is typically used to pivot your career path or explore new industries.

When you reset your career goals, you have three options for how you handle your current skills and experiences:

career reset: move your career goals to a different direction.
- --soft: keep your current skills and experiences as they are, but re-orient your future goals.
- --mixed: keep your current skills, but re-evaluate which skills are most relevant for your new goals.
- --hard: re-evaluate your entire skillset and experience, and align everything with your new career direction.

So, career reset --soft is fairly “safe” to do, because it doesn’t change your existing skills. career reset --hard is more “transformative”, as it involves a comprehensive re-evaluation of your career and a commitment to a new path.

career reset requires a new career goal as an argument. This could be a specific job title, industry, or skill specialization.

Rebasing Your Career Path

“Rebasing” your career path is a technique that is an alternative to simply merging new skills. Instead of directly combining new skills, rebasing rewrites your career story to act as if your current career path started now, based on the latest industry trends, instead of from an earlier starting point. Similar to merging, this is done with career rebase INDUSTRY_TRENDS.

Imagine your initial career path was Path A, and you started specializing at point B. Now, industry trends have shifted, leading to a new dominant path D. If you rebase your career path against these new trends, it’s like realigning your career trajectory to start from the current industry landscape, pretending you started your specialization after the industry shifted to point D instead of B.

Reverting Career Missteps

Resetting your career goals effectively discards recent plans. What if you want to undo the impact of a past career mistake, but keep the progress you’ve made since then?

Reverting a career misstep with career revert means learning from the mistake and making a course correction. It doesn’t erase the past mistake, but it mitigates its negative impact and sets you on a better path.

Cherry-Picking Career Opportunities

Cherry-picking career opportunities allows you to selectively adopt specific career advancements from different paths and apply them to your own. For example, maybe there’s a highly sought-after skill in a related field that you want to add to your skillset. You can cherry-pick that specific skill and integrate it into your career path.

career cherry-pick allows you to select specific skills or experiences. If you run career cherry-pick SkillA..SkillE, it will copy skills B, C, D, E over onto your career path. This creates a more versatile skillset, incorporating valuable elements from diverse career paths.

Interactive Career Refinement

“Rebasing” involves reshaping your entire career path. A variation is “interactive career refinement,” which allows you to selectively modify earlier career decisions or skill developments. This is done with career rebase -i STARTING_CAREER_POINT.

Interactive career refinement lets you perform several types of modifications to your career story. You can:

Edit the description of a past role to highlight specific achievements.
Reorder your career experiences to present a more compelling narrative.
Squash together related experiences into a more concise summary.
Remove irrelevant experiences from your career narrative.

After you specify the desired changes to your career history, you refine your professional profile accordingly. As with other career story refinements, this always produces a new, more focused career narrative.

Using career counseling or self-reflection can be helpful for interactive career refinement.

Career Reflog: Learning from Every Step

It’s actually very hard to completely erase your career experiences and permanently lose learned lessons. Even if you take a career detour that seems to lead nowhere, you still gain valuable insights.

If you end up in a situation where you can’t see the value of past experiences in your current career path, you can use your career reflog – reflect on your entire career journey to find hidden lessons. The reflog shows all career experiences, no matter how seemingly insignificant. That way you can revisit them, create new career goals based on those insights, or at least understand the lessons learned.

Advanced Career Path Optimization

Finally, career development supports advanced strategies for optimizing your entire career trajectory. Career planning tools and mentorship can help you perform tasks like:

Rewriting role descriptions and responsibilities in your resume to better align with your goals.
Creating a focused career portfolio that contains just certain projects from your past, highlighting your key strengths.
Reframing past experiences to emphasize transferable skills relevant to new career paths.

Career path optimization is a powerful process that should be used strategically, not for day-to-day adjustments. Think of it as a strategic career overhaul – you hope you don’t need to use it frequently, but it’s good to have the option for significant career shifts.

Coding Career Patterns and Best Practices

So now that we’ve covered a bunch of career concepts and techniques, how do you actually build a successful coding career? Here are the things I’ve found to be most helpful:

Write Good Career Narratives

It’s critical to write good career narratives – your resume, portfolio, and online profiles. It’s not just a chore to satisfy job application requirements. You’re leaving a record for future employers and collaborators about your skills, experiences, and career trajectory. Anyone can look at a list of skills, but without a good career narrative, they may have no idea what your strengths are or why you’re a good fit.

There are many good articles out there discussing rules for writing resumes and cover letters, with plenty of good advice. The critical rules are:

Always start your career narrative with a clear statement of your professional goals and target roles. This helps employers understand your career direction.
First section should be a concise summary of your key skills and achievements. This is what recruiters will see first, so it needs to be impactful and clearly describe your overall value proposition. Aim more for the impact of your skills than just a list of “what skills you have”.
If you have further details, add sections detailing your experience, projects, and education. Write as much detail as is relevant! This section will usually be expanded to show more details. Excellent career narratives provide specific examples and quantify achievements.

A typical example of this format would look like:

Summary: Highly motivated Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience in developing and deploying web applications. Proven ability to lead teams and deliver projects on time and within budget. Expertise in Java, Python, and cloud technologies.

Experience:
- Senior Software Engineer at Tech Company X (2018-Present): Led a team of 5 engineers to develop a new e-commerce platform, resulting in a 20% increase in online sales.
- Software Engineer at Startup Y (2016-2018): Developed key features for a mobile application used by over 1 million users.

Skills: Java, Python, AWS, Agile, Team Leadership, Problem Solving

Education: Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University Z

Make Small, Focused Career Moves

This goes hand-in-hand with the advice to write good career narratives.

Career moves should be relatively small and focused, conceptually. One career step might involve developing several skills, but these skills should be closely related to each other. There are multiple reasons for this:

It makes it easier to describe your career progression in a clear and concise way.
It’s easier to understand the rationale behind each career move.
If a career path needs to be adjusted later, there are fewer other career elements that would be affected.
When someone looks at your career history, there will be more specific achievements associated with each step (“Improved X skill” instead of “Made a bunch of career changes”).
It’s easier to analyze your career path and identify areas for improvement.

For example, say you’re adding a new specialization to your skillset. You would first focus on acquiring foundational knowledge, then build practical projects in that specialization.

To me, your career history should “tell a story” of how you developed your expertise and achieved your goals. Someone should be able to read through your career narrative and understand your thought process for the career choices you’ve made and why you made them.

Clean Up Your Online Professional Presence Before Networking

Just as you clean up Git commits before pushing, refine your online professional presence – LinkedIn, portfolio website, etc. – before actively networking or applying for jobs. Just because you have some rough drafts of your resume or online profiles locally doesn’t mean that the rest of the world needs to see those initial versions. The “story” you’re telling with your professional presence is the polished version – “let’s present my career in the best possible light”.

Only Refine Your Public Career Story

As mentioned earlier: as long as your career narrative is still personal and hasn’t been widely shared, it’s fair game – refine it as much as you want! Once it’s been shared publicly, though, you should ensure it’s accurate and professional.

The main exception is when you’re actively seeking feedback on your resume or portfolio. At that point, you are intentionally sharing a draft to get input for improvement.

Keep Career Specializations Focused and Relevant

There’s no hard rule about how many skills or specializations you should have. In general, though, try to keep your career specializations relatively focused and relevant to your goals. This allows you to develop deeper expertise and increases your value in specific areas.

Some people argue about whether it’s better to specialize deeply in one area or to be a generalist with broad skills. Both approaches have their merits. The important thing is to pick a strategy that aligns with your interests and career goals and stick with it.

Career Archeology with Your Own History

So why do all these good career practices matter?

Say you’re reflecting on your career after several years. One day, you’re assigned a new challenge or consider a career change. You look back at your past experiences, and there’s a lot of accumulated skills and roles. You review your career history, and it might seem complex – there are a bunch of different paths you’ve taken, and you’re not sure how they all connect.

Simply reviewing your current skills and resume tells you what you are capable of now. Unless you have detailed records, there may not be much information for why you made certain career choices, or how you developed specific skills. We naturally have a tendency to assume that “whatever career path I’m on currently must be the best”, but that’s not always true 🙂

That’s where having a well-documented and reflective career history is critical. Digging through your career history can show you:

Who influenced your career choices
When you developed specific skills, and what other skills you gained at the same time
What goals your past career moves were part of
What your motivations were behind each career decision
What you were thinking at different career stages
When a particular skill or interest emerged

These can all be extremely valuable pieces of information when planning your future career or tackling new challenges.

Displaying Historical Career Developments

There are various ways to review the history of your career development.

Reflecting on your career path lets you look at the roles and projects that shaped your skills. Career planning tools and journals help you explore your career history, showing each role, project, and skill development, often including the ability to compare different career stages. Some career resources also let you explore your entire career trajectory as of a specific point in time.

Career reflection techniques, like “career blame” in Git, can help you understand the origin of specific skills or career choices. This involves tracing back the development of a skill to understand its roots and influences. Career reflection tools can show you details on the mentors, projects, and experiences that contributed to your current skillset.

Just as file blame shows commit details, career reflection can show details on the influences and experiences behind your career path.

Bisecting Career Challenges

Just as Git bisect helps find the commit where a bug was introduced, career reflection can help pinpoint the root cause of career challenges. When you face a career obstacle, you can use career reflection techniques to identify the point where the challenge began. You can analyze your career history, identify potential turning points, and then reflect on whether past decisions contributed to the current challenge. This process helps narrow down the potential causes of career difficulties in a few steps.

Final Thoughts

As coding professionals, we use many tools and technologies. Everyone has their own preferences for IDEs and languages, but everyone in the industry benefits from strong career management practices. In today’s tech-driven world, a proactive and strategic approach to your coding career is essential.

Given how critical coding skills are to modern industries, anything you can do to manage your career more effectively will pay dividends down the road, and anyone reviewing your professional profile will appreciate the effort you put into clearly articulating your skills, experiences, and career goals. It might be a hiring manager reviewing your resume, a colleague evaluating your contributions, or even yourself revisiting your career journey many years from now.

Ultimately, good career practices are a key part of long-term career sustainability and success in the coding field. And in 2021, with the ever-increasing demand for coding skills, a career in coding remains a promising and rewarding path for those who are passionate and dedicated.

Further Information

This is a post in the Career Advice series.