--- title: "Tim's vlog: Career advice for developers" description: "I'm on holiday and I now that I have a new camera I decided to do my first vlog! It's story time with grandpa. In this vlog I'm reflecting on my own career as a developer and I give advice on how you can advance yours. There might be some nuggets of inspiration in there for you!" date: "2020-09-09T11:56:23.000Z" url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/tim/074-auzzgmyn0z4" youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUzzgMyN0z4" playlist: "tim" image: "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AUzzgMyN0z4/maxresdefault.jpg" tags: ["frontend", "devrel", "career"] --- # Tim's vlog: Career advice for developers I'm on holiday and I now that I have a new camera I decided to do my first vlog! It's story time with grandpa. In this vlog I'm reflecting on my own career as a developer and I give advice on how you can advance yours. There might be some nuggets of inspiration in there for you! Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUzzgMyN0z4 ## Transcript [Music] hello what is up welcome back to the channel so as you can see i am not in my normal surroundings i'm actually here in the south of france in a place called la domin malpass which is a place that my friends own they moved here from amsterdam to start their own hotel as it were and it's just lovely i'm here between the apple trees and the farmland and the cows munching away and this is just an awesome place to be and i have a new camera so i thought why not do a vlog in this lovely place and talk to you about careers and how to advance them because i kind of feel like this grandpa i'm 35 but as a web developer that's pretty old i've done this for a long time and i've come really far luckily i had success in my career i also had a lot of failure but because of that you learn and you grow and so when you're on holiday you tend to reflect on things or at least i do so i was reflecting on hey what did i do this year during co-fit and actually i did pretty well so i thought why not write down a bunch of things that i learned that can help you when you watch this to advance your career so it's story time sit down and let's do this [Music] all right let's get this video started i just changed camera positions because why not i have a vlogging camera so you can see there's like this old farmhouse here let me just focus that for you it's really nice right i i keep on finding these hidden gems on this lovely place here anyway so let's get started i think one of the most important points in your career is to to know the fact that things take time or things always take time you have to be kind of patient and i'm not saying here that when you take your time and be patient that everything happens automatically sadly not but there's been so many times that i've seen people work somewhere for a year felt like it didn't progress and try to find another job and then you would if i would follow them they would do that again the next job and then become freelance and then they didn't really get where they wanted to be in their career and i've seen this many times especially with front-end developers who feel like kind of things have to be rushed but you know what guys and girls doesn't have to be right um and i'm a bit guilty of this myself in the past so that's why i thought why not discuss that now and make sure you don't do that right sometimes things just take a bit of time for others to see what you've been doing and especially your bosses that can actually give you a promotion they tend to be very busy people and um i am one of those now so i know how that feels there's always like business goals there's team orientations there's there's a lot of stuff you have to be doing if you're higher up in the chain and you know what actually a super important part is to be there for your team and notice what they do but it's just not always reality and i know i'm guilty of that a little bit myself sometimes i have to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time and it's just really hard to keep tabs on everybody so what you should do is make sure that you as a person that wants to be promoted kind of play the game and that's not a manipulation game but it's the game of kind of making goals reaching those goals and making sure the perception of you is positive right you don't always have to be the best at everything but just make sure that every time somebody who was a manager thinks about you it's good right so always be on time be in your meetings be active be responsible it's a very big one take responsibility for your own work and part of that taking responsibility if you want to grow actually make goals that really get you somewhere and you tend to or you should actually make those goals with your manager together like they can generally seem because from higher up to where you are what you need to progress and generally when you actually make goals that are measurable over time it might sometimes take some time but when you reach them you should be ready to be promoted but then there's the next bit so i've seen many people actually reach some goals and then not get promoted because you know what they just they didn't ask it's that simple so what i tend to do and this is also important for the people who are kind of still a minority in the tech world like women developers or people with a different skin tone than i have for example sad to say they are still a bit of a minority but what i always say is just do what the white guys do and what do white guys do they kind of because i guess because of our privilege we just ask can i have this and you know what if you have been prepared you did your work well you met your goals and you do a good job and then you ask you then generally get that what you want right and so i tend to say just look at what the white guys do because they all do it they're all in higher positions just be an and ask for what you want and you know what when you are prepared if you come to me and i'm your manager and you are prepared and you have done everything we discussed you would do you will get what you want and not everybody is like that and if it's really impossible you might not be in the right place of work but don't let me tell you where to work of course but i think that's a pretty important part right okay so i think we've covered quite a bit here let's go to the next camera [Music] position [Music] another subject another location there's a little farmhouse here there's a hammock here we tend to chill in man this place is good um so let's talk a little bit about work life balance because i kind of feel sometimes that people don't really get that right because they don't really go to the extremes of the both so they don't really get to know themselves of what they can actually do or and also then when you know what you can do then you know what you want to do so in my opinion between the age of let's say 20 and 25 or 20 and 27 you should go two ways you should go extreme busy go crazy on the work like go as far as you can and see where your limit is and then after that or whenever you want go as calm as you can and do as little as you can and see where your limit is there because if you're bored you're not happy your motivation is gone if you're too busy maybe that motivation is also gone so you need to find your own location of where you want to be in that scale i know for myself i like to be my motivation is highest at the high end of the skill i tend to be busy some people have different priorities and so you're going to have to find a way for you what you like and then once you know you can align your motivation next to it we'll talk about that in a sec and then based on that you can advance your career right so motivation is about mastery autonomy and purpose also it's also monetary but assuming you work in web development money is fine like there's a lot of work out there so let's not talk about that at the moment but if you have mastery autonomy and purpose all of those three combined you're generally highly motivated and things just flow you're happy your creative things happen right but if one of those goes down people tend to become a bit frustrated and i've seen a lot of web developers actually feel frustrated and you know what they tend to not really know why why they are frustrated and then they kind of blame it on their boss or the client is stupid or this is not the job for me move to another job without actually addressing why they are upset or why they are annoyed and these guys or girls that get annoyed it tends to be when you start to become more senior you start to see things you don't like or but you don't really know yet why so what i always say to the people in my teams is well let's have a look at this mastery autonomy in purpose right let's do an example let's think about avenue when he built 4gs right so when you build an open source tool like that you clearly have mastery he knew what he was doing right of course he was learning as he went but he had the mastery of his whole code base so he's cool there then he probably also had the autonomy at least in the beginning he was able to choose anything he wanted to say this is good for the tool i'm making but imagine what if nobody liked fiji s right imagine he did all that work for two years and nobody used it at that point your purpose is gone and you can imagine if you have no purpose why work so hard motivation down the drain so he wouldn't want to work that hard anymore maybe even drop it there's a bit of wind i hope my mic is not picking too much anyways um so maybe another example you might work on this old-school legacy code base right you can have mastery if you work on that for long enough you will just understand it you will have purpose because maybe for that client whatever you do for that maintenance project is so important they will make money so purpose is good but autonomy might actually be gone because of these old shitty systems that you cannot change anything then your autonomy seems to be gone right you are not able to make changes based on your own opinions and again motivation goes down so what i tend to do is when we figure out why people are upset or annoyed figure out their motivations put the finger on it shall we say make specific goals or set goals for the manager to help the person out they tend to overcome those and then when you go back to taking the time making the goals work getting the overview you can get promoted right so it all goes um together [Music] for the rest i would say well those things at work professionally this is the way to go there's also a bunch of other stuff you could do right but let's find a new camera position and talk about that i thought i'd give the fancy selfie stick a try look at that stabilization anyways let's get my face exposed and start talking so um i think as a last part of this video we can talk about how you can shape your career for the better as it turns out you can actually do a whole lot yourself to give your career some direction right and for me that tends to work by doing a little bit of your own projects exploring subjects trying to champion subjects and with that learn a whole bunch right and then if you know something well you become kind of the subject matter expert and at work things will change for you right because you can actually you learn to lead a subject you learn to support others you learn to teach you learn to present all of that comes from championing a subject so let's give some examples from my own career like for me way back in the day i always worked on projects and something wouldn't really just work nicely for example back in the day we were talking 2010 here i guess the video tag in html5 had just came out but we still had flash players but of course we didn't really like the flash players we liked the video tag so i decided to make a video player with like a super nice layout that would either work with all these different video files but also flash fell back and a whole bunch of things and we needed that for a project so i just started doing that and then you learn a lot and then all projects that we got where i worked we used my video player and so i had to to learn to present what i did i had to work on issues that people would file i had to teach others what i did and how the thing worked so you learn a bunch and then you become a little bit of an expert on that work right and that really helped me to grow and later on in my career i did this for even more things like i used to work in luxury a lot i still do actually so companies like chanel or louis vuitton and they always have super rich fancy pages and they all have big images like you know those big hero banners with a fancy model on them the thing is those images need to look pristine for those brands but they also need to load really fast and they need to be responsive images and all of that complexity combined is generally really hard for people to work with so oh sorry there's just an animal on my foot um so i decided i would dive into this and learn okay how do responsive images work how do i encode images how do you resize them how to optimize them there's a whole bunch of stuff there and for a bunch of those brands i was always the person they would ask tim how does that thing work and i profiled myself as someone who knows about media because i did the video stuff and i did the images stuff and you know what right now that got me a job as a media developer expert at cloudani and cloudenaire is a company that that basically specializes in the delivery of media right from video streaming optimization ai stuff amazing things and so that got me to where i am right now and now i can speak on conferences about this kind of stuff and i'm in the media developer expert program with a lot of people that are so much better at their job than me so i have all these connections now and then i decided to do this youtube thing and then things just take off from there and you know what's interesting i'm not doing this youtube thing i do videos about startups and how if i like their software or not like the tim tri series and from that i suddenly get job offers about advocacy and how to do community building and stuff like that and honestly me trying to scratch that image itch years ago shaped my career to what it is now and i can now basically kind of choose do i want to be developer do i want to be a tech director or maybe i want to be a software advocate maybe i want to work at a startup now and having a bit of experience and grit and working hard can really get you somewhere so if i can do that you can do that too because you have people like me giving you those tips now even when you're younger and you know what there are so many youngsters out there now that are so good i really wish i was that good at that age but i guess i'm starting to sound like the grandpa again you know everything now goes fast and everybody is awesome but anyways i hope these tips helped you and i hope my first vlog was interesting for you and you know i'll see you next time bye