A shortlist of things you should do to prevent a sharp end of your career

Understand the market

IT companies appear and disappear like mushrooms after the rain. Recruiters write to you a dozen a week. But as soon as your niche becomes narrower, you will see that there are not so many valuable offers. Decide what you want from the company: stability or curiosity, the ability to work from home or more buns in the office. Find out what salary is currently relevant to your level and what you need to do to rise to a higher level. Understand why some companies pay much more than the median and why no one wants to go to them anyway.

Work in a large company

Preferably a thousand employees. With corporate rules for everyone and long, several-hour rallies, at which the schedule of rallies for the next week is planned. Understand how it is when your committee gets to production at least a month later, and for each change in the structure of the database, you have to get permission from ten people from different departments.

Work in a startup

Move fast break things! By the time you fix this bug, competitors will start and take away all customers. I hope you haven’t started working on the feature yet? Working in a startup for several years is bad for your mental health and programming style, but don’t worry: startups don’t live that long.

Learn how to pass an interview

It’s no secret that the ability to pass an interview and the ability to work are two different sets of skills. The arms race is on both sides: recruitment specialists are looking for new ways to bring candidates to clean water, and the candidates themselves each time bypassing all obstacles and memorizing answers to problems about manholes.

Write something of your own

Youth is a time for experiments. If you don’t like any of the tools you have to work with, write your own! The result may not be very good. Yes, there is guaranteed to be a lousy result, but if you go far enough, you will have time to understand how the systems work from start to finish. Well, there is always a small but significant chance that someone else will like your design and shoot. Why not to give it a try?

Negotiate

This point could be part of ‘learning to speak’, but it’s a little more complicated. Sometimes it is not enough to clearly state your position. It is also necessary to impose it on the interlocutor. Whether it’s talking about a salary or planning a new project, you should always leave the room with the best possible result.

We do not call for manipulating people (although this skill is very useful), but sometimes it is enough to disagree with the first-best proposal and ask if it can be done differently. In most cases, it is possible.

Speak at the conference

From one-on-one conversations, you can move on to speaking to an audience. You should start doing this as early as possible because the first attempts are likely to fail. But remember that it can be hard enough. Half of the audience is plugged into phones, some are whispering, some are already tired of sleep. From a certain age, such failures can even threaten reputations, so early career experience is extremely important here.

Good luck 