Programmer career

    In the article, I describe my opinion about the priorities when choosing an employer for programmers. The main factor I indicated the size of the salary, justifying this by the fact that this leaves more time for life. Further, I give my reasons why you should not get involved in processing. I continue the article with a look at the development of home projects, which, in my opinion, helps to keep up with the trends of the profession, and in addition, brings pleasure. I came to these thoughts after working for 8 years as a full-time programmer.


    Experienced people who know how to work and live, I urge you to comment on my views, to express their opinion on issues with which discrepancies were found. For those who have recently started their path as a programmer, or simply never thought about such things, I recommend not to take the article as a serious guide. I described my attitude on these issues, hoping that someone might find useful ideas in case he is desperate as a programmer.


    Priorities


    When choosing a job, I determined for myself the following priorities.


    1. The amount of cash income received. Everything is simple.
    2. Workspace comfort. This is how convenient or uncomfortable what surrounds you at work is: remoteness from home, people in your office, work computer performance, weather at the workplace, surveillance camera in your monitor, your monitor side to the aisle, attitude with the management, late fines and the like.
    3. The opportunity for your professional development. This includes your work experience. This is learning new technologies for you, honing previously learned skills and acquiring new skills that are useful to you. Everything that makes you more professionally experienced.

    Very few of this list can be found out in advance about the company before applying for a job. But given the order of priorities, one can easily compare current work and other potential, knowing the size of the salary. Sometimes you can donate part of the second and third, for a good salary. Of course, for each, this balance is different.


    Some are embarrassed to say out loud, but, money is the first and main factor in choosing a job. If you get well, then you do not have to earn extra money and process it, which means you will have more time to enjoy life. My point is this: if you are a programmer with more than 3 years of experience, and you feel that you would like to receive more, start achieving this without delay. Most likely, you have no reason not to receive more, if possible.


    How to increase your salary


    There is an opinion that you can just ask this from your management. Maybe it will work. But I suggest first to find out how much other employers are willing to pay you. If you do not have ready-made job offers, then you need to start looking for vacancies yourself. Consider options that match your experience and salary above your current one. Be ready to do test tasks, take Skype interviews or face-to-face interviews. Consider this as potential profit, do not block yourself with your conceit.


    Consider not only employers in your city, but also remote work. There are many articles about the disadvantages of remote work, but if you haven’t tried it yourself, you can still consider such options. Remember that remote work is not necessarily work from home. With the salary of a programmer, you can rent an office or addicted to coworking.


    You need to prepare for interviews. On the net you can find a list of questions that you may ask. Take the time to study them, think about the answers. The order of interviews is important. Start with the employer whose conditions you find the least attractive, then go on to increase the attractiveness of your potential new job. The point of this order is that it is much easier to fall into the first interviews. At the first interviews, you are likely to worry more, forget more, and act less confidently. In addition, if you receive questions that you could not handle at one interview, you can study and answer them at subsequent ones. Thereby, you will increase your chances of getting an offer from the company most attractive to you.


    If before an interview with a company it seems to you that you definitely won’t go to work there, take this interview seriously, because new details may open that will make this employer more attractive. It is always worth remembering that you are choosing a new job for yourself, despite the fact that it all began with the goal of raising your salary.


    If it begins to seem to you that you are taking the upcoming interview too seriously and are very worried about it, then the advice is the opposite of the previous one: take the employer not as potential, but as just a means of increasing salaries in your current job, knowing that if it doesn’t work out, it’s just nothing will change. But find a balance to look like a professional, and not a sassy type with high self-conceit.


    After receiving attractive job offers, do not leave silently from your employer. Discuss the situation with the decision maker about raising your salary. This is a very exciting moment, the first time there may not be enough determination. If you don’t feel confident enough discussing such issues, then you can try to start a discussion by electronic correspondence. But, most likely, voice communication will still have to.


    If you have no ideas on how to be determined to ask yourself for a pay raise, then I offer you the following. Start focusing on all the shortcomings of your current place of work: how you don’t like that someone constantly heats the fish at lunch, that the air conditioner works right above your back, how you are enraged by the penalty for being late for one minute, how are you tired of implementing features that nobody really needs, how tired you are of the current stack of technologies used, how long you haven't learned something new. But most importantly, imagine that you could receive + X% of the money, but do not get it because of your employer. Do you like the employer keeping your money for himself? Not? So go and talk to him about it. Just do not need to go to work offended, somehow do your job, hoping that the leader will notice this and offer something himself. This is unprofessional.


    If the leader refuses to raise and lets you go, then it's time to leave. How often can I request a raise? As long as you receive offers, it is much better than your current situation. But do not try to cheat, you should have a valid job offer after going through all the interviews.


    Overtime work


    Full-time work means that you work 40 hours a week. If you are offered to work more than this, then remember that work and so takes away about a third of your entire daily life. If you have nothing else in life except work and sleep, then you can kill time with work. Otherwise, think about your priorities. Don't settle for overtime if it’s not paid enough. But even in this case, it may turn out that you simply have no time to spend your salary. You may think that right now you’ll dig into the apartment, then into the car, then on vacation for the family, and then life will go. But life is already on, and you are getting old. Try, after all, to start earning more for the same 40 hours a week, rather than processing. Spend your free time on something that pleases you and on learning something new,


    Home projects


    There is a widespread opinion that looks something like this: "I have been programming all day, I have no strength left to come home and develop a pet-project or commit to open source." I understand that not all big fans of programming are for the sake of the process, and for them the above opinion is fair. But for some, I’ll guess the reason is that they just didn’t try to program something interesting for themselves. Perhaps they just didn’t come up with the idea that interesting things could be created, but maybe they didn’t even try to think.


    If you answer positively to the question whether you like to program at all, then you should try to come up with a project for yourself and start developing it. If before you did not develop large projects yourself, then you should not start with big ideas and plans for making money. Let it be a very small project to begin with. If you have no ideas, I suggest trying to make a game. A game that you yourself would like to play, and which you would like to share with a friend. Just don’t trap yourself while thinking about the rapid growth of users through word of mouth, selling the game to a publisher, or something like that. Not for this you do your first home project. You make it for the pleasure of programming and for the opportunity to try the latest technologies that you read about on Habré or in the job description.


    You may not seem to have time for this. But the development of home projects is much more relevant to creativity than the main work of a programmer. And about the time for creativity there is an excellent comic book . The bottom line is that when programming for pleasure, you get into a rush, which makes it hard to stop, even to eat or sleep. But remember that in addition to programming, there are other interesting things in life, look for your balance.


    Conclusion


    I described my thoughts in the form of tips, but do I follow them myself? Not really. I enjoy programming at home, learning new programming languages ​​and frameworks for me. I don’t process it if I’m not sure that the payment will be worthy. More precisely, in six months I reworked about 8 hours. Almost a year ago, he changed his job for the only reason - a good increase in salary, and the bonus was the comfort of the workspace and professional growth. And now what's wrong. I have the opportunity to change jobs and get + 50%, but I find all sorts of excuses: I feel comfortable here; recently came here, it will look bad in the resume; they can be deceived there, but checked here; there they may be disappointed in me, but here they trust and the like. To change a comfortable place of work to a new one, you need courage. I try to save it.


    It will not once again be reminded that one should not take other people's advice on how to live without strong skepticism. Especially if someone did something once, and now he recommends it to everyone.


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