The other day, I stumbled across this blog post on twitter: “Don’t Call Yourself a Programmer“. It starts with the following:
If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.
then launches into a number of examples. I think the most notable pieces of advice were the following: “Don’t call yourself a programmer” (define yourself in terms of your accomplishments, not your tech skills), “Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets” (awareness and good-will does one wonders), and “Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait“. I found most of his points refreshingly articulating things I have come to over the past six years – but lately, I have found myself working on these three more than others.
I highly recommend reading this article.
