Shoot for the Stars
It’s funny how people compare working for big and small companies. In IT it’s especially noticeable. There are many differences, but no matter if you’ve just generated your project or you’ve got millions of lines of code, there is one thing in common: the code you wrote today depends on the herculean work that other people did before you.
I’ve started working in IT in 2008, JQuery just appeared on the scene of Web Development, many PHP projects were transitioning from version 4 (procedural) to 5 (OOP), in .NET World version 3.5 was just released and many were fascinated with LINQ (to be fair similar technology appeared in Java only in version 8 (2014) ? ). Oh and by the way here’s what browsers were popular back in those days
So whenever you’re complaining about not receiving an autocomplete/highlighting for an obscure framework in an html editor, or that build is too slow, or that npm/yarn/turbo doesn’t have a feature X and that ultimately is a deal breaker for you, so you’ll end up building your own package manager — just remember that you’re standing on giants shoulders.
The progress our industry has done in 10 years is immense, and I’m not talking only about tools, frameworks, CPUs, and clouds. I’m talking about culture. Tech Meetups everywhere, YouTube videos (1 hour long and more) for you to learn whatever you feel like learning today, companies doing internal events/hackatons, caring about developers happiness by implementing ideas like Tech Fridays or 20% time, mentorship and Agile, communication — all of these things are made for you, so stop whining on your Facebook/Twitter/Instagram account and just do whatever makes you happy.
I can go to Udemy and buy a course on ANY technology for a little more than $10 and be proficient in a specific technology in 3–4 days (assuming your course has 20–25 hours of video content and you watch it with 1.25X speed). I can buy a domain name with SSL, setup a hosting plan, launch a WordPress with X plugins in less than 1 hour. If you don’t feel that CSS is your strong side, get a nice looking template in ThemeForest for a website or in IonicThemes for a mobile app, and focus on the back-end skills you have. You can create an account on AWS/Azure/Google Cloud for your DevOps needs. Need a new UAT environment — why not? Do you need to automatically scale up or down depending on your site’s load? — we got you covered. You’re in the mood for creating a custom CDN for your new social network (like Facebook but for dogs) video content? — S3 and CloudFront to the rescue. Do you have your own mighty servers and you want to manage yourself your own microservices, but with a nice interface like AWS? No problemos, use OpenStack.
I hope you got the point. Today you can do anything, start any business in IT with $100 or less (well for Apple it could be a little more ?), and do it fast. If you don’t know how you want to do it, go to conferences, do some networking, ask people questions. I’m sure you’ll get some ideas and directions and then — go learn what you can about that direction. Make some educated guesses, go and complete some challenges like https://javascript30.com/, https://100dayscss.com/. Once you complete these challenges fill your portfolio with your best work, share your work on LinkedIn as Shante Austin did. She shared her 30 applications challenge and got the first job in IT in the first several months after it. You’re up for a bigger challenge? Go and set an unreachable goal for the next year, for example — achieving a job at Google (or Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft) — and allocate at least 3–4 months and prepare for that interview. You can find lots of examples and resources on that topic — for example, this one. What would most probably happen is that you won’t end up being a Google engineer. But you’ll be prepared enough for Booking, TripAdvisor, Uber, Airbnb, or any other prestigious company you want to be working with.
Do whatever makes you happy, because there was no better time to be a developer than now. Use your Jedi power to improve your overall life quality, share your path with your audience and shoot for the stars!