Factors In Tech Career Progression (Part 2/2)

Make no mistake, I've had a rocky career. Some of it was due to poor choices, some of it wanderlust. After the first six years spent in desktop support, I swore never again to allow my comfort zone to hold me back. The result was several one-year stints (sometimes shorter) in various firms. This also resulted in me picking up new skillsets and applying previously acquired skills.

The following table is comprised of this information...

Job. This is comprised of job title, company type and what I was doing.

Skills Transferred. This describes the skills I had picked up in my previous jobs that I got to use in the current one (those in bold denote most recent skills).

Learned. The skills I picked up during the stint in the company, whether at work, at school or on my own.

Remuneration. How much my pay went up (or down) from my previous job.

YEAR	JOB	SKILLS	REMUNERATION
2008	Technical Officer in a small non-tech firm, creating dynamic web portals.	Transferred: Classic ASP, HTML/CSS/JavaScript Learned: MySQL, CPanel	-8%
2010	Web Developer in a small tech firm, creating dynamic web portals.	Transferred: MySQL, CPanel Learned: PHP, AJAX, WordPress	4%
Mid 2011	Web Developer in a small tech firm, creating CMS-driven web portals and e-commerce sites.	Transferred: WordPress, AJAX Learned: Requirements gathering, customer relations, Joomla!	3%
Late 2011	Web Developer in a small tech firm, creating dynamic web portals, e-commerce sites and web applications.	Transferred: Requirements gathering, customer relations Learned: Stored Procedures, SQL Server, ASP.NET (C#), Visual Studio, TFS, ColdFusion,	3%
Late 2012	Web Developer in a medium non-tech firm, creating dyamic web portals and e-commerce sites.	Transferred: Stored Procedures, SQL Server Learned: Bootstrap, SQL views, Mailchimp and Google APIs	17%
2014	Web Developer in a medium non-tech firm, creating dyamic web portals.	Transferred: Bootstrap Learned: Java, Android Studio, Eclipse, jQuery, jQuery Mobile, AngularJS, Responsive Design	15%
2016	Web Developer in a small tech firm, creating web and mobile application.	Transferred: jQuery, Responsive Design Learned: MeteorJS, Semantic UI, LESS, ECMAScript	5%
2017	Web Developer in a large tech firm, maintaining large-scale web application, public-facing APIs and automated DevOps.	Transferred: ECMAScript Learned: Ruby, ReactJS, DevOps	25%

Editor's Note: I've been informed by a reader that I left out Java, which I picked up sometime in 2015. My mistake. While I have yet to use Java in any significant fashion, much of my current habit of almost exclusively using Object-Oriented Programming can be traced back to the time I learned Java. Still, it's a blip on the scale, and the data doesn't suffer significantly from its omission.

Let's interpret this data!

Data's useless if we're not going to interpret it, so here goes...

Here's a chart...

To make things simpler, here's a cumulative-value line graph plotted from the table. The red line represents the new skills I picked up, the light blue line represents the skills I transferred from job to job, and the yellow line represents cumulative salary growth.

In the table, you'll notice that throughout the years, my title has remained predominantly "Web Developer". There's been no mention of Management. Yet, my pay has gone steadily up, despite a slight blip at the beginning due to my career change. Sure, a 10% pay rise could be due to inflation. But towards the tail end of that table, the increase goes above 10% and up to a whopping 25%.

One could claim that where I work is a contributing factor, and that's undeniable. Smaller firms do tend to deal in lower-value work (take note; this will be relevant a few paragraphs later), and thus can't afford to pay much. But, without the experience and skills acquired at the smaller firms, I might not have been hired by the latter firms today.

Also, the amount of skills I leveraged off in each new place of employment is relevant. In fact, I've almost never failed to use stuff I've learned from my last place of employment. And near the end of the table, as time went by, it seems that the list of skills I'm leveraging on from past workplaces, is growing longer. You'll see the blue line trending upwards steadily in the graph. Of course, picking up new skills does help. The salary growth spikes each time the red line does. But it still isn't enough to explain why my pay went up over time.

Now, take a close look at what I was doing in each of these companies. At first, I was making dynamic data-driven websites. Then I graduated to CMS-driven web portals, followed by e-commerce sites. And finally, I began making and maintaining large-scale web applications. Am I still making dynamic data-driven websites? Haven't done that in years. With the rise of sitebuilders such as WiX, Weebly, SquareSpace et al, the value of the work needed to be done on such websites has drastically fallen. Increasingly fewer people are willing to pay others to do something that can easily be done themselves. Now such sitebuilders are capable of creating CMS-driven e-commerce websites just like that. There's no doubt in my mind that if I were still making websites as my main hustle, my career would be in a tailspin.

But web applications of sufficient complexity still require developer expertise. I've graduated to doing more valuable work using the same technical skills I've acquired over the years. That is the main cause of the rise in remuneration - higher-value work. My value is measured by the value of what I do, not by some grand-sounding title. It's not even because I'm particularly good at what I do. It's because what I do is in demand. And people are willing to pay for it.

Track your career progress!

If nothing else, it will give you a greater appreciation for how far you've come.

Stop moaning over not being a Senior this-or-that, or envying those in Management. For all you know, you could be shit at that level and dodged a bullet by focusing on what you're good at. Though, if you really suck at this level, you might want to try getting promoted to Management. It seems to have worked for plenty of people.

That's not to say that only crap programmers become Managers (else I would have been promoted long ago), but the best Managers I've had weren't necessarily the more technically experienced ones, though this doesn't hurt, as you might imagine. No, those were the ones who knew what orders they were qualified to give and what they weren't, and were willing to shut up, stand aside, and let you work.

Where I'm going

As mentioned earlier, having a wide skillset was advantageous early in my career. It allowed me to be easily employable. I may have mentioned this before here, but once, I stole the jobs of three people  because I could do all their jobs - not because I was better at them at those jobs, but simply because the work did not require the level of expertise they had that the company was paying for. I was basically cheap labor doing three jobs (and the scary thing was, I've had worse. This was, in comparison, practically a vacation for me).

Years later, things have changed. Technology has changed. The tech landscape has shifted.

At this point in my career, I'm going to have to stop being, in military parlance, all-over-the-shop and try to specialize in something. Because with what I'm getting paid now, I'm rapidly going the way of the people I so blithely replaced years ago.

Onward and upward!
T___T