Short version is don’t be a “ticket taker”. Move closer to the customer/stakeholder and further away from the IDE. Think in terms of adding business value and focus more on strategy than tactics (pulling well defined stories off the board).
I didn’t just pull “scope”, “impact” and “ambiguity” out of thin air. The leveling guidelines of all the tech companies boil down to this in one way or the other.
I’ve been moving closer to the “business” for a decade now after spending almost two decades as your bog standard enterprise dev. I haven’t done much active coding except some simple Python scripts in almost 3 years.
My focus is now strategic cloud consulting focusing on application development. I’m not saying necessarily “learn cloud”. Learning how to deal with “the business” and leading implementations that deliver business value is the objective. The “cloud” just happens to be my tool. I’m slowly adding Big Data/ML/“AI” to my tool belt.
Hmm. I maintain a pretty big open-source project, so I guess I'm already kinda that? I honestly love computing moreso than I love coding. I'm not very familiar with business concepts though.
I really hate to say this. But open source contributions don’t matter either. It’s only what you do for a company. No one has time to look at an open source repository. Every open job these days have thousands of applications. They aren’t going to look at your GitHub repo.
I guess I'm just confused now. I can't do technical since that's too commodified, but I can't do business since I'm a youngster with no real world experience.
