Be Professional — Work Ethic

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Your career is your responsibility. It is not your employer’s responsibility to make sure you are marketable. It is not your employer’s responsibility to train you, or to send you to conferences, or to buy you books. These things are your responsibility.

Some employers are willing to buy you books and send you to train classes and conferences. That’s fine, they are doing you a favor. But never fall into the trap of thinking that this is your employer’s responsibility. If your employer doesn’t do these things for you, you should find a way to do them yourself.

It is also not your employer’s responsibility to give you the time you need to learn. Some employers may provide that time. Some employers may even demand that you take the time. But again, they are doing you a favor, and you should be appropriately appreciative. Such favors are not something you should expect.

You owe your employer a certain amount of time and effort. For the sake of argument, let’s use the Swiss standard of 42.5 hours per week. These 42.5 hours should be spent on your employer’s problems, not on your problems.

You should plan on working 65 hours per week. The first 42.5 are for your employer. The remaining 22.5 are for you. During this remaining 22.5 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.

You might be thinking: “But what about my family? What about my life? Am i supposed to sacrifice them for my employer?”

I’m not talking about all your free time here. I’m talking about 22.5 extra hours per week. That’s roughly three hours per day. If you use your travel or breaks time to read, listen to podcasts on your commute, and spend 90 minutes per day learning a new language, you’ll have it all covered.

Do the math. In a week there are 168 hours. Give your employer 42.5, and your career another 22.5. That leaves 103. Another 56 for sleep leaves 47 for everything else.

Perhaps you think that work should stay at work and that you shouldn’t bring it home. I agree! You should not be working for your employer during those 22.5 hours. Instead, you should be working on your career.

Sometimes these two are aligned with each other. Sometimes the work you do for your employer is greatly beneficial to your career. In that case, spending some of that 22.5 hours on it is reasonable. But remember, those 22.5 hours are for you. They are to be used to make yourself more valuable as a professional.

Perhaps you think this is a recipe for burnout. On the contrary, it is a recipe to avoid burnout. Presumably you become a software developer because you are passionate about software and your desire to be professional is motivated by that passion. During that 22.5 hours you should be doing those things that reinforce that passion. Those 22.5 hours should be fun!

Continuous Learning

The frenetic rate of change in our industry means that software developers must continue to learn copious quantities just to keep up. Shame to the architects who stop coding — they will rapidly find themselves irrelevant. Shame to the programmers who stop learning new languages — thy will watch as the industry passes them by. Shame to the developers who fail to learn new disciplines and techniques — their peers will excel as they decline.

Would you visit a doctor who did not keep current with medical journals? Would you hire a tax lawyer who did not keep current with the tax laws and precedents? Why should employers hire developers who don’t keep current?

Read books, articles, blogs. Go to conferences. Go to user groups. Participate in reading and study groups. Learn things that are outside your comfort zone. If you are a Java developer, learn Python. If you are a Python developer, learn Ruby. if you are a C programmer, learn Go. In this training rhythm you’ll find yourself always to be prepared.

Practice

Professionals practice. True professionals work hard to keep their skills sharp and ready. It is not enough to simply do your daily job and call that practice. Doing your daily job is performance, not practice. Practice is when you specifically exercise your skills outside of the performance of your job for the sole purpose of refining and enhancing those skills.

What could it possibly mean for a software developer to practice? At first thought the concept seems absurd. But stop and think for a moment. Consider how musicians master their craft. It’s not by performing. It’s by practicing. And how do they practice? Among other things, they have special exercises that they perform. Scales and etudes and runs. They do these over and over to train their fingers, voice and their mind, and to maintain mastery of their skill. Consider how sport athletes master their skills. They practice 3 times per day and perform only 2 hours per week or even month. The same principles should apply to the software developers and any other professional.

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I hope you enjoyed the reading. 🤓

Dejan