Soft Skills Made Me Write A Blog
One of the Book Club at Pinterest has recently been reading Soft Skills by John Sonmez. Early on in the book he makes the case that you should treat your career like a business. This includes things like having a goal, realizing your options and marketing yourself.
John point out that most engineers are like me and have a intuitive dislike for marketing themselves. For me personally there is something dirty about it. At least that’s how it feels. It feels like I’m focusing on trying to appear better rather than being better. Given 10 hours to spend on self improvement my intuition leans heavily towards reading a book, starting a new project or trying a new technology. Spending that time marketing myself feels just very shallow.
That said when you start thinking of yourself as a business the basic necessity of marketing becomes much more apparent. On some level Software Engineering as a profession doesn’t require any marketing. I feel like so far in my career I’ve been very successful without ever actively marketing myself.
This leads me to think I don’t need marketing. Truth, be told, that’s right. I likely don’t need marketing. Marketing isn’t necessary, but a great investment. What’s going to have better return on investment for your time, going above and beyond and working 50 hours a week or working 45 hours a week and spending 5 hours building your brand. My bet is on the later. The same can be said for learning a new technology. Ideally I hope to use the time marketing myself to better reflect upon my ideas and as an excuse to learn new technologies.
So being sold on the value of Marketing, I am now starting this blog. About me… I am an Android Developer at Pinterest. I’ve published apps from scratch, but at Pinterest I recently have been focusing on performance. I’m going to try out blogging with a focus on Android Development, my experience working at multiple startup, best practices for coding and developers in general and other things I hope will be interesting for Android Engineers everywhere.
