Success Isn’t Linear, Nor is it Transitive

With the climate of tech workers in a weird state post Covid-19 pandemic, and with the rise of the tech influencer I feel this topic is not only relevant, but also important. There are people who really want to break into a tech career from their current path, and there are people who want to change careers within tech itself. Whether you are looking to level up your existing career, make a move into a different section of tech, or just trying to break into the tech industry any way you can, you have likely heard many other people tell their success stories.

While there is value in other’s path to success, it is by no means a guaranteed repeatable process. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. Technology, business, and the economy (or things adjacent to these subjects) are a living and evolving thing. Someone who came up through the ranks of success in the 1980s is likely not going to have a success story that is repeatable in the 1990s or 2000s, just simply because the times are different. Things change, not only from a technology perspective but also from every other external factor that influences our lives one way or another.

It is also worth stating that success is not a linear journey, as you will have setbacks, and then you will need to make a bit more forward progress to get back to where you were, or just ahead of where you last were. There aren’t set levels you can just level up on a single track with. You must work with what you have, and where you are currently at. This means that everyone has a different starting position when trying to make change in their professional lives. Just like some folks may have more privileges than other folks when starting out.

My Origin Story is non-Transitive

I started out in the late 90s working in tech. Back then if you could swap a hard drive and install an OS you pretty much qualified for an entry level computer tech or desktop support gig. I didn’t have any spectacular set of skills by today’s standards in the 90s, but I am a product of the 90s as that is when I entered the work force. I did warranty repairs, desktop support, OEM systems building, and many similar things. Later on I went to work IT for 2 different school systems. One of them I was a hybrid support and system administrator, and at the second one I was a Sr. System Administrator and started to delve into the engineering side. From that point on I have held various engineering focused jobs that were more geared toward automating with code.

The big thing here about my career path progression, is that I had this huge middle step to support my path to engineer in system administration. Timing was everything here, because I quickly migrated toward an engineering first perspective, and now my team automates a large majority of system administrator tasks. So, the demand for folks doing System Administration work in the tech industry, has been going down over time, and the demand for engineering focused jobs has gone up. Things like DevOps has become a series of concepts many IT Engineering teams have adopted. We have seen other jobs pop up as well that have sort of taken over or been involved in device management like CPE and SRE While not every Org out there has taken this approach, we can also look at things like the diffusion of innovation which is something we have observed over time with technology and the adoption of said technology.

Is the System Administrator dead? Oh no, it is not, and in fact in many industries it may be thriving. My career path was always moving toward working in the tech industry. Not everyone wants to work in the tech industry, and there are plenty of other industries that offer great jobs. However, for my specific success path, I think it would be much more difficult for someone to get onboard at a tech company and then move their way up from say help desk, desktop support, and then eventually some sort of IT engineering job. This is my opinion, and not fact, but it comes from the idea that the mid-career progression job I had as a Sr. Sys Admin, is just less common at high-tech orgs these days. That job allowed me to do all my work as a tech worker without having a hard requirement to write code. So I was able to write code as I progressed, and I was able to do it a pace that worked really well for me. I don’t feel this opportunity is no longer in existence, but rather it is just much harder to find in some industries. My Sr. Sys Admin job is really the one that allowed me to transition into engineering. If I had not had that opportunity my path could have ended up much differently.

So, I typically don’t tell other people to follow my footsteps. I don’t think my path is as relevant as it was back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I tell folks to focus on core fundamental skills, and I feel those are the most transferable today.

Other’s Success isn’t Transitive Either

One thing we often do in our communities, is share what works and what doesn’t work for us. Add in things like scale and requirements from our employers, and you will get a plethora of answers and a lot of them may not ever work for you in your current work environment. I stopped assuming what I could accomplish is also what others could. There are always factors why a good idea, is actually not a good idea and being able to tell the difference can be quite difficult at times. So, even in modern times of today, if someone builds something that works and scales at their Organization, it may never work anywhere else just due to the nature of the Org and the job.

This is one factor why writing and building open source tools is so difficult. It is so hard to balance an abstracted high level tool that has many use cases, without tons of people wanting to file issues to meet their specific niche needs. I honestly have so much respect for open source maintainers, as they have a very difficult position to manage. Since it is very difficult for an open source maintainer to account for every person’s problem at every potential job site, they have to abstract their tools into something that just gives the end user of that tool the options to use it how they best see fit. It ends up being more like a framework or similar. In the commercial software space, you can just hire someone to build something to your specification. The tradeoff is that cost you money, but you can get what you want (and what you pay for).

So, what you may come to learn is, even though you can communicate with your peers across the all the tech communities, their successes on what they do may never work for you or your Org. That is also okay, and sharing our successes is still a great thing to do. It opens up ideas, squashes echo chambers, and diversifies your thoughts even if their successful solution won’t work for you.

Tech Influencers and Content Creators

Is an Influencer and a Content Creator synonymous? I honestly do not even know the answer to this. What I do think is that they are likely going to be around for a while. That is okay too, there is nothing really inherently wrong with either of these things, because if you don’t like it, you can simply ignore them. What I would like to point out though is that many of these folks have content that can boost your career in tech. Oftentimes an ex tech worker turned content creator will use their platform to replace their job. The reason I am mentioning this specifically is I have noticed a few trends around Influencers and Content Creators, and some of them seem to be selling their own personal success stories. I am not very well versed in this subject, but I definitely follow several of them on LinkedIn and other socials.

Since most things are relative, or at least have some relativity when it comes to a human’s personal journey through life, I would suggest taking precautions with any Content Creator or Influencer that wants to bootcamp style train you for a job in tech, basing it off their own personal success.

I won’t name any names, but I have definitely found some real genuine and great content creators out there that do in fact post meaningful content which I think is mostly good. A common occurrence among the ones I like, is they focus more on core fundamental skill building over selling you a success story. Most of the ones I really like, rarely (or never) sell their own personal success as direction on how to succeed.

Fundamentals and Core Skills are Successful!

When it comes to building a path to success, I do believe that developing core fundamental skills are a great place to start. They can be somewhat transitive, and this is a space where others success may be more relative to your own. Fundamental skills aren’t a guaranteed path to success in your career, but they are something that can help you be a life-long student, and they are something you can always fall back on.

When an athlete plateaus or recovers from an injury, or to strengthen their skills, they do tons and tons of core fundamental drills and exercises. A musician will do repetitive drills, scales, sick riffs, produce sweet beats, music theory, and many other core fundamental skills that help them hone in on their craft. No one is born with innate skills or knowledge of anything, everyone must build them over time. There are a set of core fundamentals for many things humans do, and tech work is honestly no different.

So, if you are trying to level up, or stand out in the crowds in this job market, remember to fall back on your fundamentals and focus on your strengths. If you are trying to get into tech, keep focusing on building strong fundamental skills over time. Remember, no one is born with this, everyone has to put in time to build these skills. So, don’t think you can shortcut it. It is okay to take time, it is okay to build them at your pace. What matters is mostly if you are progressing.