The Software industry is frightening!
Last week, I started Software is eating the world blog posts series where I shared my opinion and experiences around the current hastiness in the software market and analyzed the driving forces behind current trends. The post went really viral with 2.5K views in two days.
However, I would like to continue this series by reviewing some courses which I believe are valuable to position yourself in the market and develop a general understanding of the market directions. I see these courses are eternally useful. Simply, because they have nothing to do with technology or tools, it is more about learning techniques, mind-frameworks, and eye-changers that will help you for years to come.
The courses I will mention are available on Pluralsight, the popular IT training platform. Pluralsight offers free trials, you can get yours. The author of all four courses is Dan Apple man, a well-known consultant, speaker and CTO.
Recommended Courses
(1) The future of technology careers
Simply, it is the best course I have ever watched in my career! The core idea of this course is to link macroeconomics trends with microeconomics trends and explain how that impacts the software industry market. The course discusses the impact of economic recessions on IT markets, the impact of new software directions on the market (e.g., how IoT drives security) and draws on that some conclusions and pieces of advice. To be more concrete, the author puts his unique perspective and experience from the dot com bubble era. Your viewpoint on the software industry will change A LOT after this course, I promise!
(2) Career Survival Strategies of Software Developers
This course provides an overall analysis of the possible choices a software engineer has during his career along with some bits of advice. The author visits some questions such as: When to invest time to learn a new technology vs. when to learn it as you work? What is the Software developer life cycle? The hesitation between starting a business or continuing a job. How does your age impact your income? What the Importance of speaking and writing skills is? Is it better to work for a small, mid, or large-sized company? How to become a consultant? How to assess job offers? etc.
(3) Introduction to leadership and management for software developers
This is a unique course. It discusses the social skills weakness in the tech sector works and its impact when they are switching to management. The course's basic idea is based on a comparison between humans and computers and aims to help developers to utilize their computer science knowledge to better understand humans. Thus, the course introduces concepts such as” Human Debugging” and “Brainware” to map concepts. It might look weird to compare a human with a machine; however, when you watch the course, you will find out that it turns to be useful.
(4) Learning technology in the Information Age
This course is among the best courses. Dan points out one challenge aspect that has been continuously stressed – Technology is progressing way faster than our human capacity. The course aims to help you bridge this gap by developing some mental framework that you can use to assess the feasibility of learning and technology. He classifies the knowledge into fundamentals, Information, skills, and innovation.
Fundamentals are the very basic concepts that rarely change with time (e.g., TCP/UDP protocols). While Information is the libraries and tools which we use to implement the features (e.g., setting up socket connections to servers). Skill is the ability to efficiently deliver to achieve these libraries in a way that generates business value. Finally, Innovation is the ability to advance the state of the art of your field and come up with innovations (e.g., devising your own RFC).
The author argues that it is a smart decision to invest time in learning fundamentals properly as their value diminishes slowly with time, along with many other pieces of advice based on this mental framework.
That is it for today, a short and straightforward article? Please spend the rest of the week watching them, they are invaluable eye changers!
And of course, do not forget to subscribe to the mailing list in the top right to get hints and tricks on making your code smart and your career smarter :’)