How to stay relevant is a question I ask myself pretty often. Mainly because for as much as I like programming, for how much time I spent typing on my keyboard life is hard to predict. Somehow to be being relevant maps to job security in an environment that continuously updates itself and where staying on top of what happens around you matters.
A few years ago for me it was all about being somehow known, career development, conferences, finding the right people to grow with, work with and have fun if possible. I am lucky and I think I did all of the three.
First what does it mean to stay relevant and is it important? To me it means to be able to get access to work that is interesting, well paid with people that are nice in an environment that cares about people. Easier it is to find the intersection of all those lines more relevant I still am.
Everyone that feels the same needs to find its way, mine went from opensource to writing, to sharing about what I care and hopefully being a nice person (sometime I failed, but I hope rarely). I know people that are way better than me at coding and they took a different direction, they can just fix and code everything everywhere, as long as we are nice with each other there is not right or wrong way. Sometime I want to be like them but in reality I have my own way and that’s important.
Having a direction makes me happy to wake up and work, trying to be somebody else does not bring to happiness.
If you are at the beginning of your career listen to me, at some point you will pivot to finding cool people you want to work with everywhere to reach out to cool people you know because you want to work with them again! Network and friendship is how I think I am gonna stay relevant for the next couple of years. No via being good at making interviews, not because I have followers on social network that proved to be ephemeral and not that people friendly.
Ex-Influxer all hang out into a Slack account where we make fun of each other, we comment Influx blog posts sometime but we also support each other if needed. Recently somebody I didn’t even worked directly with because I was already gone was looking for a connection at Grafana I happened to have a few, I put them in contact and I hope they will get a job and a little bonus from bringing a good eng onboard. Those crews are just gems you find in your career. And it works similarly for friends I made along the way contributing to Kubernetes, Docker, and going back to PHP, Zend Framework or Doctrine.
Let’s speak about the elephant in the room generative AI, LLM and the current job market. I won’t lie to you, the job market looks a lot different compared with the one I was into when I started but don’t make the mistake to think like we are in a single huge market. I have limited visibility into it as yourself.
For example in startupland, VCs, Silicon Valley side I see less space for newcomers looking for jobs. It looked like hiring was free for the last 10 years but now companies are happy to postpone new hire as much as they can and Senior developers with the help of AI can help with that because they get an assistant that can write stupid code that makes not that complex business happy enough. Not saying I like what I see, but this is what I think it is happening.
In contrast markets like Italy not drugged by so much capital training new developers has more value and probably AI is not in every editor as it is in places like San Francisco where there are more AI startups that any other kind of store.
We are lucky to have Antirez sharing his thought about similar topic in Italian on YouTube so what I am writing may come after watching his rambling but I agree with the idea that the best way to stay relevant is to work hard, learn complicated things. I also think that soft skill play a role.
For example being the smartest in the room when it comes to a specific language may not be that smart compared with being open to collaborate at the product level to be good and developing what’s actually useful for the company, with the use of AI if required just as people may develop with an IDE instead of an editor.
Coming from opensource I know politics matters and it is also possible that being associated to environments that supported sides that do not represent myself makes being relevant totally useless! Work is complicated and often it is not because you picked Rust instead of Java or MongoDB instead of Postgres.