You Are Not a Technology Stack

Occasionally people ask me for career advice. I’m always surprised when this happens as I don’t really have a lot of deep insights to share. But I do have one thing which I think is good. Here it is.

You are not a technology stack.

It’s pretty simple. Don’t define what you do or who you are, either to yourself or others, by the technology that you work with. Frankly, it sells you short, limits your potential and it disqualifies you from a bunch of interesting conversations.

I had a superb colleague who is one of the best problem solvers that I know. She’s fantastic with clients, quickly grasps issues and has no problem keeping up when the discussion goes down a rabbit hole. She’s also one of the best Java developers that I know. In fact, if you look her up on Linkedin she shows up as ‘Senior Java Programmer’. To me she’s doing herself a massive disservice. Yes, she’s a fantastic developer but most of the time I needed her to understand a problem and come up with the right solution. Along the way, I knew that she’d probably cut some code. And I knew that code would be solid, commented and elegant. But is that the real value that she’s delivering ? In reality, she’s going above and beyond that.

Okay, you might say. But if I’m not listed as a ‘Mega Awesome Technology Stack Guru’, then how will anyone know my Mega-ness ? Well, calling yourself something like ‘.NET Developer’ is just putting yourself into a category with a 100,000 other people, so there’s no differentiation there. And this is exactly what things like skills and summary in LinkedIn are good for. Any recruiter that can’t construct a decent skills query isn’t one that you want to be working with anyway.

Personally, I’d much rather see someone who is people-savvy, relevant and motivated. We can teach the technology bits - let’s face it, if you’re good at one stack you can probably get good at another reasonably fast - but teaching the other stuff, and demonstrating it, is much much harder.

So, here’s my advice. You are not a technology stack. You can do better than that.