Don Jones - Own Your Tech Career: Soft skills for technologists

Soft skills for technologists

Don Jones

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ISBN: 9781617299070

This book came from the confluence of several seemingly disconnected events. I was about ready to prepare a fifth edition of Be the Master, an independently published book on choosing your own success and growing that to help others. I was also looking to revise Lets Talk Business, another independently published title focused on making business basics more accessible to technologists and other individual contributors. Finally, Manning reached out and said that they wanted to create a new soft skills book, one designed to help technologists with the non-technical aspects of their careers. The timing seemed perfect, and so this bookthrough several iterations and many revisionswas born.

Soft skills, as a phrase, totally downplays the importance of things like communicating, understanding why businesses do what they do, working on a team, developing leadership skills, and so on. These skills may not be hard technical skills, but it turns out most companies worry more about getting the right soft skills than they do about making sure their people know the latest version of C#, or Windows Server, or Tableau, or something else. Technical skills can be developed through training and experience, and in many wayslike certificationscan be measured, to a degree. But soft skills are harder to wrap an organizations collective mind around, harder to measure, and harder to develop. Yet arguably, our ability to work with other human beings is the most critical skill for any kind of success.

This book isnt designed to be the last soft skills learning youll ever have. Its designed to be the first, or one of the first: a way to frame up the skills youll need to focus on, grow, and refine throughout your entire career. This book comes largely from my experience and the experiences of close friends and colleagues, as those experiences were the best way I could think of to ensure the book was real-world and relevant.

Whether youre brand-new in your tech career or a decades-long veteran, I think youll find that this book offers valuable perspectives, new things to think about, and new topics to include in your career management repertoire. Most important, this book tries to stress the importance of your career being your career: you define what success looks like, you decide how to make that success happen for you, and you benefit from that success in the end. Ive tried to frame everything in a way that puts you in the drivers seat of your career, offering advice and observations but not directives.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope you find much success along the way!

I want to thank my friends and familyespecially Chris and Donavanfor putting up with the gnashing of teeth and furious typing as I made my way through the principal writing and the editing passes.

I also want to thank the early reviewers of this book and its outline, many of whom provided invaluable suggestions and insights that theyll see reflected in this final result: Adriaan Beiertz, Bill Bailey, Bobby Lin, Cameron Presley, Christopher Villanueva, Dave Corun, Irfan Ullah, Ed Lo, Fernando Corrales, Joe Ivans, Lee M. Cottrell, Marc-Anthony Taylor, Markus Braasch, Neil Croll, George Onofrei, Sergio Govoni, Vasile Boris, and Warren Myers.

And finally, I want to thank all of the readers of my prior efforts, including Be the Master and Lets Talk Business, who provided so much feedback, encouragement, and constructive criticism.

This book is for anyone pursuing or living a career in technology: developers, data engineers, network architects, systems operators, security teamsyou name it. People just starting out will perhaps reap the biggest and most obvious benefit, but even if youve been in your career for a couple of decades, I think youll find plenty of useful perspectives that will help you guide the rest of your career more effectively.

The contents are organized into a series of complementary topics, with each chapter essentially covering a single soft skill or similar subject. You can read them in any order, although I definitely suggest reading the first three chapters first, as those set the stage with some important definitions and shared concepts.

Youre welcome to contact me on Twitter @concentratedDon, or via my website, DonJones.com , as well as through the official Manning forums.

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