iamacp.com – I Am A Computer Programmer
All about the daily work issues of a Java/J2EE Computer Programmer

Every single job I’ve had I’ve always learned new lessons. I think the greatest lesson I’ve learned this time was to network more while you’re employed. I have networked in the past but usually just the occasional contact or update with a vendor. This was a mistake. The importance of networking is the single most important way you can get job leads. I highly recommend that if you haven’t joined LinkedIn already you should do so. It’s a great social networking site to keep contact with people who can help you land a job (coworkers, headhunters, etc..). You really can’t have enough contacts when it comes to finding a job.

In just 2+ weeks I have already accumulated over 40 contacts on LinkedIn and it will rise in the coming days and weeks. I will continue to build my contacts even when landing my next job.

The most important thing a computer programmer can do is sizing up the competition. Sizing up the competition allows a computer programmer to evaluate his worth and value in the marketplace. Doing this is one of the most important things a computer programmer can do to investigate the market. Here are The Benefits Of Sizing Up The Competition.

• Seeing What The Market Is Like For Your Skills – I have  tested the market time and time again while employed just to see what the market is like for my background. Call it curiosity but I am always looking for better and more promising opportunities. I don’t really ever thing I would be happy at least knowing if I could not make more money, work in a better location or have better fringe benefits.
• Decide Whether To Stay Or Move On - I have worked in several companies where I just was totally unhappy or not satisfied where I was in my career. By knowing where you stand you can see if it’s a good decision to stay with your current company or look elsewhere. There is no point staying where you are if you know you can do better elsewhere.
• Testing Your Resume – You really do not have to respond to any new opportunity but you get a chance to see how effective your resume is. If you don’t like the results you can try rewriting it and see if the rewrite helps.  Keeping your resume current is a great way to help size up the competition.

These are The Benefits Of Sizing Up The Competition. Every so often when I am curious about the current market I size up the competition by testing my resume to see where I stand.  Usually it’s a huge confidence booster for me and feel much  better after. You can follow this or not but keeping aware of the market can only help you.

Just when you can’t think anything can’t get worse it can and will.  Anything possible can and will go wrong working on a project almost seemingly at once. These are a list of the possible reasons why everything can go wrong at once when working on a project.

• Not Enough Information - Have you tried to program blind? It does not work. If you do not understand the task at hand there is no way that you can successfully code a project to completion. Trying to code with just a vague understanding of the task does not work. I have tried countless times to code blind but I always end up having to ask a ton of questions to successfully get the needed info to complete the project.

• The Chain Of Information – Knowing who to ask for the right information can be downright confusing sometimes. If you’re stuck on something you may have to ask a ton of people just to get the right answer to your question or something fixed. This is not fun at all. For example I was on a chat the other day where 10 people were involved over a 5 hour time frame just to get the answer to something which impacted my project from succeeding

• Configuration Hassles - In large companies dealing with improperly set up configurations and broken configurations sometimes happens more often than not. It’s not surprising when there are dozens of people working on different aspects at a time of the same system.

• Too Many Dependencies – I have worked on complicated systems where many components are so tightly coupled that if one component breaks it breaks the rest of the system. This is not really a good idea to code to that degree. It is not smart to code like that in critical systems.

These are just some of the many reasons why everything can go wrong at once.