Create Value for People

This is a guest post from Minh Pham. Enjoy.

Dear new developer,

I want to start off by saying Congrats and Good job. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you know how to code – and even if you’re still working on getting that first job, that means you have one of the most desirable skill sets in the world today. I congratulate you because getting here took work. You weren’t born with this knowledge, and even if you felt like it came naturally, it was still a journey of discovery, learning, and practice that got you where you are today.

As you look towards your first job – I want to offer you a single piece of advice that may act as your career’s guiding north star:

Create Value for People.

When you have the power to create anything, you begin to realize the importance isn’t on the code you’re writing but rather why you’re writing it in the first place. What value are you creating through your skill? This is why companies hire people like yourself. They are seeking out individuals who can ultimately deliver value to their customers, particularly through software. As you mature, you will realize that much of engineering has little to do with how fancy your solution is, and instead has everything to do with what problem it solves for the user. Once you accept this, you’ll begin to see that discussions of tech choice and code structure rarely matters outside the context of what business value it represents.

This is where your focus should stay.

Obsessions with patterns and algorithms don’t serve anyone’s mission by themselves. Ignore the constant pressure to assert yourself through syntactic cleverness and obscure trivia. These things don’t matter. These things don’t drive value for anyone. No matter how many “experienced” engineers tell you these are important, I promise you no company hires people simply for them to recite principles and algorithms.

While coding might be your latest skill set, it is by no means an engineer’s only skillset. Remember that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your code is ugly, fancy, verbose or concise – the value you create matters. Strive to be an excellent communicator, a quality teammate, and an outstanding human. These attributes will guide your engineering efforts to ensure you bring value.

No matter where your career goes, if you focus on creating value for people, opportunities will never be in short supply. Desire for specific skills may rise and fall, but people will always look to those who can create value.

With that, I wish you the best of luck and may our journeys cross again,

Minh Pham

Minh Pham believes you should lead how you want to be led. This has been the guiding principle of his career since he started. As an Engineer, he always wished he had someone who would guide him – telling him what’s important, what he has to work on, and what he should ignore. Having gone through all that and then some, Minh now looks to be the positive influence he wishes he had.

As a manager, Minh’s greatest passion was teaching people the skills to create and drive the careers they want to have. Now as a career coach, he works to show people they have the power to build the life they want.

Minh believes anyone can do it – and he promises it doesn’t involve linked lists or graph traversals.