Hey! This is a daily overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now today I want to
talk about branding yourself as a software developer.
Okay, so today I want to talk just a little bit about personal branding, and I
know it's a bit of a corny subject, but let's talk about it anyway, because I
think it's very important for software developers, or people of any profession.
Right, we always have to be thinking how do we differentiate ourselves from
everybody else? It's something I have to think about personally as a professional.
It's something I have to think about overpass as a company. How do we stand
out from everybody else, because there's so much competition and there's fewer
jobs all the time, it's constantly, it's like, it's not sustainable right?
We have automation taking away jobs and we have more population coming in taking
away jobs, so it's getting very hard to stay employed. One of the things you
have to do, if you want to be paid anything decent, is to brand yourself. So
like, my thinking about this changed about 17 or 18 years ago. I first read an
article by Tom Peters on the Fast Company website. It was called " A Brand
Called You " and I'll include a link in the description. Basically it was
about how you should consider yourself to be the CEO of Me Inc. See I told you
it was corny, right, but it made a lot of sense. It said one of the things with a
with a future coming, and more jobs being shipped overseas, with job markets
shrinking all the time, you have to find ways to differentiate yourself from
everybody else, especially, yes and I think it really applied in software
development. See my problem was a lot of the work I had done prior to this, like
technology work, was in investment bank so it was on an intranet site someplace.
I couldn't share it with anybody, they never heard of it, so I just had to
describe it, oh I worked on a compensation system, I worked on this system,
I worked on that, so I started writing a blog
and I every time I come across a technical problem, I could blog
about it I could blog my thoughts about certain technologies, what I was excited
about, what I wasn't excited about and I tell you what, I got teased about this a
little bit from people who found out about it. Oh Eric and his
blog right, but it was what it was. I found that when I on my CV I
didn't just have my job experience and whatever hobbies and everything. I could
also point to different articles that I had written. I
could talk to blogpost. I could do all that kind of stuff and most of the times
when I went for an interview when we talk about these kind of things my ideas
were already solidified because I was thinking about that. I would take on jobs
that were interesting because I thought that would be better from a branding
point of view than they were from a paper view because always thinking how
do you market yourself going forward and as a contractor marketing yourself is
one of the most important things you could do but as an employee it's
important also. I am always surprised whenever I look at CVS or I'm hiring
somebody or for overpass or even when I have to interview people on when I was
working on investment banks, I was always surprised how many people didn't have a
,didn't have articles they could point to. They didn't have a YouTube
channel. In this day and age, right, you know they don't even have a social media
presence. I'm still surprised how few people are on YouTube, right,
considering every time you discover a new problem or whatever a new solution
to a problem, you can share that with other people like this as a as your
responsibility, but most of the time is that that initial I feel really
embarrassed doing this like I did at the beginning. You just have to get over that
and do it, so it's something I want you guys to think about if you're a software
developer. Think about the personal brand. If you're gonna do your own company one
day it will help in that matter. Can you think about how do I want
everything to look? How do I want everything to be positioned? And also
think about yourself how do you present yourself when you go to a new employer,
to a new prospect, whatever you're thinking, what do you have behind you. If
someone were to google you, what would they find. It's easier than ever before
to do it now, and as a software developer, I think you should have some apps on the
app market. Stuff that you could point to or maybe a github project that you
contribute to. I think all this stuff is very very important now and I think it's
something that you know as corny as it is, brand you kind of stuff looks. I think
it's really important. So let me know if you agree with me disagree with me.
Like I said, a lot of people's like Oh Eric and is blog or whatever, you just
have to put up with that kind of stuff and that that's what makes it hard. It
makes it hard is the people who just want to naysay it and
everything like that. So okay, let me know what you think. Do you agree or disagree?
And that is it for today. I'll talk to you tomorrow.