So you as a software developer didn’t have any of the career-limiting habits from my previous post. Great! Congratulations! You’re totally good and on your way to career growth and unlimited success.

But wait, there’s more.

There are many other habits that can severely mitigate your career growth. So here are three more.

1. Lack of thorough testing

So you have completed a feature and think it’s good to go. Your code is committed. You are feeling good about meeting your deadline. The QA folks are unleashed.

Then it happens. Thirty minutes later a problem is found. Oops.

Many times, I have had developers come into my office, proclaiming that a feature or bug fix was completed, tested and ready do go. Then, when external validation started, something was found within just a few minutes.

Granted we all miss things on occasion. But, if this situation happens too many times in your code, you might be forming the habit of lack of thorough testing.

There are many reasons this occurs. Everything from time pressure to just plain laziness can contribute to this. Sometimes it’s a lack of environmental understanding or unclear requirements. Regardless of the origin, this habit will severely curtail future career opportunities.

You can overcome this by using TDD, BDD or similar methodologies where appropriate. Thinking “testing first” can help you identify and code for those issues up front. Even if your organization doesn’t make formal use of test-driven development methodologies, you should still spend some time thinking through all the ways your code could fail and make sure you handle or document each one. Making that a habit will reduce the chance of an embarrassing situation with your boss or QA just minutes after you pronounce something done.

2. Lack of communication

For an application that is larger than one person can manage, there is a natural migration to particular areas of expertise by the team members.  Alice knows the database interface, Bob knows the CSS and front end, Sarah knows the business logic, Arun knows the device drivers and so on.

We all build silos of information and expertise. This is good and helps us provide value to the organization.

The career limiting aspect occurs when we withhold knowledge (either implicitly or explicitly) that could help other team members. The lack of free flow of information across developers reduces productivity, increases the odds that defects are found late and reduces overall department effectiveness.

If you become known as the person who “knew that last week” but didn’t bother to share with the team, you will become a pariah. The team members who could have benefited from that information will grow to resent you and begin to exclude you, exacerbating the problem of team effectiveness.

It’s a good habit to err on the side of too much communication as opposed to not enough. In the end, you will make the team more productive and be seen as a better team player and better example. It’s a karma-enhancing habit if you believe in karma. 🙂

3. Being a “One trick Pony“

Software tools and technology move at a rapid pace. The hot technical tools and trends of a few years ago become the archeological artifacts of tomorrow.

Back in my high school days, I was pretty good at BASIC.

Guess what. Nobody cares.

If I still relied exclusively on my ability to do BASIC for employment, if I had made it my ‘one trick’, I would have starved long ago.

I moved on to other more mainstream technologies over time such as FORTRAN, C, Perl, Python, PHP and the like.

If you, as a developer, acquire the reputation of being able to only do one thing, it will, over time, severely limit your opportunities.

Think about how technology has changed in just the last 10 years, then extrapolate that out over the next 20 or 30 years. We all better be embracing change. In the future, the most important skill could be the ability to learn new things.

Over a 40 or 50 year, career time span it is imperative to stay relevant. The saying goes “Adapt or Die”.

If you become a ‘one trick pony’ you will be limited in the opportunities that are available to you.

Conclusion

Hopefully, none of these describe you. However, if you have any of these tendencies, now is the time to change your habits so you can reap the future benefits.