Are you a developer who can’t talk publicly about what you work on?
Maybe you work under an NDA. Maybe you have a security clearance. Maybe your company simply doesn’t want its technology discussed publicly.
That’s pretty common, and it’s a fair position from the company’s standpoint.
And since I’ve been telling you to make your experience more visible, you might be thinking: “Great, Tony. How exactly am I supposed to do that?”
I’ve heard that from quite a few of you lately.
You don’t need to tell me what you’re building
Most of the interesting stuff probably isn’t the product itself anyway.
Tell me about the decisions.
I recently had a developer tell me they built out a nationwide, citizen-facing solution. I don’t need to know what it is, who it’s for, or what it does.
Instantly I’m thinking: how did you handle scale? Concurrency? What broke when testing it? How do you handle failovers?
So many things I’d want to know as a developer, and more importantly as a hiring manager with a similar problem.
Every project is full of things that aren’t the project
- You had two ways to solve a problem. Why did you choose one?
- You considered microservices and decided a monolith was enough. Why?
- You had to trade performance for maintainability.
- You inherited a system with a limitation you couldn’t change, so you had to design around it.
- You chose a boring technology instead of the shiny new one because it was the right decision for the business.
None of that requires telling me:
- Who your client is
- What the product does
- What proprietary technology you’re using
- Anything remotely classified
You can even change the details of the scenario when necessary, because what you’re demonstrating isn’t the secret project.
It’s how you think.
That’s what another senior developer recognizes. That’s what an architect recognizes. That’s what an engineering manager wants to see.
So if “I can’t talk about my work” has kept you from sharing what you know: don’t talk about the work.
Talk about the decisions the work taught you how to make.