I decided to buy The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler based on the glowing reviews on Amazon.com and from seeing it on several other people’s must read lists.
The author starts the book explaining his reasons for writing it which explains its original title(My Job Went to India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book)) and the reasons why it was changed.
Although the book is geared towards programmers, I think many professions could benefit from the career advice it contains. Asking us to view ourselves and our skills as a business product, the author guides us through the corresponding steps to design, build, market and maintain our software careers. Much emphasis is placed on understanding the business domain and cultivating people skills, two areas often overshadowed by the quest for technical skill. Along the way, the book gently reminds us that much of the fun and challenge that attracted us to programming can be found in all our tasks, if we are willing to evaluate the way we view our work.
The author makes use of a series of analogies with his own career as a musician which in an interesting ways to explain things as like a musician, a programmer can never stop learning and practicing.
The book contains 53 short chapters about various career topics. Some of my favorites are:
From Choosing Your Market: “Coding Don’t Cut It Anymore” – the author says you should learn the business domain of your product, which is absolutely essential to not only survive in IT but to become more than just another developer. I also liked “Be a Generalist” and “Be a Specialist” in this section. Why both? Because you need to know how things work outside your (small) job label to be really effective. And, you need to know specialized content to be great at a job.
In the Marketing section, there’s a lesson called “Build Your Brand,” where the author describes how to think about your brand (your name) and which types of projects to affiliate yourself with. There is also a lesson called “Let Your Voice Be Heard”, which is a reminder to keep your blog updated as a way of marketing yourself.
Also in the Marketing section, a lesson called “Release Your Code” described a concept called “Refactotum”. I had never heard of this before, but it is a good way to get your feet wet on an open source project. It involves finding an open source project and run the unit test through a code coverage analyzer to find areas that are not covered by unit tests. Write tests for that part of the system, and look for ways to refactor that code to make it more testable.
In the Maintaining section, the lesson I liked best is “Avoid Waterfall Career Planning.” As the author says, your career is the most complex project you’ll ever have to manage. Careers are not linear. If you look at successful people, they took advantage of opportunities. (This is why I hate the interview question, “Where do you want to be in 5 years?”)
I’m of mixed minds about this book. On one hand, it’s well written, easily digested, and offers practical advice for anyone who is feeling maybe a bit stagnated in their software career. On the other hand, most of the advice given seems intuitively obvious to anyone who has worked more than a couple of years in IT. Though it does have some helpful tips, it reads too much like an autobiography, and the author’s constant analogies to his musical background are distracting and really do not contribute much to the theme of the book. If you’re someone looking to climb the corporate ladder, you’re better off getting a book on business or management. If you’re truly passionate about programming and technology, get a more technical book instead.
I believe that everyone experiences peaks and valleys of job satisfaction throughout their career. This is a good book to read during the valleys. It really does makes you rethink your career and look at things from a different perspective. I found myself energized and enjoying my job again after reading this book.
What I liked about this book:
- The chapters are short and to the point, and can be easily read in a few minutes.
- The book is well written and easy to read and understand.
- It makes you rethink your career and (hopefully) understand what you like about your job.
What I did not like about this book:
- Too many stories about his career as a musician. This added nothing to the book and violated the “No Fluff Just Stuff” principle.
- Many of the lessons in the book are common sense items that most of us have already experienced.
