Career track in IT

Source: King's Bounty

Hi, Habr!

In the previous article we dealt with who the team leader is, why he is needed and what skills he should possess. The question remains how to grow to this position. In this article we will go further and analyze what kind of development opportunities do developers have.
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Let's start with the mysterious concept of "career track".

Career track

On request “career track” in Google and Yandex, you can find, perhaps, pictures with escalators. We'll have to fill this gap. Let's start with the definition. Career track (or career path) is a sequence of stages of professional development of a specialist.

This term in relation to a specific person can mean both vertical advancement on a career ladder and horizontal career - change of a field of activity or industry.

As applied to an organization, the term “career track” means an employee promotion plan — from an intern to a department head. For each position in such a plan, specific criteria are established that the candidate must meet: work experience, skills, quantitative and qualitative indicators. This is an extremely useful tool, as an employee can plan his growth in the company and assess the prospects for promotion.

Career track reminds a good game in the genre of RPG - it is like a tree of character skills. The player determines who he wants to become and develops the necessary abilities.

Next, we will look at a generalized track for an IT specialist, since the development paths in different companies in the industry are generally similar.

Intern

The career of most developers begins with an internship position. This happens at the 2-3 year of the institute, when all more or less thinking about the future, students begin to walk some "optional" couples in order to work somewhere. Today, a university graduate who has not worked anywhere yet looks, to put it mildly, strange.

The trainee is required to understand the basics of development in a specific programming language, knowledge of basic algorithms and a great desire to learn. For the trainee's professional growth, it is very important that the curator is assigned to him from the first day of his work. Let us return to our comparison with a computer game: the player passes the first levels with the full support of the game itself, but as it advances, it becomes less and less. Thus, the task of the curator - to interest the ward learning process and gradually increase the load.

Developer

This is already a more or less autonomous employee who can solve problems of low and medium complexity himself, draws up the code correctly, knows how to work in the industrial process.

The trainee in order to become a developer usually needs 1-2 years of hard work with a good curator. The main skills that need to be developed at this time: the ability to work in a team, responsibility, accuracy and, of course, knowledge of the language and technology that are used in the company.

Lead Developer

At this stage of his career, a person can independently solve a problem of any level of complexity, if it relates to writing code. He absolutely does not need to be able to design the architecture of complex applications, his main task is to choose the right tools in the local area and write code that works and which will then actually support.

Such people today are worth their weight in gold. The reason is the lack of people in the industry as a whole. Because of this, specialists often move up the career ladder faster than they grow professionally. The result of this advancement was a whole layer of developers who consider themselves to be leading, but who do not possess the necessary competencies.

From developer to lead at least 3 years of active work. It is necessary to gain experience on different projects with different tasks, to build up your own set of tools. Key areas of growth: teamwork and the solution of complex problems in various ways.

At this stage of development, the role of the curator is still very important, so it is better to choose companies with strong specialists. How to define such a company? Look at the one who interviewed you. Think a few times before accepting an offer if the level of your future manager seemed to be not high enough.

Timlid

We described this option of professional development in detail in the previous article. In short, a team leader is a technical producer of a project who is responsible for collecting business requirements, transforming them into tasks for developers, estimating deadlines, planning releases and managing quality from a technical point of view. In addition, this is the real informal leader of the team who can take on some managerial functions: motivation, development of employees.

It will take the lead developer about 2 years to become a good team leader. At this time, you need to not only write code well, but also acquire managerial skills. Learn to plan your time, ask for a trainee mentor (by this time you will already have all the necessary technical knowledge), study the work of a manager, go to meetings, watch, listen, draw conclusions.

Architect

Those leading developers who for some reason do not have a career with a bias in management can choose a different, more technical branch of their career. An architect is, as a rule, a highly qualified specialist working on several projects at once. He is engaged in designing complex integrated projects, planning work under high loads, scaling and refactoring. An architect, unlike a tmlid, is more powerful in building complex software products and less in management, which he does not do.

Architect is an extremely rare profession. Our partners for 11 years of experience in IT in the game-industry, integration and digital, saw 5 alive people who could be called architects. As a rule, these were people from high load or from enterprise development. And they had a beard with gleams of gray hair.

Timlid in the future can become a manager or even start his own project. An architect usually develops only in professional terms. It is a pleasure for such people to improve their skills and make more and more complex projects, more and more elegantly.

Summary

The career of a developer is endless, even if you think that you have reached the ceiling, there is always the possibility of professional growth. The main idea of ​​this article is that to go to each new level requires several years of hard work and learning from your mistakes.

We sincerely believe that the IT industry will stabilize soon, and upstarts about to become team leaders in 1-2 years will not pass the interview to the vast majority of companies. To do this, first of all, increase the literacy of employers. This is facilitated by the various standards that are being developed, for example, by AP KIT ( beskov , our teacher of the Timlid course, participates in their creation).

Editorial notes

Thanks semmaxim for a hint about the source of the image.
Thanks to DezmASter for the hint about the link to the previous article.