Category: IT Industry

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Seth’s Blog: Getting paid what you deserve

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

Getting paid what you deserve

You never do.

Instead, you get paid what other people think you’re worth. 

That’s an empathic flip that makes it all make sense.

Instead of feeling undervalued or disrespected, you can focus on creating a reputation and a work product that others believe is worth more.

Because people don’t make buying decisions based on what’s good for you–they act based on what they see, need and believe.

Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short. We don’t ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It’s a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.

This is another way to talk about marketing. And modern marketing is done with the people we seek to serve, not at them. It’s based on the idea that if the customer knew what you know, and believed what you believe, they’d want to work with you. On the principle that long-term trust is worth far more than any single transaction every could be.

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Ageism in Tech: The Silent Career Killer

Cascade Insights published an article Ageism in Tech: The Silent Career Killer  that everyone should read.

Beyond the self-interest in the topic,  it is interesting how they use LinkedIn as a data source, the limits and limits of other data sources. It is harder than it should be to investigate ageism in the technology sector and as job function within an industry.

The  conclusion, if you’re over 50  and working in a tech role,  finding that next position will be hard.

 

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Buzzword Importance

Why is it important to pay attention to industry buzzwords?  Often, they appear to simply describe existing concepts: “The Cloud” versus 1970’s TSO”, “Thin Client versus Web Application”, “Thick Client” versus Client Server Architecture”, or “Monitoring” versus “Observability”

After a superficial examination, a buzzword has the feel of “marketing spin” being applied to recapture drifted attention.  A simple application of the “New and Improved” marketing strategy.

Buzzwords do have an importance.  They are often signaling new approaches to implementing that technology.   Buzzwords can represent inflection points in a technology or industry.

A cloud system isn’t simply “someone else’s hardware, not on your premises”.  It is that, but it is implemented in a way where a lot of the responsibility and maintenance tasks have shifted from you to a third-party.

Observability isn’t monitoring.   A new buzzword in system operations architecture is “observability”.  Generally speaking, observability systems execute analytics in memory on incoming data streams that are stored for further analysis later.  Observability products are organized around the use cases of enabling data exploration, visualization and prediction.

Monitoring contrasted to observability, is oriented to alerting engineers that there is a current problem to be investigated.  Clearly, monitoring has aspects in common with observability. However, monitoring is not necessarily about the deep dive analysis of individual components.

Buzzwords are not to be initially written off.  Even though quoted out of context, you don’t want to be remembered like DEC’s Ken Olsen pronouncement of personal computers.  He is infamous as having said “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” in 1977.   Buzzwords need to be examined in depth to make sure that you’re not missing an important evolutionary shift in a critical component to your industry.