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This only holds if you believe that deliberately making decisions that will cost the company more than they should is in your career interests.

As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business.

This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.




I am not sure how much it is in the interest of a developer to help the business to increase revenue or reduce cost. It's certainly good to come from a successful company but if you haven't worked on the latest cool tech you still don't look good. Even if that decision was 100% the right thing to do.

That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur".

The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.


Can't say I'm 100% sure either. Certainly having nice buzzwords in the CV can be beneficial, but I would guess would be more common in certain corporate structures/areas/sizes.

I have no experience in being labelled a 'dinosaur', but I'm sure there are jobs where being practical and generating actual results will matter. In ideal conditions, these are the jobs which are desirable to work at, so I don't like the idea of optimizing for hotness in itself (at least for my own career decisions).


Given that changing jobs every 1-2 years is common now, I don't think actually trying to act in the interest of the company is a good strategy. By the time anyone really notices that you have, you'll probably already have another job. So perhaps the cure for resume driven development is fixing the constant job hopping problem.


The most (only?) reliable way to get a raise in this industry is to change jobs (or make noise about doing so). Most young companies don't provide a path forward for employees, which is somewhat understandable, b/c most young companies don't have a clue what their own path forward is. But without companies making an effort at solving this, they have pretty much guaranteed they will have very poor retention.


Exactly. It's in my best interest to make sure the business is doing well and I don't do things that jeopardize that. And no, it doesn't have to come at the cost of taking a hit to my career either. This is not a fine line balance I'm talking about - doing things with the main goal of boosting my career will sooner or later ruin it.




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