Why Just Doing Your Job Is Not Enough for a Developer Career

At the moment when the opportunity arose in my life to influence not only the hiring of employees, but also their salaries, life became a little more complicated.

It would seem that there are two developers in front of you. Both passed the interviews well, are ready to accept the offer and leave in a week... but there is only one position. And you, as a hiring manager, need to understand which of these Pokemon is your Pikachu and which is Magikarp.

And then I remember the time when I myself was "just a developer." I have always had the position: to ask for a raise, you need to do something. And, to be fair, wages have always increased. The only problem was that in the companies where I worked then, extra-tasks were rare, the focus was always on the main tasks, and you had the most time to work with technical debt at the end of the sprint.

At such moments, I asked myself the question: why would the manager raise my salary if I was just doing tasks? Yes, usually after that I decided that it was time to move on and changed employers. But I asked myself this question "why?" at every place of work.

And now, returning to our Pokemon. Who to choose? I wish I could hire both, but the team only needs one.

One candidate takes on extra work: helping communities, speaking at meetups, writing articles, contributing to open source, or maybe just trying to understand why the product doesn't work the way it should and suggesting improvements.

And the second candidate just works. His resume consists of the phrases "did tasks" and "fixed bugs." Simple encoder.

And here the main thesis appears: just working is not enough.

Especially today, when AI can cover most of our routine, hoping that an employer will be interested in "boring" candidates is dangerous.

Don't just be coders. Be engineers. Because today the winners are not those who write the code, but those who understand why it is needed.