Furward Momentum (Introduction)
- Building Your Support Network and/or Team
- Mapping the Technology Landscape
- Learning the Fundamental Skills
- Choosing Your Path
- Starting and Growing an Open Source Project
- Building Your C.V.
- Getting Your First Tech Job
- Starting a Technology Company
- Career Growth and Paying It Forward
This will be approximately the shortest entry in the Furward Momentum series, but it’s the most critical one, because it will determine a lot of the decisions you make from here on.
Once you have formed your think tank, mapped out the possible technology careers, and learned the fundamental skills, it’s time to choose the path you will take for the rest of this adventure.
Although you may be overwhelmed by the possibilities, there are really only two paths before you:
Do you try to get a job working for an existing company, or start your own?
There are advantages and disadvantages to both paths.
If you have an exceptionally talented group of friends that work well together and have immense amounts of self-discipline, starting a company together might seem like the obvious choice.
On the other paw, the short-term goal of securing stable employment might come first for some or all of you. Businesses are risky; most fail within the first year, and getting started requires a lot of activation energy. But with that risk comes a lot of reward.
Take some time to decide what the best path is for each of you, and your collective.
Once you have decided your path, not much will change for the next two entries in this series. The steps will remain the same, but with different goals in mind.
For entrepreneurs, staring and growing an open source project will be more about prototyping, iterating, and evaluating market fit. For employees, it will be about developing real world experiences that you can draw from during job interviews (especially with the companies that develop the technologies you use in your projects).
Likewise, the focus of building your C.V. will differ slightly. For employees, the goal is pretty obvious: Getting your foot in the door for a job interview. For entrepreneurs, however, the skills used in building one’s C.V. is still important: You need to earn trust with your customers (especially if those customers are other businesses).
The two paths will not, truthfully, diverge until after that point. One entry in this series is dedicated to getting your first technology job. The other is dedicated to starting a technology company.
Choosing one path, ultimately, does not preclude the other. You may find value in both, even if you stick with one.
So let’s get started, shall we?