Courtesy of Slashdot Forum kscguru
Re: The same advice in every profession (Score:5, Insightful) by kscguru (551278) on Thursday June 13, 2013 @12:06PM (#43996953)
Same message but with a more positive spin. (And yes, I'm in that 200K+ category).
Make sure your code works right, on the first try. When you have to pick between a band-aid and a permanent fix, choose the permanent fix - and deliver it just as fast as the person proposing the band-aid - because you know the system well and can deliver a fix faster than the outsider who is trying to be conservative. Design defensively and plan for debugging - make sure that when something goes wrong, it's very obvious where the problem started. Don't fear bugs in your code - optimize the process of them being assigned back to you and fixed.
When you know in the back of your head that something you wrote isn't up to par, invest the work immediately. Don't wait for somebody to tell you to do it better. Be a generalist: if you are waiting for another team to deliver a feature, learn how to add it to their area, add it, and unblock yourself - what you are doing will get done 10x faster that way. (It's a lot more work for you, but see: $200K+).
Longer productive hours, need not be longer total hours. Don't goof off during the workday - no reading Slashdot [slashdot.org], no kitten videos on Youtube, etc, do all that after you leave work. Most people only work 2-4 productive hours a day, and have a raft of excuses (meetings, interruptions...). If what your company does cannot keep you interested in your job for 6+ hours a day, you aren't going to be a $200K+ developer working for them.
Invest in and maintain social relationships. That group you depend on for your new feature? It takes them 2 weeks to deliver when you are a person with a face they see every week, but 2 months to deliver when you are just an e-mail address. And talking to them frequently helps ensure that dependency works right when it arrives, instead of being a technically-correct-but-useless mess. You say it's your manager's job ... I say your manager would be delighted to see you take care of yourself so he can focus on the people less qualified than you who need his help to be productive.
Establish a reputation for reliability; when the company needs an issue fixed right and cannot afford to have an average person fix, re-fix, and re-fix again, be the person who gets called. This requires working in an area where some problems must be fixed "at any cost" (e.g. a $10M contract is on the line) - hence why most $200K+ developers are at big companies where mistakes in certain areas are disproportionately expensive.
This requires some mental jujitsu: you don't have enemies. Your job is to make them succeed just as much as your job is to succeed. When somebody tries to get in your way, don't focus on crushing them. Get around them, co-opt them, give them chances to succeed on your coattails (they may fail due to the incompetence you suspected, but at least you tried). This is a particularly hard skill, found only in CxOs and 95%+ salary range professionals. If you think "win-win" is just a figure of speech, then you aren't mentally ready to be in that crowd.
Your co-workers want problems solved, not drama. (They get plenty of drama from their SO's at home / their sport team / their WOW clan / Glee / Game of Thrones / whatever). Drama is a distraction from your job; see above point about fully utilizing your hours of work. This doesn't mean you cannot have drama - only that it cannot distract from your job.
More importantly, know which rules to bend / lie / cheat and which to respect. When a new feature shows up on your plate, dig deeply into it to figure out which parts matter and throw away the rest - and convince whomever asked for that feature that you are giving them everything they need. Know when to break a promise because the world has changed and what was important 6 months ago no longer matters - and take the initiative both in breaking the promise and (don't forget!) educating / convincing everybody else the new thing is more important. Which also implies that being a $200K+ developer means being able to convince everybody around you that your path is the right one to follow - which takes charisma and even more effort.
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