IT Career Resilience: Mistakes and Growth

One of the things I’ve consistently observed is that we all start as developers, but somewhere along the way when we become team managers or people managers, our touch with technology gets lost. In my opinion, that is the biggest mistake a software developer can make.

Back in 1998, when I started my career as a web developer, the technology was in its infancy. Tools were scarce, the community wasn’t strong, and technologies were simpler. Since then, technologies have become complex, and the applicability of software to all areas of life is much broader than it was back then. Careers have also evolved – there were very few back then, and now there’s a much wider range. The field used to be inches deep, but now it’s miles deep.Back then, if you made a mistake, it only affected a minor subsystem of an isolated network. For me, a typical software unit coming from a web background was about one web page. A mistake you made mostly affected a web page or maybe the web page it linked to next, like hyperlinks. So, the potential fallout was minimal. But now, if you make a mistake in a script of your Node.js code in a common library used across many projects within your company, it will affect every one of them and a much larger user base. The mistakes people make now can potentially affect the whole world.

To read more of what Puneet Kumar, CTO of Dyninno India, thinks, click here