Work a side hustle for your, and your employer’s benefit

One of the first things I get excited about when reading CVs is when someone has persued contract work outside of usual salaried employment. Whether this is full time or even part time, working contracts can give you an invaluable perspective on software development. In particular, when you are taking on the whole contract by yourself, very quickly you will have to up-skill in all areas of software development, time management and stakeholder interaction and accelerate your career forward.

Software development in medium to large scale businesses requires a significant number of actors in addition to just the people who are writing code. For anyone from a small start-up or even self-employed background this can be quite jarring. These two worlds could be separated by people who are specialists in specific areas and generalists who can cover lots of topics. However, I believe there is an emerging need for generalists across both areas.

It’s a fairly common pattern in scrum that these actors are still bundled together into small, multi-functional and cross-disciplinary delivery teams who strive together towards a shared goal. Specialists are valued contributors here, who have a deep technical or business knowledge. These specialists become critical to the success of the team, which given the 2-pizza rule usually means you’ve created a team made exclusively of single points of failure.

Generalists fill the gaps here, they may not be experts in that specific technology or area of the business, but they adapt quickly and can contribute value in multiple areas of the scrum team. These people ready themselves quickly to support when a specialist is unavailable or over capacity. True generalists don’t limit themselves to one area either, whether this be writing code, infrastructure management, business analysis, design and prototyping, they’ll wear whichever hat helps get the job done.

Generalists, unfortunately for a hiring manager or head of development, very quickly become promoted beyond practical contributions. As they have built skills in lots of areas and have a culture of supporting colleagues they become key candidates for management. If your career goals are looking at those lofty Head of or CTO roles, becoming a generalist will be fairly instrumental in your success, and if nothing else will certainly expedite your trajectory.

Contracting will give you the opportunity to expand your skillset quickly by getting you lots of small chunks of experience in a variety of different technologies. Seeking out contracts that are on the edge of your experience will force you to adapt quickly and learn a new code base, even if not a new library or framework. Critically, you’ll likely be paid per hour or per day for these things, and employers will want to be seeing value delivered from day one, so understanding and learning requirements of a new business or domain will become a core attribute of your capabilities.

But what about the benefits to my employer? Well, all that time you’re working, you’re learning. It might not be immediately applicable to your day-to-day, but inevitably one day something you learned while building software in your own time will come back around and help in your work. Investing in yourself will always pay back to your employer.

So stop reading this and go get on your hustle!