What Is This Blog All About, Anyway?

It's become somewhat apparent to me that many software engineers keep blogs going about the interesting and informative topics, ideas, technologies, platforms, and general day-to-day that radiates through their lives. There's all kinds of amazing blogs out there teaching the cutting edge, or extrapolating on dealing with legacy nightmares, or doing agile development, and a plethora of other developer related topics that run the gamut. One of the things that I don't see as much of, though - money.

Almost all of the software engineers/programmers I know write software for the love of writing software. We spend time at home reading about technology, experimenting with technology, and in general, just being technologically engaged people. Because of this, another trend I've noticed is that most of the programmers I know don't really treat their skill set as a business model.  I'm sure there's other fields where people love what they do but don't spend all day thinking in business terms - but software engineering is the one I'm personally closest to.  Sure, we all have resumes and watch for the best jobs out there. But something that I see happening less often is taking responsibility for professional growth without just job jumping. I'm guilty of job jumping on occasion too - but we'll get to that in some other post.  A range of topics come to mind, and this list is by no means exhaustive:

• Strategies for asking for a raise (especially when you're certain you deserve it)
• Strategies for earning a promotion
• Professional networking
• And Professional groups / organizations
• Having a professional growth plan
• What is a key performance indicator (KPI) and why does it matter for your salary?  More specifically, how to prove that you need to have some impact on at least one KPI? And, that you need to be recognized when that KPI is impacted positively.
• Engineering advocacy in product ownership
• Continuous improvement where it counts (how to talk ROI with your boss)
• This relates to KPI, but KPI is what you should measure if you can as a part of the business unit. Talking ROI is about how to prove your value. Sometimes it's difficult to use business KPI to prove ROI - since ROI can be qualitative in nature, where KPI is almost always able end up on a graph. And, sometimes it's really hard to prove that positive changes in KPI are directly because of something you did.
• Why you might be a great engineer (or other professional) but a terrible boss (don't get insulted, it happens to most engineers/professionals I know)
• Entrepreneurial development mindset
• Side Projects

I don't know if anyone will end up reading this, but I hope that some of what I write ends up informative and useful to others who get a little bit lost in the "politics of money" surrounding their jobs. Obviously, the first and most important thing is love of the game. But, once you love the game - it's also important to get paid appropriately for it.