Book Review: My Job Went to India (52 Ways to Save Your Job)

Adrian Citu

As it is said in the description of the book, this book is not about India, it’s about you.The main idea of this book is that you should see your carrier as a product. So, as with any product your carrier should have a life cycle:

  • choose your market
  • invest into your product (career)
  • execute
  • market your product

Well, I limit my review only to the advices that i find very useful.

  • Go to the niche technologies where the offshore companies don’t go.
  • Learn about the business domain of your company.
  • Invest into a “dying” technology because this technology will be replaced with a new one and it will need some peoples for the replacement.
  • Learn a new programming language totally different from the one you already know or practice. For example if you know Java, try to learn Lisp.
  • Don’t close yourself into a technology, operating system or position, try to be a generalist. If you are a manager try to program a little bit, if you are a Windows developer try the Linux tools, if you are a Java guy just try some .Net
  • Be a specialist, know the technology on which you are working inside out.
  • Don’t focus your career on a vendor specific product (don’t put your eggs in someone else’s basket)
  • Be the worst guy from the team 🙂 because you will have plenty of things to learn.
  • A good professional is passionate about his job. If you are not passionate it will be visible on the results f your work.
  • Be curious about your work environment. Try to learn new things about your IDE or your company business domain.
  • Understand the basics of the business.
  • The best way of learning something is by teaching to someone else (be a mentor).
  • Learn from the work of other developers, take a look to the sources of the open source projects (imitate, assimilate, innovate).
  • Automate your repetitively tasks.
  • Be proactive and try to “read the mind” of customers, managers. Get ideas from this persons to imprve your project.
  • Do the boring tasks perfectly. In this way the boring tasks will became less boring or even fun.
  • Learn to love maintenance work. You can transform this boring stuff into a fun task by doing it perfectly and by adding small enhancements.
  • There is no way to objectively measure the quality of a knowledge worker and there is no way to measure the quality of that work so, it is important what peoples think about you. Perception is the reality.
  • Communication, especially thought writing is the bottleneck thought all the ideas must pass. You are what you can explain.
  • Try to find the next bleeding edge technology. Even it’s a gambling game to find this technology, if you don’t play you will definettly loose.