It’s been about six months now since my career to a sharp right turn. At the request of my kids, I left a decade of consulting for a role as a full-time work in as a database architect with a financial services company.
Since this change, I’ve spent a lot of time evaluating what I want from my career. What should I continue to do versus what I had to do to build a consulting brand. As a consultant, it is easy to see the value and necessity in blogging and presenting. The wider your technical base of knowledge and better your reputation , the more success you can expect. Blogging and presenting offer a great opportunity for both of those.
While this doesn’t change as a full-time employee, there is an additional consideration that comes up. What’s the value of deeper industry versus technical knowledge for your career going forward. The catch here being that when in financial services, there is a limited amount in which I can discuss industry knowledge and technology related to my projects. Adding to this, the job change was related to spending more time with the family, and time for blogging and presenting presents a trade-off in time.
As a result, I’ve taken some time to figure out if I should continue writing on this blog. And by writing, I mean a return to some real technical content, versus the rubber stamped Monday roll-ups. While going through this, I thought about whether I write for myself or for others. While there is merit in both, I think I’ve been successful in the past when I’ve focused on writing for myself.
This goes back to when I started writing and why I should continue. I started writing create a stake in the ground regarding thoughts, proofs, and ideas regarding technical topics and techniques. Building out fully formed ideas and validating my understanding on how different technology pieces operated. It’s easy to play around with technology, but its better to polish an idea to the point in which it can be considered done. Of course, the byproduct of writing for myself is the ability to share that content here.
I have a backlog of things both SQL Server and Azure that I’ve been playing with the last few months. It’s definitely time to start polishing and publishing those ideas.
Thanks for reading.
