Asklemmy

I'm almost wondering if I wrote this because it sounds a lot like me. I made a pitch for doing light (to us) coding for several other people last week. I also talked about automation. It's something I really want to do because I like working on many small projects (I literally said I have at least 100 repos on gitlab) rather than monolithic ones. We'll see if they bite. They are going to get back to me tomorrow.

Here's my advice. Keep doing what you are doing. Work on small projects. But for employment, most people want specialists. They aren't going to take you on for one small project for you to just move to something else. Or let you hop between other things within their organization unproven. People are afraid of generalists because there is no way to know if you are just ok at one thing or generally helpful at many things. Why should they take your word for it? Specialization is how they can tell if you are excellent.

You need to pick one thing and get VERY good at it. Better than the average specialist. This doesn't need to be programming, in fact it is probably easier if it isn't. I'm a teacher. By becoming a good specialist at something, in my case teaching, you show you are capable of being great at at least one thing, and it gives you a broad understanding of the organization and then you can make a pitch.

A pitch is something you need to figure out for yourself. You need to convince them your value is addressing the needs of other specialists. Very specifically. You need to be conversational in all of their projects and this takes a lot of people skills.

TLDR: Pick a singular career to support yourself first. If you want your job to be to dabble, be excellent at your job, then prove your real talent is horizontal not vertical