Should I be a designer or a developer or .... ?
Tags: beginners, career
Published: 2021-12-28 13:51:03

Whether to be a designer or a frontend developer or a cybersecurity expert or a blockchain developer or something else? There are so many domains within tech and this is such a difficult choice. Just like a grand buffet. I have gone through this dilemma myself and discovered a few things the hard way.

First and foremost, **it's your choice to make**. Stop asking people what would be the most optimal choice as per the market. Now, you'll say- but how do I choose the best option? There is no single method to figure this out. You need to fit your persona in what you want to do. 

What follows is a way that worked for me, may not work for everyone. This is not a sureshot way, but it helped me and a lot of people I know in figuring out what they wanna do. There will always be a road that we took and [another road not taken](https://poetryace.com/the-road-not-taken).

**Evaluate yourself.** Start with a few why questions and then move to a bunch of what questions. These questions would help you narrow down this infinite list to a few probables.
_For example- Why do you want to be in tech? What are your strongest traits? What are the weakest ones? What is important to you? That's not all, you can think of even more questions to ask to yourself. ([SWOT](https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-to-complete-a-personal-swot-analysis-2f8769aebd5e) is a good framework for this, but focus on SW, and not that much on OT for now.)_

**Try broadly understanding** all the domains that you can think of at first. You'll find a few of them interesting and others not. Then, dive a bit deeper into the things that you thought are interesting, try understanding what kinds of problems people are solving with it or any adjacent areas or sub-domains.
_For example- If you're interested in machine learning, you can look at problems like risk assessment, fraud detection, recommendation engines etc or sub-domains like computer vision or predictive modeling. (This is where O of the SWOT framework kick in)_

**Combine your self-evaluation and domain understanding** to further narrow down this list basis whatever parameters you want. Find out what works for you, and what doesn't. You can use anything- how good it makes you feel, how well does it pay, does it fit in with my strengths, does it give me learning opportunities and whatnot (You can now complete the SWOT analysis you made for yourself).

**Start the journey.** Understand what is expected from a typical entry-level job in your chosen domain. You can use the Internet to understand this or you can talk to people (but don't ask for a roadmap) or even better, you can do both. Prepare yourself. Learning by doing is what I'd recommend.
_For example- Continuing with the above ML example, find datasets and slice and dice through them. Go to websites hosting ML problem statements._

**Don't wait to be perfect.** Start looking for internships or jobs as soon as you feel you know a few things that you can work with. Keep learning on the job. You won't be perfect at day 1 or at day 365. It's a long-term game.

**Grit** is the only thing you need to keep doing better. You'll be a bit better every passing day and over a sufficiently long time, the incremental gains would accumulate to a lot. Just remember this- even a 1% improvement every day translates to an exponential change.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wv213ttrx1j97oeeuqle.png)