10 ways to thrive as an egotistical developer
Tags: career, motivation
Published: 2022-03-02 14:18:43

---
title: 10 ways to thrive as an egotistical developer
published: true
date: 2022-02-10 12:16:19 UTC
tags: career,motivation, 
canonical_url: https://www.glennstovall.com/10-ways-to-succeed-as-an-egotistical-developer/
---

You don't want to find the company where you're a good fit, you need to find the job that's a good fit _for you._ Here are ten tips to help you land your next gig:

## 1. Consider job titles

Only accept titles of 'senior' or higher. It doesn't matter if you graduated from codingbootcamp.biz six months ago. Some people get the same one year of experience ten times!

## 2. Pick the right technologies

Stick to cutting-edge technologies. Any framework more than thirty days old is legacy and therefore bad. For example, Ruby on Rails is dead so avoid sad sack companies such as  Bloomberg, Soundcloud, Zendesk, Basecamp, Shopify, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, GitHub, or Urban Dictionary.

## 3. Work on the best projects

Only work on projects you want to work on. Remember that doing work that isn't your favorite is a one-way path to burnout city!😫 Staying in your comfort zone hides your weaknesses and protects your personal brand.

## 4. Show initiative

Apply to jobs with unsolicited feedback and redesigns of their website. What you lack in context and restraints they had when working on it, you make up for in CSS animations you copy/pasted from Codepen that add pizazz.

## 5. Avoid coding puzzles

Click that "leave meeting" button when they ask you to code _anything_. If they want to judge your quality, they can read all of your blogs, review your sample projects from coding school, or take another gander at your resume. You even rated your skills on a 10 scale to make it easy to scan! Companies that don't read every piece of content by every applicant clearly have an understaffed recruiting department, and is that the kind of place you want to work?

## 6. Build a personal brand

Don't practice coding puzzles. You know what you know, you shouldn't have to "prepare" for an interview. Instead, tweet threads about how all those graph riddles aren't an accurate metric for evaluating you. You build a brand by sharing, not learning. All that engagement might get you leads! Besides, you wouldn't have dropped out of college if you wanted to study for quizzes.

## 7. Learn in public

After leaving a company, write a think piece explaining how you left a $100 billion company after five months because "there was nothing to learn there." Use that newfound free time to establish expertise by writing think pieces on how _other_ people should be interviewing (#branding!). The comments Hacker News will surely validate your decision to walk away from a remote job with a six-figure salary.

## 8. Practice self-care

Quit jobs where they expect you to receive feedback. You're too stoic to be around that kind of negativity. Be sure to quit via text so you can post screenshots on /r/antiwork.

## 9. Stay up to date

Stay current via extreme onlineness. Follow people who work 45 minutes per week (never on Fridays!)  and make $245,000/year (plus benefits!) Keep up with people on round 13 of their interview process and can no longer even. Reflect on how everyone in the tech industry is so great (source: YouTube) and so horrible(source: Twitter) in parallel. Reflect on why you aren't doing as good as everyone else seems to be, if things will ever get better, or if you'll ever stop feeling like an impostor. Wonder if making career decisions attempting to make your reality match the filtered artifice you see online was maybe not be the correct tactic.

## 10. Start a Substack

Newsletters are the new self-actualization.