My #1 Career Mistake

My number 1 career mistake in IT was not looking at the way things were going and changing my skill set to match. I was working with PHP, and the environment went Perl::Mason. I was a Redhat admin, and they were going Debian. The guy who was the big Novell fan got kicked out in favor of Windows AD. I got laid off six months after releasing a BIG company-wide application in PHP.

My bit of unsolicited advice for this week: If your boss tells you, “We’re going to standardize on X” — either learn X and implement it, or find a new job. Don’t run your own stealth campaign to proliferate your favorite technology. You will get found out, and your head will be first on the chopping block when they’re looking for people to get rid of.

No, I didn’t lose my job now, I learned this lesson about five years ago — but some of the people at A&M are making this exact mistake. Good thing for them that we work for a state institution and they can’t get fired, ‘eh?