5 Ways to Guarantee Your Failure as a Web Professional
Pitfalls to avoid for success in your web professional journey.
This article is geared toward anyone looking to implode under the crushing weight of unsustainable business practices, unreasonable client expectations, long hours for little pay, and a general sense of bewilderment as you ponder what went wrong.
While that may not be you today, you may identify with one or more of these afflictions. Are you already recalling your worst clients and the headaches they have caused? Here are some of the ways that you can hurt yourself as a web professional.
1. Be a Jack of all trades
It seems the conventional wisdom lies in how much you know rather than how well you know it. I see people who have skill sets that take up a lot of space on a resume. Admirable? I suppose so. Does it make you more valuable to a potential client? Absolutely not.
Think about it: has a client ever hired you just because you knew 8 programming languages and 10 web development frameworks? They hired you to work on a specific project that requires a specific skill set, and chances are you have represented yourself as an expert who is the best fit for that project.
If you can’t settle on a particular tool set, you won’t be able to gain that competitive edge we all desperately need to be successful. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but if you really think about it, no successful development company becomes so merely based on the size of their tool set. They become experts in a particular skill set, and they have value because they leverage their knowledge and find their competitive edge in that context. You can specialize in so many things; find a niche that works for you, and focus on that.
2. Take on every project that comes along
Getting work is great, isn’t it? As young, nubile professionals, there is a tendency to covet every job we get; billable time is billable time, right?
Inevitably, though, what happens as the workload increases? We gravitate towards certain types of clients that fit our skill set better or people that we can tell understand our role as the experts versus “order-takers”.