welcome

Thanks for purchasing Own Your Tech Career. This book is the evolution of several titles I’ve published independently over the years, and more importantly an outcome of the many career development workshops I’ve run over the past decade.

The goal of this book is not to make you a better programmer, or a better sysadmin, or a better data engineer; scores of books on those topics can help you there. Instead, the goal of this book is to fill in the gaps we all have between our “hard,” technical skills. This book is intended to help you be a better communicator, a better team member, a better overall professional, and maybe even a better team leader. It’s designed to help you in the job hunt—a process that necessarily begins long before you even know you want a new job. It’s intended to help you develop processes for “keeping up” in your field, and for analyzing the overall market to decide where to point your career, from a technology perspective.