Marketing Yourself: When You Don’t Know Something, You Don’t Know It (And That’s OK)

Reading time: Approximately 4 minutes

One of the best ways to increase your income is to work on the income steams that you already own.

For me, my biggest income stream still happens to be my full time job as a software developer. I earn a modest salary which I’m fairly happy with, but recently though, I felt as if my job wasn’t challenging me in the right ways – to push me forward in the direction I want to take with my work.

When you go into work day in and day out doing the same thing it’s a little hard for it not to feel like drudgery at times. I thought I’d take advantage of this “feeling like I’d hit a brick wall” phase in the position I was in. I knew it was time to shake things up a bit.

Weighing The Risks

Shaking things up with your job position isn’t without risks, but the biggest risk to me in a technical position is that my skills aren’t varied enough staying in one job for an extended period of time.

That, and it’s probably dangerous for my co-workers if I’m surrounded by grey fabric walls bored out of my skull for 8 hours straight everyday.

I decided at the turn of the new year to change jobs. And with it came a raise and some really exciting work. I’m loving my new position and it’s filled me with the energy I needed to follow my other passion of building up my side business’ as well.

An Interesting Discussion

My new boss and I were chatting and getting to know each other one morning (it’s a small company) and he was telling me how he interviewed another guy for one of the positions.

Similar level of skill as myself, similar amount of experience, and similar professional background. The one difference was, as he put it, “he just knew it all”.

Everything they discussed about this project he was being hired for was “not a problem” or “I’ve had heaps of experience with that”. To my trained, more experience boss who was doing the hiring, it was pretty obvious that he didn’t. The interview was all but over in 15 minutes with a friendly “we’ll be in touch”.

I’m pretty sure his resume was filed under ‘R’ for “arrivederci”.

My Interview

Contrast this with my interview – while I’m still a cocky little bugger, I know my limits. My recent ventures online have illustrated that to me quite well thank you very much.

I spent probably half the time saying “No, I don’t know that technology, but learning is half the fun.” To my surprise, he agreed and we spent most of the time bonding and sharing a laugh.

The Take Home Lesson

The take home lesson for programmers and any other job seeker out there: If you don’t know it – admit it. It’s a thin veil and your future boss knows when you’re bluffing.

When you don’t know something, you don’t know it. But that’s okay as well.

For technical people at least, your goal should be to demonstrate that you have the core skills, so your prospective employer knows that when it comes to technical road blocks (of which there will be many, trust me) you will know how to figure them out. That is more important that “knowing” the ins and outs of the syntax of the latest tech programming craze any day.

I can’t remember who it was (pretty sure it was one of my engineering lecturers) that said, “Engineering is not really about knowing things – it’s about knowing how to find things.

Parting Advice

The conversation finished up with this parting wisdom which I’ve paraphrased:

Fulltime positions are a two way street – it’s the company’s responsibility to make sure you’re constantly challenged and not bored in your job. If I hired the guy that knew everything (even though I doubt he does) he’s not going to be challenged enough to stick around.

Good advice.