Rules for a great career (even if it is accidental) Part 2 of 3 – Give stuff away

This is the second in a series of three posts about things that have helped me develop and sustain a career I love.  The first post is about how to stay in close touch with people with whom you have worked.  The second post is about how to give away free work whenever you can.  The third is about how to invest significant efforts in helping previous employers, people who can never help you, and “the least of these.”

A few days ago I wrote a post about some of the reasons I have a career for which I am extremely grateful.  I think I have a handle on a couple of the things that have helped me move forward in my career.  I wrote about the importance of contact with colleagues from companies or division where you worked previously.  That has been an immense help in the development of my career, but there is another “thing” I did that I believe was just as instrumental.  I do not know whether to call that “thing” a behavior, a tool, or something else. The best way to describe that thing is “giving stuff away.”

What does that mean–giving stguff away?  It means exactly what it says.  About fifteen years ago, I was working for at the Oregon division of a large, multi-national organization and one of our vendors asked if I was willing to help a large government agency solve a difficult problem related to protecting the environment by measuring the amount of particles and the turbidity of water in streams in the wild.  I jokingly told the vendor I was a Republican and really hated clean water, but it was a worthy effort and I signed up.  I wrote a sophisticated program for free with the idea that it would be a help. The skills I learned in the development of the software to perform those measurements allowed me to add some things to my resume that won me my next job at a much higher salary in North Carolina.

I earned nothing for the water quality work, but the skills I learned won me the new job and made me a lot more money than I could have made by my paid work experience alone.  When I got to North Carolina, I made a new friend at my church who was making a career change from the clergy by returning to college to earn a degree in Civil Engineering.  On his way to a Bachelors degree, he decided it might be a good idea to go on to a graduate degree.  He worked with a professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering department to perform water measurement work as undergraduate research.

I wanted to help him so I volunteered to write a program to measure water height in streams, lakes, and other water bodies in very remote locations.  As a result of that work which I continue to do at the writing of this post, I developed skills with a set of libraries that allowed me to win a position that paid significantly more than the job that brought me to North Carolina.  All of this taught me the lesson that anything that I do for free in the support of a noble cause, especially respect to the work associated with my career, helped my career in unexpected ways. So the second set of rules is just one rule:  Give your work away in the support of big and small, personal causes.  It helps greatly with respect to career advancement and is very gratifying.

In a corollary phenomenon, part of the reason I got the two jobs described above is that, before I went to work for them, I got them talking about some of their most difficult problems.  Then I spent a few evenings and weekends to write code that I could give to them for free that solved their problems or at least showed their problems could be solved.  When these future employers saw what I could do for them for free, they were eager to get me on board as an employee, both of them for a greater salary than they originally wanted to pay.  Actually, they were happy to pay the higher salary when they hired me because of the free work performed for them.  Of course, I had to perform after I got there, but the expectations of success were already set and I had excellent stays at both jobs.