The Big Tech Fish🐠in a Small Tech Pond. Here’s What I Learned

Photo by Craig Lovelidge on Unsplash

This article is about what success looks like for The Secret Developer and asks what success should be for the readers of this blog.

For some success is being a big fish in a small pond and ruling over a small pool of talent. For other people, success is having the maximum impact in a larger pool of talent.

Before we delve into The Secret Developer’s experience and see what we can learn we should agree on what big fish in a small pond is. Introduced in 1984 to describe the idea that individuals have higher self-esteem when they compare themselves with their peers in a less competent group.

The Big Fish In A Small Pond: Becoming A Local Hero

At the start of my tech career, I worked in a digital agency in Asia. I’ve never made a secret of my love for formal education and I felt this gave me some advantages while working over the colleagues who wouldn’t work on Wednesdays.

In such an environment delivery is very important. When people find out you can perform they are more than willing to use this ability. The result is The Secret Developer got the opportunity to touch on various parts of development they would not otherwise have had the opportunity.

Actually, I remember they kept getting me to check FE copy due to my English “Skills”. I guess some commenters will find this difficult to believe after reading the blog.

The lesson: Becoming a big fish in a small pond means you can be offered opportunities and boost your career. Your confidence builds and you can see the impact of your work (and also see your acceleration beyond your peers). You can not only become the “goto” software engineer in your current role but build a path to your next job.

The Small Fish In A Big Pond

When you move to a larger tech company you learn fast that they have a wider pool of talent to choose from. Initially, I thought the challenge was to get a position and dutifully studied all of the LeetCode-type questions that I felt might come up.

Yes. I became one of those developers that practiced interview questions and couldn’t “do” it in practice.

The opportunity was massive. The tech stack was professionally set up and three years later I still take ideas about how to set up a tech environment from their setup. Everyone in the company was good at their job and the coders were really good. For the first time, I met people who were not just better than me at the theoretical side of coding but also better than me at practical coding.

The result of this story is inevitable.

I got fired

That isn’t the point of this story though. I couldn’t make it in that particular company (their turnover is amazingly high as they fire quickly if you’re “not up for it”) but I learned more in a couple of months than I have in years after. The opportunity that being a small fish in a big pond gave me, the opportunity of working with great people lasted me years.

It also made me cry.

The lesson: Stretching yourself to make a leap into a big pond can be worth it. It’s not without risk but gives you the opportunity to make progress in your technical career. I do accept that some are afraid to take the risk though.

Conclusion

When I read this article I saw that there are advantages to being a Big Fish In A Small Pond AND there are advantages to being a Small Fish In A Big Pond.

That means you need to find out and understand what you need at the stage of your career. You’ll probably make the right choice for you and will be able to think of the best way to become the best version of yourself.

Like me. I’m the best The Secret Developer.