What does it mean to think money? September 11, 2008
Posted by hardly Uncategorized
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Laurie R over at Punk Rock HR made a great post on Wednesday, McKinsey & Company: Thanks But I’m Good.
In this post, she talks about having received a study from McKinsey & Co about how the nature of IT Spending will shift from strict cost-cutting to 'investing' to get a much larger return. This is nothing new, mind you, as some companies have been doing this for years. Others, well, not so much. You know who you are.
For all you out there in the software dev, systems dev, systems engineering worlds (there are probably more worlds out there, you'll just have to live with the injustice of my momentarily bad memory), this is an import issue to consider in your near-term career, and in how you position yourself for the future.
I harp on this a lot, and this study confirms why: Everyone needs to validate their worth to the company if they want to get hired. Right now, very few Software-Development types do this. And, it's a key differentiator.
"I see here that while at your last role as a Web Developer that you deployed some SEO strategies at your company's website. How much of a financial impact do these changes make?"
"You spearheaded the initiative to deploy Blackberrys to the Sales team, the Consulting Org, and all Product Marketers. Sounds like there were some technical challenges there, and you overcame them. How much did revenue go up after the full deployment? Did you see an increase in deal velocity through the pipeline? How much?"
"Your current employer adopted Ruby on Rails, and it says here that you were on the team that was the guinea pig. How long was it before you were comfortable in this new dev environment? How long did it take everyone to get up to speed? Did your release cycle time speed up, and how did it compare against the other teams that were the comparison cases?"
Not many hiring managers I know are asking these questions yet. But, what would happen if you presented the answer to these questions as a proud accomplishment?
And here you thought you'd only have to get prepped for white-boarding some Java code...
