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In this episode, Derick Bailey – who is not actually on fire (that would be quite hazardous) talks to Arsalan about the best way to get ahead in software development even with tough life situations and steep hurdles.
Derick’s Bio:
Derick Bailey is a developer, entrepreneur, author, speaker and technology leader in central Texas (north of Austin). He’s been a professional developer since the late 90’s and has been writing code since the late 80’s. In his spare time, he gets called a spamming marketer by people on Twitter, and blurts out all of the stupid / funny things he’s ever done in his career on his email newsletter.
Find him on Twitter @derickbailey
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Derick: I am a software developer and an entrepreneur but I am a human being first of all. It’s a side of me that most people never see. Most people out there that see my blog, se my video and see me at conferences, they see the highlight reel of my life. They see the parts of me that I want to show the rest of the world and there’s a lot of me behind the scenes that people never see and I do show some of this through my mailing list and through the stories that I write about my struggles and my failures in my career, but still there’s a lot of me that never gets shown to the public and a big part of that is because I am very much scared to expose those things and I don’t know how people are going to react and how they are going to take that.
Derick: I am certainly a software developer but I am also a father of a special needs child and I don’t talk about that very often out in the public world because I don’t want that to taint people’s perspective of why I do certain things…
Arsalan: People love that senior professionals like yourself – famous people – open up and show them that you are human. You’re like everybody else. I have girls. I have two daughters and I worry about them and I want them to be in a world where it’s good to be a woman and it’s not a challenge as it is today.
Arsalan: We’re human. We have issues. You have a child with special needs and you can’t just suspend that. We were reading this news story about Amazon on New York Times about how Amazon treats its employees. If you were an Amazon employee, I don’t know how contented you will be because their attitude is: we don’t care…
Derick: When I got out of college, I left college and moved to Dallas and I found a recruiting firm in Dallas and the person I was working with – right before the dot com bust – wasn’t steering me towards those startup companies. She was steering me more towards marketing organizations and organizations that needed web development in a marketing related capacity. I think she did that because I had experience in graphic design and art a nd a little bit of marketing from my college years abd previous part time work I had done. I got my first job in a manufacturing company and I was in the marketing department building their websites and doing marketing related things. I worked right next to graphic designers and copywriters and other people like that… and it was through a company reorganization that took the marketing manager and made him the head of IT over the parent organization and he brought me along to the IT department where we formalized me as a software developer…
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