2020 has been a challenging year in many ways and I don’t want to reiterate the whole Corona thing, but it surely had some impact on my initial plan for that year:
2020 Career Goals
- Pass my CKA exam
- Get more comfortable writing go
- Reiterate my future career plan
- Start and keep blogging
Because I left my former employer I stopped pursuing the CKA. On the parental leave I was busy parenting and after that my focus at work switched to the AWS Cloud. But maybe one day I will turn back to the K8s-world.
Since starting at radio.de I switched from “doing some Go” to being a full-time Go Developer and I love it. The community, the opinionated nature of this small language and the tooling amaze me. There is no way I will be going back to Python anytime soon. I am still learning here and there, but I feel really comfortable writing and reviewing Go code.
Regarding my future career I did switch jobs in mid 2020, but I also found out for myself that I do not see myself being “promoted” to management anytime soon. That career path seems to be weirdly common in Germany and I only know of very few instances where roles like principal or staff engineer even exist. Google for example has these roles in theory, but a friend at Google Germany told me, that there are no engineers above “Senior Engineer” (Level 5) at Google Munich. Level 6 would be “Staff Engineer” or “Intermediate Manager” but the former seems to be virtually non-existent.
So a mid- to long-term goal would be to join a company where a future career path as individual contributor is defined and possible.
As of starting my blog and keeping updates coming I want to use Corona as an excuse, but the other half of the truth would be a lack of motivation and energy to do anything intellectually demanding or creative after 8 hours of work plus 4 more hours of handling the kids to give my wife a break.
Maybe 2021 will be different, but right now it is Corona-main-season. Thankfully residing at my in-laws gives us some slack.