| You need to develop your profile. Have a great LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter and don't forget to make yourself actually better in what you do. What is also important is to figure out how to improve the processes you're involved in. How to make things faster, make sure stuff is shipped faster or in a better shape. Be pro-active. Then there's another level you need to play on, which is your role. You're now at the junior level, which means that you're not expected to complete complex tasks on your own. You need to make sure that you grow to medior / senior level, medior meaning being able to build complex tasks and senior level means being able to understand if such a task should be built, how it should be built and more important than everything what it costs and how to actually get it shipped. In short: you need to become a shipper. Nothing else matters. You should be able to tell somebody that interviews you "I have shipped X, Y and Z and the impact was...". Once you've become a shipper and you know how to convince the world that you are one through your self-marketing it's time to move up. You can try to get a senior role in your own company but they rather pay you the same so that might be more difficult than just working in another company. So use this job to get more senior tasks, polish your resumé and move to another one. But don't be shy to just _ask_ your boss how to move into a more senior role. Being in a company and growing is good. Being for 5 years in the same company without growing is bad. Really bad. So don't stay too long if you're not growing. After that it's about multiplying your salary. You'll earn twice as much if you're a fully booked freelancer and four times as much if you're a fully booked consultant. Another interesting path is going to the US and be a low-level CRUD developer in a famous company like Google. But you need to be able to beat their tests, which means studying a lot of stuff you won't use in your daily work. I have a famous algorithm book that I read like once a month because I really want to learn it, but I'm perpetually just too busy :( |