Enjoy What You Do (Asya Kamsky)

5 Minute Mentor

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Asya Kamsky started her career in technology in the late 80s. Throughout her career, she’s worked at different companies and held various roles. She’s currently Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB.

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Transcript:

ES: This is 5 Minute Mentor, a podcast where you’ll get advice from prominent engineers, authors, artists, and more in 5 minutes or less.

ES: Today’s mentor is Asya Kamsky. Asya started her career in technology in the late 80s. Throughout her career, she’s worked at different companies and held various roles. She’s currently Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB.

ES: This is their advice.

AK: Trust your gut, in terms of what job feels right. It doesn’t matter if you’re a phenomenal programmer. If you don’t enjoy doing it day to day, it’s probably not a great long term career for you. Same thing for, you know, you might be good at let’s say, doing presentations, or teaching people things. But if you don’t also enjoy it, you know, I always feel like, the best career is one that’s the closest to the intersection things you’re good at, and things you enjoy, and things that somebody is willing to pay you to do. Right, because we might enjoy some things that we’re very good at, but maybe there’s no market for getting paid, you know, to play games, or goof around somehow. But somewhere between those three axes, and I think that those of us in technology are so superbly lucky because there’s so many companies out there that will need software engineers and technologists, techies in general for the foreseeable future.

AK: So, the key is to find the part of that domain that has that intersection of you know, enjoying your work day to day and getting paid for. That’s kind of the dream, right?

Asya Kamsky, Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB