Don't End The Week With Nothing

If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something. You'll learn more shipping a failure than you'll learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance of shipping a success -- people greatly overestimate how difficult this is. Just don't end the week with nothing.

If you cannot gain exposure at your day job, try to get some exposure outside of it. Network actively. You don't have to have an audience of thousands for an audience to be worthwhile -- for landing a new job, having an audience of one hiring manager is a darn sight better than having no audience at all. Blog and collect an email list. It's old and... See more

You don't have to optimize for "sexy" projects. You know, sexy projects: I don't know how to describe them but I know it when I see it. Most engineering work isn't intrinsically sexy. I would, however, optimize for impact and visibility.

If you cannot build things you can show at work, you should build things you can show outside of work.

The failures and false starts aren't extremely interesting to most people, but having some successes under your belt credibly demonstrates that you're capable of either reproducing them in the future or experimenting your way to new successes in your new environment.

Write about those lessons as you learn them. If at all possible, publish what you write. Even if it is published to an audience of no one, you will be able to point people back to it later.

This could mean working in industries which default to being open rather than those which default to being closed.

This could mean working on particular projects within the organization which like external visibility (e.g. Android) rather than projects which don't (e.g. AdWords)

Thus my first piece of advice: if you have the choice between multiple jobs, all else being equal, pick the one where you are able to show what you've worked on.