Are You Thinking About Less In Your Career?

If you told me ten years ago people would be playing a game on their phones that was birds being flung at pigs, I wouldn’t believe you.  Oh, and ditto on the entire jewel-moving thing.  Games were always bout bigger and better, baby!

Have I mentioned I really like Angry Birds?

Or maybe that people would be publishing little pamphlets again, many in electronic format.  I’d probably give you a dull look and ask why – people seem to love books of a certain size.  Oh, and pamphlets are for blogs.

By the way, I just helped edit one and am working on my own.

The Windows 8 interface is simple – probablyy too simple.

Android is taking things by storm, and it’s a simpler-interfaced Linux.

Everything is icons.

It seems sometimes less is really more – or more what people may want in some cases.  It’s pretty big in the geekonomy right now.  So I want to ask you this . . .

Are you thinking about what less means for your career?

Things peak.  Trends don’t continue.  Sometimes less comes into vogue, from the tiny smart cars to smaller games.  As a lot of us work in cutting-edge areas, I think we need to think about what “less” means and when trends of “less” come into play.

It’s too easy to think everything grows and expands.

So is the technology you work on getting smaller, going on smaller devices?  Do you need to learn how to scale back, make tighter code, port code to something tinier?

Is the documentation you write something that needs to be broken out?  Made simpler?  Released in pieces?

Is that book your writing better as serial fiction?

Is the class you teach better scaled back to a  presentation or broken into more classes?

Does the big device or gizmo you’re making run the risk of being too big, too complex, and have feature creep when people want things simple.

For myself, I work in project and program management.  I’ve got to ask about fast, light feature development and agile processes and how delivery works best in a scaled market.  I have to ask how to get less to happen more.

What’s “less” in your career?  Have you asked?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.