Communications of the ACM
The Many Shapes of a Computer Science Career
When you apply for a career in tech, it often means having to decide: Am I a product manager? A software engineer? A researcher? A designer? These roles are all clearly defined with their own sets of mostly nonoverlapping skills to help companies hire the right talent. But that's not the way we define ourselves. Most of us have a variety of skills that don't all neatly fall into one box.
We collect skills across multiple dimensions over a lifetime of different experiences. We may start in a box, but before long it's a hexagon, an oval, or something that looks more like a puzzle piece: bends, openings, sharp edges, all wrapping themselves around our ever-growing skills. Eventually it becomes three-dimensional, with depth in some areas and breadth in others.
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