244: Overcome Your Introversion and Realise That Asking for Help is a Strength with Derick Rethans

<p>Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Derick Rethans. Derick is a PHP internals expert and author of Xdebug.  He works as an independent contractor and consultant on PHP extensions and related projects.</p> <p>Derick has contributed to the PHP project in numerous forms and is the host of the PHP Internals News podcast as well as being a frequent speaker at conferences.</p> <p>In this episode, Phil and Derick Rethans discuss why asking for help is a strength rather than a weakness. Derick shares how he counters his introvert tendencies so that he can fill in his knowledge gaps and help others. They also talk about how to take on challenging roles and build new skills, while still maintaining the right work/life balance.</p> <p><strong>KEY TAKEAWAYS:</strong></p> <p><strong>(3.18) TOP CAREER TIP</strong></p> <p>Asking for help should be a skill that you use liberally. Doing so saves you a huge amount of time and hassle.</p> <p>Often, it is a mutually beneficial experience. They answer your questions and, often, will ask you a few of their own. We should all be leveraging off each other´s knowledge base.</p> <p><strong>(4.47) WORST CAREER MOMENT</strong></p> <p>At the start of his career, Derick was asked to fix an SEO Unix machine. He knew a bit about Linux and Unix II, but the machine he was working on used an older version. One he was not familiar with. As requested, he attempted the fix. A decision that nearly led to disaster. He explains what happened, in the podcast.</p> <p>From this experience, he learned not to assume you know things about technologies you have never touched before. Things are not always as similar as you might think.</p> <p><strong>(7.10) CAREER HIGHLIGHT</strong></p> <p>Being approached by people at conferences who say to him “It is nice to meet you; I like what you did on x project…” feels particularly good. Although, at first, it felt very weird to him.</p> <p><strong>(8.23) THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T</strong></p> <p>Derick finds the pace of change and t