Functional or Technical Focus

In my professional life, I’m constantly confronted and hesitating between two career tracks:

1. Focus more on functional area and increase my business expertise and knowledge on specific industries or business domains;
2. Focus more on technical area and increase my IT technical knowledge on specific set of technologies, language, framework without any specific business focus.

Note that I've highlighted the verb focus here, since most IT work done in enterprise has a very important business aspect. So unless you are working for a highly technical business sector, you can't get away in IT without any business knowledge and culture.


Recently I’ve leaned more toward the technical side, mainly because in my freelance practice, I had a lot of software development activity. Surely the best way to learn and acquire real knowledge about technology is to actually deep into it by doing real development yourself (expressed clearly in this famous B. Franklin quote: "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn"). However, this requires a lot of learning and adaptation because of the fast pace of technology change and evolution.

Since my arrival to Sword in Switzerland, it seems as if I may have to reconsider this focus as the bulk of software development work is done offshore and I'm more involved in functional specification. I’m not making a big deal out of this, since I’m currently involved in the telco industry which has a lot of technical focus and is also very challenging and constantly evolving!

And besides, there will always be the open source world where a lot of possibility exist to practice and maintain my software development skills. But for the time being, I can't even consider that…, even my own personal projects had to be put on the backburner.


Martin