DevPathfinder™
DevPathfinder is a self-assessment that offers personalized data to assist you in making more informed decisions about your tech career. This article contains a background on its origins, design of its algorithms, and a history of changes to the product.
Last Updated January 24th, 2025
Table of Contents
The Team Behind DevPathfinder
DevPathfinder is designed and developed in Austin, Texas by Jayme Edwards and his son Julian Edwards.
Jayme Edwards is a 27 year veteran of the tech industry who’s worked on over 30 software projects as both an employee and consultant. His specialties are software architecture, business intelligence, DevOps, lean product management, coaching and consulting.
Jayme is currently focused on guiding experienced tech professionals through integrated career and life coaching, and hosts the Thriving Technologist YouTube channel and podcast.
Julian Edwards is an independent software developer who provides solutions for small business clients. He helps clients overcome their challenges with user experience, APIs, and data. He’s currently building solutions using Amazon Web Services, Laravel, Remix, and Dagster.
Julian collaborates with Jayme on designing features, builds the user interface, and implements algorithms for DevPathfinder. He’s also a consultant for a data analytics company in the healthcare industry.
How DevPathfinder was born
By Jayme Edwards
Over my own career, I’ve encountered aspects of my work in the tech industry that I loved – and others I hated. As I learned more about what I did and didn’t like, I adjusted the direction of my career several times. Sometimes the new direction I chose was an improvement, other times it was way worse. I know I’m not alone in this experience! The number one thing people hire me for as a professional coach, is to help them get clear on what direction to go in their career.
Coaching is one tool (a powerful one) that can help you see beyond your own experience of what’s possible. Unfortunately, one-on-one coaching requires a significant investment, and I can only help so many people at a time. Thus the need for DevPathfinder.
Coaching over 100 tech professionals…is a humbling experience
Nothing in my career could have prepared me for what meeting over 300 people from all over the world would be like. I’m not sure how much you know of my background, but I somehow found myself working with a lot more companies than your typical professional through a combination of working as an employee, and then consultant. So it was pretty natural that I began coaching 5 years ago, thinking I already knew most of what people needed help with.
I’m also an ongoing student of personal development. I’ve read lots of books over the years related to the psychology and sociology of work (I was especially interested in these subjects during college). So while working in software, I was always looking at myself and other people and asking: “WHY do we do – WHAT we do?“
Only after meeting professionals online did I realize how we’re all different – but in many ways the same. I started noticing patterns in people. There were different “archetypes” of tech professionals. Some people were almost wholly focused on engineering. They couldn’t care less about the customer, or other people even – and were very introverted. Another person in the exact same job role was frustrated. They cared a ton about people, but were always getting penalized for “not being productive enough”.
It frustrated me that so many great professionals care deeply about their work, but when it came to knowing whether they were a good fit for the type of job they did, it was a guessing game. They were often pressured to keep doing work they knew deep down was wrong for them. They would experience burnout, losses, rejection, and what they looked at as career setbacks. But they never stepped back to ask the question – “Is this really what I was born to do?“
Winning the war against the status quo
One of the primary motivators for DevPathfinder is to help people break free from a career limited by what other people think. When you make a career decision, there are several forces working against you. These forces generally keep you stuck, or prevent you from doing work that’s truly fulfilling. These usually prey on the Status Quo bias. This is a bias we have towards inaction – also known as resistance to change.
The pressure to “stay in your lane” comes from multiple sources:
- Your Employer – When you work for a company, you usually have a boss who’s responsible for your growth there. They’ll often tell you they care about your career overall. But ultimately, they’re an employee. Even if they mean well, they can only really help you grow if what they offer you – is also important to the company. The moment what you need from your career falls outside the company’s opportunities, your boss may become dismissive. They might even try to persuade you that what you want, isn’t important to your career!
- Certification Companies – There’s a lot of money to be made by companies if they can convince you they’ll help you get a better job. These companies focus on one thing, and one thing alone – your ability to get something done. What they don’t help you with at all, is knowing whether you’ll WANT to do that kind of work over and over again, or if you’ll become bored or burned out.
- Online Influencers – As a YouTuber and career coach myself, I know the immense responsibility of offering advice online. It’s easy for anyone to “put up shop” and share their ideas. As a professional coach, I’ve learned that every person I help with their career is unique – so there’s no “one-size-fits-all” set of advice that applies to everyone. I like to say I have “strong opinions, loosely held”. I do this for a living, but I also take my responsibility to you or anyone else I advise very seriously. Unfortunately, there are many people out there just wanting to make a quick buck – without any real experience to back it up. Because of the (healthy) skepticism this situation creates, it can be easiest just to do nothing. Putting faith in another person’s ideas can be scary – especially if you don’t trust anyone!
- Pride – This one may have you closing this article if it’s a bad enough problem. But as painful as it can be to confront, an overinflated sense of pride in your abilities can be a major barrier to making career progress. In tech job roles like programming, a “do it yourself” or DIY attitude helps you get stuff done when there’s a lack of clear direction on the job. But the dark side of this talent is that when you truly need help, it can be hard to ask for it. In my own personal life, I’ve come up with elaborate excuses not to get help from other people when I don’t want to change. This is known as “self-delusion” and like all humans I still fall prey to it on occasion. When I look back on my life, most of the really stupid decisions I made, were when I deluded myself that ignoring someone’s advice was the smart thing to do. When in reality, it kept me trapped.
Reaching the masses
About 3 years ago, I had worked with about 50 people in paid career coaching engagements up to that point. One day I had a sobering realization. Though I loved working with people to help them one-on-one, not everyone could afford it. I started having to turn down clients that just didn’t have the money. Other clients I would turn down because they weren’t in the right mindset yet to get help. I call this mindset being “coachable”.
So I got to thinking – “How can I get people some of the same insights they would have working with me, but at a lower cost?” And also wondered “How can I reach more people, and make a difference in the lives of more tech professionals?” I started by asking my clients what they thought I could do. I also have 3 business mentors who gave me some ideas. And I had some extensive conversations with my wife, and ChatGPT. “Wisdom is in a multitude of counselors” is a scripture from the Bible that resonated with me – so I sought out a variety of opinions. It’s especially easy for me to go it alone in today’s online environment where we create “echo chambers” of people that agree with us.
A self-service option for tech career guidance
Eventually I came to realize I needed to create a self-service solution of some sort. An assessment where people could answer a set of questions, then be shown insights that could help them find a better path for their career. The problem was, up to that point I used a lot of intuition (and I still do) to guide a person. At first, I couldn’t possibly see how a “product” could be created to offer anything like what I do one-on-one!
So I began a period of deep research. I reviewed many hours of coaching notes I’d taken over the years. And soon I began to notice some patterns. Without realizing it, I was using a complex set of pattern recognition to identify aspects of a person I would coach. And then I was mentally mapping that to the things I knew from my time as a consultant. With that mental map, I could guide them to discover how much they would like (or hate) specific kinds of work in tech.
I knew this assessment wouldn’t be able to offer everything I do as a coach. There’s no substitute for a human being answering all your questions and helping you overcome limiting beliefs – and fears. But an assessment like this could give them a wider perspective than they might have on their own.
Reflecting on my time coaching clients, I realized the outcomes they wanted usually sounded like this:
- Would I be happier in a different tech job role?
- Why am I unhappy in the tech job I’ve got now?
- Should I start managing people?
- Am I the type of person who people would follow?
- How realistic would it be for me to start my own company?
- Would I be better off freelancing?
- How can I have a healthier work/life balance?
With this set of outcomes in mind, I went systematically through each question above. I reviewed my past coaching experiences, and my own career, to figure out – “Which aspects of work would give clues leading someone to the right answer to these questions?“
Establishing the key aspects of a development career
Eventually I came up with a list of about 14 different aspects. These were “angles” with which to view work, that determine how much someone would like doing different types of jobs in the tech industry. These aspects were things I personally realized, but I also used them (though sometimes subconsciously) to guide people during coaching.
A few of the aspects I selected were:
- Task Diversity – How much variety do you need in the tasks you do every day?
- Complexity Threshold – How much complexity can you handle before getting overwhelmed mentally?
- Solution Flexibility – How “attached” do you get to your ideas, versus being flexible when things need to change?
- Relational Energy – How much does working with other people energize you, versus wipe you out?
- Responsibility Threshold – How willing are you to take accountability for other people’s work?
Initially, I came up with 14 different aspects like those above. But I knew I was missing a few things. So then I began working with ChatGPT, running the list by my son Julian (who also is a developer and knows my YouTube channel well), and doing further research.
Eventually I arrived at a set of 28 different aspects. I call these aspects Key Development Career Aspects, or “KDCAs”. KDCAs are a combination of universal aspects of work that could apply to any job – and unique aspects that only apply to jobs in the tech industry.
Designing The Algorithm
To facilitate meaningful results, a number of algorithms needed to be created to produce insights based on how you answer questions in the assessment. Any product manager will tell you one of the biggest challenges in creating a successful software product is striking a balance. There are often tradeoffs that must be made for a product to be both valuable, and usable.
In service of this goal, I set forth creating DevPathfinder with the following design goals:
- Completing the assessment shouldn’t take too long.
- There should be enough questions to offer meaningful results.
- Questions should be easy to understand regardless of your technical background.
- Once completed, important insights should be available immediately.
- When more detail is desired, you should be able to “drill down”.
- Results should link to TechRolepedia so you can identify next steps to take.
Identifying important tech job roles
First, I needed to identify a set of tech job roles relevant to the assessment. There are hundreds of job roles in tech, and many of them overlap in responsibilities and tasks. This problem is compounded by the fact, that some companies use different names for common job roles, or misname them altogether.
If the list of job roles were too long, people would be overwhelmed when viewing their results. So I chose a set of tech job roles I feel are most prevalent in software development related projects. I also attempted to use their most popular names. Eventually I settled on a list of 25.
Assigning importance to the KDCAs
Next I needed to create a reference set of data. This data would assign an “importance” value to each KDCA, related to each job role. For instance the Complexity Threshold career aspect is more important to a front-end software developer, than it is to a technical sales representative.
This process was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. It wasn’t too difficult to determine what was more (and less) important to tech job roles that were very different. But some tech job roles had a lot of overlap, and so picking the right importances was a balancing act.
The initial importance rankings released in version 1.0 were a combination of my selections and recommendations by Chat GPT. Since then, I’ve made major adjustments based on feedback from customers.
Since there are 28 different KDCAs, each tech job role needs a unique value for each KDCA importance, where a value of “1” means most important, and “28” means least important. I can adjust these importances with special values as needed, but in the majority of cases they fall within that range of 1 to 28.
Scoring individual answers
As you complete your assessment, questions are answered using the Likert scale. These questions work well for tests like DevPathfinder, and are an improvement I made in the 2.0 release of the product.
During the assessment, a statement is posed to you such as “I enjoy working on highly complex problems“. Then you are given the ability to specify how strongly you disagree (or agree) with the statement. This determines your score for that question.
At the conclusion of your assessment, the algorithm determines the combined Likert value of your answers across all questions associated with a single KDCA. Then divides them by the total value possible to determine your score per KDCA.
Finally, the algorithm compares that score with the aggregated importances of KDCAs across every tech job role.
Calculating exponential importance
During testing and data analysis, I determined that a linear algorithm (one where a KDCA with an importance of 1 is 28 times more important than the least important KDCA) was not providing the best results. I changed this to be an exponential algorithm where an exponent is used to create a slight curve in the effective importances.
In practice, this causes the most important KDCAs for each job role to be slightly more important than they would be otherwise. As more customers take the assessment, I have access to a larger sample size of results to analyze. This exponent value then becomes a fine tuning variable I can use to improve the accuracy of the assessment.
Displaying recommendations
Since questions are answered using the Likert scale, customers could theoretically answer “neutral” for every single question. In this case, the results will not be very meaningful. Some level of variation in answers is required to get insightful results. However there will also be customers who don’t have very strong opinions and so most of their questions are “agree” or “disagree” but never “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree”.
Because of this, displaying results along with absolute values (you scored 90%!) aren’t really helpful. Instead, the user interface uses ranking sequences when displaying which tech job roles (or professional pathways like leadership, management, consulting, or entrepreneurship) are a better and worse fit.
Essentially, these are relative, not absolute results. Interpreting the results is not as simple as looking at a number and saying “I scored highly”. Instead, you need to view your results in the context of other options.
Interpreting your results
DevPathfinder is not a crystal ball, or a matchmaking service. It’s a powerful tool created to assist you with making career decisions.
It also includes articles with unique content about every KDCA to help you understand what they mean – and how to recognize them in typical tech job roles. You’ll need to read these articles as you explore your results to understand what it says about your desires, and how they impact the work you choose to do.
As new, better paths for your career become clear – you’ll want to take action. You may want to pursue a new tech job role, or a promotion along the path of your current one. This is where TechRolepedia comes in. Every tech job role recommended to you links directly to its accompanying TechRolepedia entry.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, TechRolepedia includes the following data:
- A list of skills and qualifications, so you know whether you need to invest in building new skills to pursue a tech job role.
- Education and training, so you can determine whether you already meet the requirements most employers look for in a tech job role.
- A career path and progression, so you know where you might go “up” from where you are in your current tech job role.
- Salary and compensation in major regions of the world, to give you a ballpark when determining whether a job role will pay your bills.
- The outlook and demand for a tech job role in the industry, so you have some idea whether it’s a good long term investment to pursue.
- Unique responsibilities and challenges of a tech job role, so you walk into it “eyes wide open” to what you’ll be up against to be successful.
- Links to notable people who do a tech job role, so you can learn from their experiences and mistakes.
- Links to additional websites, books, and online communities; so you can pursue additional training materials and find your tribe.
Ready to discover personalized data to guide your tech career?
Wondering if you’d make a good leader, manager, consultant, or entrepreneur?
DevPathfinder Release Notes
Below is a list of changes to DevPathfinder that have been released to customers. Versions are listed from newest to oldest.
2.0.3
Released January 24th, 2025
User Interface
- Require acceptance of terms of use before taking the assessment (unless user already accepted them while using version 1.0).
2.0.2
Released December 21st, 2024
Algorithms
- Increased the importance of the Complexity Threshold, Focus Threshold, and Persuasion Desire KDCAs for the Software Architect job role.
- Increased the base exponent value used for scoring job role matches. This increases the relative weight of the most important aspects of each tech job role.
2.0.1
Released December 10th, 2024
User Interface
- Updated the styling of assessment selections from radio buttons to toggle buttons.
2.0
Released December 1st, 2024
Version 2.0 is a complete redesign of the questionnaire and results user interface. It also improves upon previous recommendation algorithms.
User Interface
- The “story” and “document” views of assessment results have been replaced with a dashboard.
- A radar chart displays results within each major category of KDCAs.
- A list of recommended tech job roles appears ordered from best to worst potential fit.
- Gauges display suitability for each professional pathway (leadership, management, consulting, and entrepreneurship).
- Unique pages with content about every KDCA, along with their most important tech job roles.
- Unique pages with content about every tech job role, along with their most important KDCAs and links to TechRolepedia.
- Unique pages with content about every professional pathway, along with their most important KDCAs.
Algorithms
- Assessment reduced from 140 to 84 questions.
- Questions changed from multiple choice to using the Likert scale.
- Uses a round-robin method of asking questions across KDCAs instead of asking all questions across each aspect in sequence.
- The importances of KDCAs used to suggest professional pathways de-emphasized across most tech job roles.
- Further re-balancing of KDCA importances based on customer feedback and analysis of previous results.
1.0.3
Released August 30th, 2024
User Interface
- Show your DevPathfinder score in every KDCA once the assessment is completed, on each page of TechRolepedia.
1.0.2
Released April 22nd, 2024
Purchasing
- Added a demo account potential customers can use to try out the product before they buy.
1.0.1
Released January 31st, 2024
User Interface
- Show your DevPathfinder job role rankings once the assessment is completed, on each page of TechRolepedia.
1.0
Released January 13th, 2024
Initial release to new customers. Algorithm base exponent value and importances for job role KDCA rankings were adjusted based on release candidate feedback and results analysis.
0.9
Released November 1st, 2023
Released for free to existing career coaching clients who previously purchased the Career Compass coaching package.