8 Career Learnings From 8 Years, 8 Months, and 8 Days

One day I asked myself how long it's been since I started working in the IT industry as a developer. I double-checked my LinkedIn, did some heavy math, and voila! Eight years, eight months, and eight days will pass in a few days. Still enough time to sit with a cup of coffee and spill some thoughts on the paper.

And I wanted to finally launch my own blog.

So here we are! Today's the day. The blog is up. The post is written.

I present you the 8 valuable learnings that stayed with me after all this time.

1. All advice comes from the different place and time

The world is full of people giving you a piece of advice (myself included). Each of them was a result of a summed-up experience of the author but usually, you will see just the tip of the iceberg. It's impossible to share everything that led the author to some conclusions in a tweet. Advice might inspire you to do something different. It might connect to some other thought you had for a while. But at the same time, it can fail you because your context looks way different from the person that shared some words with you.

My approach there is to decompose what I read and hear by asking myself at least two questions: How it may work? How it won't work? I start with the former because I am an optimist and you can start with the latter however choosing only one question may lead you in the wrong direction.

2. Be happy for others

Good things will happen to people around you and it's up to you how you react to that. If your colleague will find a new job and you're still in the same place, that's okay. Usually, we start to compare ourselves at such a moment and most of the time it ends with sadness or other negative emotions.

Being happy for others changes your future thinking. It's like a switch from saying to yourself: "They don't deserve that" to "Great! So how can I get there myself?". It's a good moment to rethink what is important to you and where you would like to be. The surprising result of that might be that you're actually happy where you are and that's okay.

3. Try to find out WHY you have to create things

I've met lots of developers who were perfectly fine with understanding only what has to be done. Maybe that was all that was expected from them before, but there is a different way. Knowing why something has to be done opens your head to solutions that were not there before.

Some ideas might be easier to implement, more efficient for your stakeholders. Find out what is the actual problem that someone wants to solve and think through if there are other ways. You won't be able to do this just moving cards in JIRA. For more visit The XY Problem because it was important enough that someone actually created entire page about it.

4. Show people their value, not yours

We spend most of the time in our heads, with our thoughts. It's not surprising that during discussions with other people we start describing things from our own point of view. Some never-ending wars happen because we stick with what is valuable for us. HR vs development, management vs common folks at the bottom of the ladder. They all fight because it's hard to get out of their heads and translate what they want to say in terms of what is valuable to the other side.

There is a big difference between:

We want to spend two weeks rewriting this piece of code so it's less buggy

and

We want to spend two weeks rewriting this piece of code to avoid time-sucking firefighting with issues we are having with it all the time

Yes, the second one is longer but way more efficient as it may bring more understanding to people interested in the productivity of your team. It brings more context and that's your goal in effective communication.

5. Manage your energy level or burn out

I had times where I simply wanted too much and my expectations were never met. I guess it's okay to go like that for a limited amount of time but how do you know when to stop? That's the tough one. Without some proper tracking, you won't find out instantly that your mood is deteriorating until you burn out completely. For some people going on vacation might be enough to recover, but sometimes it's way harder than that. From my experience the bigger difference between what you want and what you get, the faster you burn out. One of the best articles on that I've found is Burnout and the Brain. But here is TLDR:

...key components of the workplace environment that contribute to burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Burnout emerges when one or more of these six areas is chronically mismatched between an individual and his job.

I still try to balance extra hours spent on the side projects and learning. Silent, thoughtful moments and asking myself how I feel usually help to evaluate if I should chill out more or push towards the goals I set for myself. I recently heard from my colleague that you have a limited amount of fucks you can give. I guess giving more than you have ends up your day on minus.

6. Just go to sleep already

There are challenges that you cannot let go away. Some tricky problems you are trying to solve. As relentless beings wanting to deal with it we push harder and put more hours until the day ends. We care that our code is efficient but what about us? I've realized so often that my evening time is not that productive as morning time.

So I do something crazy.

I abandon further work on the problem that afternoon, do non-work stuff and give my brain 8 hours of sleep. In exchange I got nice solutions in the morning in a fraction of the time I would spend on it in the evening. It's good to calculate the Return of Investment when we hand out our money.

How about calculating it when we pay with our time?

7. Find out what's important for others

I care for code quality, good relations within a team, and simple but effective solutions. Probably something more.

What will happen if I bring my beautifully crafted piece of code to a person which is driven only by shipping new software?

Not much.

If I want to do an in-depth code review to discuss the impact of my change to the codebase then I picked the wrong person. I would be more delighted to have someone who cares for the similar things I do, but it's often not possible.

Understanding what is important for the different people definitely helps in dealing with everyday tasks faster. If I know you care most about minding your own business I won't be bothering you if I have a chance.

8. Find out what's important for you

Developing software consists of many ingredients. Just to name a few: thinking, planning, communicating, visualizing, and of course actual writing code. Sometimes you might be even asked to make a presentation, organize a workshop or write an article on a tech topic that will likely boost your company's visibility in the market.

The best part of it: you can choose to opt-out of certain activities.

If you have an opportunity to do something you've never tried before, do it. In the worst case, you learn that it's not your thing, but otherwise, I would focus on the things that are important for you. Having some personal development goals, even small ones like: "get better at talking to people", helps you to sort all activities by how much they contribute towards them. If you don't have any goal then you will be like a leaf on the wind, blown from task to the task at the mercy of others.

What is the alternative? Saying no.

No to optional things that you are not interested in. No to things that drain your passion. No to things that do not move you forwards. Sometimes it's not possible. Sometimes it's just worth supporting your teammates doing some menial tasks so others can thrive. But I want you to know that it's okay to think about what you desire. With that in mind, you can volunteer for a task that will help you to move in the direction you want. I managed to boost my presentation skills when no one wanted to prepare slides for the weekly sprint review. I contributed to some local meetups. And then I stopped those when I noticed there are other things more valuable at the time.

And that's the end of the weird celebration with the number of 8.

Welcome to my new blog!