Professional Crossroads 12/27/22

For some reason my colleagues see me as a good developer.

I never really believed them.

I've spent my time wallowing in self-pity and agonizing over wanting to be a good developer, without even noticing that I have become someone whom I would actually want to work with - someone whom I've come to respect.

Even though I have the knowledge and got to a point I am comfortable in my own professional skin, I have completely neglected the human aspect of my field, which to me is conveying your ideas and inviting other people into your way of thinking, and listening to their ideas as well, perhaps even giving them honest feedback.

I believe that the only way to grow as a person is to be a part of something bigger than yourself.

Only by taking more responsibility can one discover his true self.

Only by being a part of something you care about (whether it's family, a relationship, a workplace, etc.) can you really understand who you are as a person.

What makes my work meaningful is people.

People had fun playing a game I made.

People saved time and effort because of a script I wrote.

People understood something because I took the time to explain it to them.

People are more productive because of something I had made for them.

The first script I ever wrote was a PHP web scraper using some off the shelf library for DOM parsing. I took me nearly three hours to get right, but it eventually ended up saving my friend four hours. Every day. For six months.

Four hours of my friend's time at work were dedicated to excruciatingly monotonous work: he used to open a spreadsheet, filled with links, upon which he had to click, one by one, and on every page in that link, he was asked to search for specific information. He used to do it, every day, wishing he could get some actual work done.

After he got that script, his reaction was of man who had just struck gold. He used to let that script run while he was catching up on some reading, with a smoke and a cup of coffee, talking to people and enjoying his day, and getting paid for something his computer does instead of him, while he was able to grow as a developer.

That was the moment I felt like a true super-hero - the restorer of lost time.

I don't quite get to feel like that anymore. I don't enjoy my work. Now, I just waste time. I just suck it all up, from people with deep pockets, who just want to make things no one wants to use.

I need to feel good about what I do again. I need to feel that passion, or should I say, sense of fulfillment.

In order to become better at interacting with fellow professionals, I must feel comfortable expressing myself, and to do so in the best way possible.

I must aim to be succinct, honest, and most importantly, confident in my work.

To truly feel confident in my work, I need to be genuinely proud of it. However, I find it challenging to experience that pride when I constantly find myself prioritizing impossible deadlines for irrelevant features in lackluster software. Nevertheless, I hold onto the hope that I will one day find a way to reconcile these conflicting feelings and steer my work towards a more fulfilling path.