I started my career thinking I’m gonna be the best programmer ever lived and will be writing the best code ever written for rest of my life but yeah reality hit me sooner than later, just last week I questioned myself on my JavaScript skills after a bug drove me crazy for hours until I realised that I don’t know Regex. Multiple times in the last 5 years I have shipped code which my young self would vomit on 🤷, well I’m not proud of them but it did get the job done which was to run the business I was working for.
One of the hard realisation I had was writing code is easy but maintaining it is harder and people are the hardest 🙄
When I build any personal project I choose all the cool stuff in the town but this is not possible at work, so I had to learn to get the best out of the tech stack at work while not whining about it all day.
I used to think I’m gonna spend all my time coding fun stuff and it was true for some time until my manager asked me to work on some business critical grunt work 😢, sometimes I’m just staring at the wall contemplating the universe while the change I made is taking 1.5 hrs to deploy and it fails. I spend only 30-50% of the time working on cool problems and rest of my time is spent on ensuring business is happening as usual.
Code is easy and straight forward and people are not, I might be hitting my head against a wall while trying to convince my senior or fighting to get someone’s time to help me deliver my work, overtime I learnt that my senior who is casting stones on my way is just trying to do his/her job and I need to have better data to convince them rather than convincing them on face value. I’m not able to get someone’s time because they are also busy trying to get things done, so I have developed deep emphathy for everyone I work with rather than assuming that they are conspiring against my growth. Unlike code every person is different and everyone has their own way of working.
When I myself became a senior and needed to lead a team I had to not just code but also convince my team to follow a vision while keeping them engaged and oh boy it was not easy! I made a lot of mistake but with my team’s support I learned that the best way to lead a team is to lead by example. You can’t just tell someone that you need to do this rather you need to take yourself through the journey and show them how it is done.
It may seem like I hate my job 🤣 but no I do still love my job a lot, just that my definition of what I’m supposed to do has changed a lot, our customers do not care if I’m using cutting edge tech stack, they don’t care if my code is using all the best practices, they don’t care if everyone in my team is aligned on tech decisions, all they care is does my product get their job done? so my goal now is not to write the best code in the world but rather write code that brings maximum positive impact to my customers!
I know some of you might find my journey relatable and some may not and that is totally ok!