Developing Insight

In which our Hero sees an edge of the world and wonders if it is his.

I’ve been a programmer since I was 8 years old. Admittedly, at the time I was writing some silly things like a dice rolling application but by the time I was 14, I was functionally a TA for my computer teachers, and by 15 I was working for Procter & Gamble as a paid programmer (Well I started as a free intern, but they kept me on after the internship ended).

I started with a very clear role. I was a programmer. And the career track for that is pretty straightforward too, first you’re a programmer, then you’re a team lead and run a team of programmers, and then you become an architect and design the stuff that your team of programmers will work on. And… then I’d do that till old age. You know. 30. (grin)

But it turns out that not only am I good at those roles, I’m also good at explaining what’s going on to managers. And when their other projects had troubles, they’d get me to take a look. Or when their other projects needed a guy, they’d pick me, regardless of the fact that I didn’t know anything about their work.

And suddenly I was being a project manager, or an interface designer, or a tester, or a business analyst or a process designer. Instead of having a speciality, I became a firefighter, playing roles as I went. Hello client, I am a professional web application architect. Hello, other client, why yes, I’m an expert in data warehouses. Hey, client, I know I was last here as an expert in GIS scheduling, but now I’m an expert in HR benefits. Oh, and I know I was just here as an HR benefit expert, but actually that’s just part of my being an expert in salesforce management.

The recurring message of my career is that there is no technical challenge I cannot solve. Period. Not that I always win. Sometimes I’m defeated by budget or time or by the sheer weight of client inertia, but I get things done.

There is an evolution to people. There are plenty of hotshot technical people like me, and a lot of them graduate to managerial roles and stop touching the code and their skills kind of diminish until they can’t actually do much but they have the words and practise to be able to talk pretty well about things. And then there is the rare senior manager who is also technical, and honestly, that’s the direction I’ve always seen myself going.

But I make things go. And the other lesson over the years has been the awareness that not only am I team lead, I’m also top dog. The new guys on the team may not realize this, but I did their job. And I can *still* do their jobs. And at least as well as them. So I get pulled into some esoteric not-team-lead issues because I’m smart and know things. (recent triumph: Solved a team’s “this feature is impossible” in a language I haven’t used seriously in 10 years. With square brackets. Seriously. The difference between “impossible” and “possible” was exactly this: [] Heh.)

And that’s me. That’s basically me for the last decade. Uberconsultant. Walking the world like a god, pausing once in a while to invent some flowers. Able to take on any technical problem and wrestle it into submission. Unlimited by actual knowledge because my experience is vast and my capacity for abstraction from it is dwarfed only by my ego.

Until…

I was working on a little technical proof of concept. Trivially simple. Connect to a server, grab *any* piece of data. Just to prove that my account actually works. Piece of cake. I did something like this in about 10 minutes ages ago.

Except I don’t have the tools I had then. So I slapped one together in a few minutes. Except it doesn’t handle security all that well. That’s okay, I’ve got another tool… but it turned out not to handle the proxy server. And another tool choked on the structure of the message (It made assumptions that weren’t true for me). And so I kept trying approaches.

And trying…

And trying…

Until a week later, intermittently experimenting between other tasks… I reached this point of questioning myself. Maybe it’s time to give up? Maybe it’s time to concede that I couldn’t figure this out fast enough, and hand the problem off to a subordinate with actualy development tools installed. Maybe I’m not the god damn batman?

Is it time to put down the screwdriver?

Well, you start questioning the core of your professional identity and you start to discover that despite your best efforts, the face that you do your profession all day means that your profession is all tangled into your actual identity and suddenly questioning that professional identity is an existential crisis because now it’s time for me to make a decision to change, to evolve into the next me and leave this defining piece of me behind.

And I’m fortunate enough to know that I’m just a dot on a spectrum and that not only will I be surpassed but that I’ve been surpassed all along. Good as I am, there’s always been better than me. So this shouldn’t be a shocking idea that… I’m leaving that piece behind.

I’m still a good person. And technically, I made the choice to put my life ahead of my career years ago. And this is the natural consequence. I’m still me… just a different me.

It’s not losing. It’s not defeat. It’s just change. Change happens. Change is okay.

Fuck.

The business day after my existential crisis, I was getting ready to give up. And towards the end of the day, Hollywood asked me a couple of questions about my stuck experiment. And one of them gave me an idea.

And I looked at him and admitted, “I had pretty much decided to give up on this. And now you’ve given me another idea to try. So now it’s just going to take longer and I’ll have to work really hard when I’d just started to get used to the idea that it’d be easier to leave the technical nitty-gritty to the grunts.”

He laughed at me.

He knows me.

The idea didn’t work. Neither did the next two. But that one suggestion was enough to make me dig in. And it took another week to crack the problem. But I got it.

I’ll have to put down the screwdriver eventually. I’ll need to accept that my priorities and interests are elsewhere and that someday my halfassed attention is not enough to outclass the shmucks around me. I’ll need to finish the existential reconstruction that comes with leaving a self behind.

But not yet.