This week, Robert Martin posted this article: Whiners that Fail A line that particularly caught my eye was the following: “YOU, and NO ONE ELSE, is responsible for your career.” … I think, if asked about this, a lot of people would shrug and say say “yeah, okay, I suppose that’s true”. But that idea a really life-changing idea if you think it through-at least it was for me when I realized it several years ago.
For many years, I was a pretty head-down coder- yes, taking pride in my work, yes, getting my work done, and I was pretty good at working the way I’d done, but I wasn’t actively looking to improve, and only really hitting new ideas as I accidentally ran into them. Eventually, I found myself in a particularly difficult/stressful work environment, overworked, supporting a large, complex, high-usage, system with large amount of legacy code of dubious quality. Then, the unthinkable happened-the one colleague who was teaming with me to support the system resigned, and my employer chose not to replace him. Things got much worse for me. I saw my future ahead of me, and it was what I was already living: stress, pressure, and a lack of respect- both from those around me, and from myself for the shoddy work I was doing while flailing, falling further and further behind.
In the midst of this, I came to a realization: my employer didn’t fundamentally care about code quality, about my health, my happiness, my work-life balance, my career or anything else-all they really cared about was that I was spinning enough plates to keep the clients from leaving. All of those things were up to me and only me to obtain if I wanted them-they didn’t necessarily come automatically, and nobody really owed them to me. Sure, some employers have a bit more forethought and realize that satisfying these needs is a good way to keep top employees, but it’s just a perk-the real responsibility to make sure my life and career is on track is with me, not them. As for code quality, from a selfish perspective, I wanted code quality at least in part so I could look myself in the mirror at the end of the day. Sure, of course there are real, very important company-centric reasons for code quality, but regardless, cranking out poor quality code day after day was extremely demoralizing.
I thought this through a bit more-then decided that, improving my life hung on my skills and what I had to offer. It was like waking up. I made improving myself my priority-I started reading everything I could get my hands on, and started blogging as a means to force myself to stay focused. I found I really enjoyed this kind of study, and the habits I built then stuck with me. The actual content of what I’ve learned since has fundamentally changed and tremendously enhanced the way I think and work, but it was the initial recognition of the need for self-reliance that got me started on the path of improvement.
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