Accidentally in Code

Tag: passion

  • Passion and the Developer

    Passion and the Developer

    danbo tightrope
    Credit: Flickr / Andreas Kiebs

    I go to a startup event, and it’s interesting to hear non-technical people talking about developers like over-priced commodities.

    L comes to me for advice, she’s contemplating her next move and worrying about whether or not she feels passion for the project.

    C reads my blog, tells me that she can tell I’m passionate about writing from my writing. I say, “that doesn’t mean I want writing to be my job.”

    R knows what she wants to prioritise with her career, but is hearing conflicting advice about what she should prioritise instead (and it sounds a lot like “passion”).

    I loathe the word “passion”. I loathe it in relationships, where it seems to mean seeking out the movie style ending rather than the day to day. And I especially loathe it in career advice. I like the Study Hacks ethos – it’s not passion, it’s hard focus.

    Entrepreneurs talk about passion. Cool. You probably have to be chasing something really hard to give up economic stability. That doesn’t mean it’s for everybody.

    Passion is Blinding

    To be passionate about something, means being unable to look at it rationally. This is unfortunate, because rationality is a very important part of building things well. Maybe it helps you stay awake for a week on a caffeine-fuelled coding binge. But it’s hard to love anything that much, for long.

    Passion doesn’t help you prioritise, it asks you to do everything. Data and pragmatism help you to prioritise.

    Passion doesn’t help you weigh up the eng-overhead and the data on usage of that feature and advocate for cutting it.

    You are Not the Decider

    There’s a reason why Product (PM) and Engineering are two separate roles. The PM looks at the big picture and the whole product and market (the what), the engineer owns how to build it (the how). It’s cool to have an opinion, but the PM is the decider on the what (this is fair! Engineers don’t like it when PMs try to be deciders on the how).

    When you feel passionately about the what, but you disagree with your PM and they overrule you? That sucks. But that is their job.

    You might think you know better, and maybe you have a really bad PM and that is true. But if you have a competent PM, they are going to make better decisions than you (on average) because that is how they spend their time.

    Competition is Fierce

    A friend was working on a super cool project, that she should totally have loved… but she didn’t. She should have been really happy… but she wasn’t. She was really stressed by the environment.

    We talked about it, and I observed something along the lines that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to work on something like that, but that I really didn’t want to work with the people who really wanted to work on something like that.

    Because a lot of people go looking for passion, and The New Shiny, the people who end up building The New Shiny are often the people who were willing to shove other people out of the way to get there. If you are happy to go about your work looking over your shoulder to see who might push you out of the way to get what they want, cool. I’m not.

    You Live in the Details

    It’s great to like the bigger thing that you are working on, but at the end of the day engineers mostly spend their time pushing pixels or protos. 1000 lines of test code does not make me feel warm and fuzzy about the product; it makes me feel confident about it’s stability. The menu bar might be part of some grand vision, but after a couple of days of just you and the menu bar, the vision seems pretty far away.

    If Not Passion, Then What?

    As a developer, passion is a distraction. For me, it’s not about passion for a product, it’s about having a healthy relationship with my job, a commitment to my career, and then maybe a general excitement about technology.

    What does a healthy relationship look like?

    • I like what I’m working on, and I think people will be better off because it exists.
    • The people I work with treat me with respect.
    • My work does not have to encompass my entire life. I can maintain other interests.

    Most importantly though, it’s good if you think that leadership can manage and ship a project of this scope (preferably, this should be based on evidence) and that you can manage and execute on the part of the project within your scope (again, it’s best if this is based on evidence).

    I say with evidence because passion hides, rather than cures mismanagement. Passion is the advocate of scope creep, the delusion that sets in at the expense of prioritisation, the fuel of Dunning-Kruger, and the carrot that would have you work more hours, for less money, on something that is destined to fail.

  • Rediscovering Balance

    Free Child Walking on White Round Spheres Balance Creative Commons
    Credit: flickr / Pink Sherbet Photography

    My life has been out of balance for as long as I can clearly remember. And I know, the most successful women embrace that imbalance but my feeling is that mine has been too far out of balance, or perhaps just too imbalanced in the wrong way.

    Last semester, I was in so much pain from dislocating my kneecap a lot of activities were off the table. I worked a lot. My TA frankly sucked. I achieved some things that made me really happy, but the pressure that I felt because what I was working on was always defined took it out of me. I had too much structure, and not enough freedom and creativity.

    This semester, I’m trying to re-equilibriate. That means working hard, but carving out time to be inspired and un-pressured. I bunked off today, and as a result finished something that I’ve been working on for weeks. The time I needed was there in my schedule, but what wasn’t was the freedom I need to be inspired.

    Teaching skiing on Sundays is so far amazing for my balance. I spend the day without my phone (or computer!), outside, doing something physical. And I return too exhausted to do anything other than watch movies and go to bed. Then, I sleep for 12 hours. I’m not sure how much I enjoy being a ski instructor, but I do enjoy skiing, and the feeling of achievement when after an hour I see an improvement in a student’s skiing. I think, though, what I really enjoy is not being a grad student. It’s like a break from my life.

    I want a life that I’m sufficiently happy with that I don’t need to take breaks from it. But I don’t think I will have that whilst I’m at graduate school.

    With WISE, lately, I’ve been delegating as much as I can. There have been some teething problems, but what I notice is that I’m doing more but it’s easier – I’ve tipped the balance from a list of obligations to inspirations. I need to do that more in my life, generally. So tonight, even though I know what I should do is go ski training, what I’m going to do is go to Body Pump followed by Body Balance. Because, honestly, I know what I need to do to improve my skiing. It’s 1) buy new ski boots and 2) go and work on being able to ski on one leg (dislocating my kneecap didn’t just imbalance my life) and do consistent short radius turns down a black run until my thighs burn. And what I need to do to improve my feeling of imbalance is to make a shift from “what I should do” to “what I want to do”.

    There are three ways to do this, I think. One is to rejig things, which is what I’ve done with WISE and my schedule by bunking off.

    Option two is to ignite my passion again, so something goes from “should” to “want to”. Going back to kickboxing in January, it was a bit of a should. But I’ve upped my fitness to the point where I can go to the non-beginner classes and it’s starting to become a “want to”, instead. For school, on Saturday I was working but came across something that was really inspiring and as a result was able to clarify some things I’d been thinking, then I had a brief chat with my co-supervisor which was so helpful after the other day (he seems to have read what I’ve worked on, and see things more in line with how I’m seeing them).

    Third, and finally, I think leverage is important. Leverage is buying new ski boots (my current ones are so beat up they don’t fit right anymore and keep coming undone when I ski hard). Leverage was getting a trainer when I started going back to the gym because it was helpful for using my time there best, and motivation. Leverage has been getting someone else to write my CV – I’ve found that the amount of time I’ve put in has been about the same as it would take me to write a (mediocre) resume, but hopefully as a result I’ll get a much better one. I also feel more prepared for interviews. Leverage, is delegating stuff to other people for WISE, we had a big event on Saturday, and are introducing monthly “workshops” – so we’re achieving more as a group now I’m not a bottleneck. It can scary to give up control, but it can also be empowering.

    I guess for everything that gives me this feeling of “don’t want to”, I need to consider whether I can rejig, ignite, or leverage to make the situation better. Because ultimately, I don’t want to rediscover balance, I want an imbalance – I just want a better one.