I have considered at length, my place in the world and how this may relate back to my general well being and happiness. Acknowledging that being employed will encompass a significant portion of one’s life in today’s ecosystem, it does make one pause and ponder the potential overlap of work-life interactions.
Within the tech-sphere in which I work (as a half-baked engineer, mind you) I’ve encountered many fellow programmers of varying skill and enthusiasm. I’ve oft joked with old colleagues that skill is inversely proportionate to enthusiasm; that is, the more experienced a programmer becomes and the more things they see, the less enthusiastic they become.
I’ve been working professionally for about 5 years now, and let me tell ya – I’ve seen some stuff. I remember when I first started out; a young man being exposed to the world of massive corporations and assuming that there’s no way that the backbone of these workplaces was built on old duct-tape and PVA glue. I assumed that I’d be surrounded by people genuinely invested in their work, plying their trade with the seasoned hands of a professional. God, I was SO wrong.
So, I begun wondering – how important is it that you are competent? Additionally, does one even need to be vaguely interested in the work they do in order to be successful? These questions are largely philosophical in nature at this stage, and hopefully by the end of this article you may be able to peer into my mind palace as to how these thoughts have been generated over the last 5 years.
I write all these words under the guise of someone who is ‘superior’ to his fellows; I can assure you, this is not the case. I do not come from a formal engineering background; I simply have an interest in the way computers work. So, take what I say with a large granule of salt (perhaps two, if necessary).
Anyway, rewind a couple of years and you would see me interviewing for a very large company called Amazon Web Services (WOA, it only took 4 paragraphs for this guy to tell me that he ‘interviewed’ at AWS). I was going after a Data Engineering position and underwent several hours of interviews; both technical and general.
I remember taking the entire day off for 8+ hours of interviews, back-to-back to test my mettle from several global team-members; all of which I would not be working with directly. I feel I did quite well on the general interviews and how I aligned to their operational style. I admittedly struggled greatly with some aspects of the technical interviews; namely writing some very simple Python programs in front of their more senior engineers.
This is more a comment on how the engineers who looked at my code reacted, so feel free to disregard. I remember three of them being genuinely upset with my solutions; although their reactions were well-founded with how poorly optimised my code was but I feel their reactions also extend well beyond the workplace. I mean, I’m a dude who you have to spend 45 minutes with and watch struggle through a text-pad writing code and at the end you look like you are unhappy with being alive. I’m not sure I would react this way to someone coming to me for help with writing a program nor would I react this way in an interview (although as you can probably tell, I may not be well-suited to a hiring board).
The most senior of the engineers who I had a 1-1 with was incredibly nice and patient, which was a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, this is the one I bombed the hardest! All I had to do was a find a maximum value within a nested dictionary using native functions then ‘optimise’ it later on. The poor guy even told me how to solve the problem and I still managed to screw it up. Irrespective of my skill level, this guy seemed WAY happier with his place in life compared to the other three I had encountered earlier that day.
So, where am I going with all my various displays of ineptitude and comments on random people I only met for 45 minutes of which I will never see again? Well, I’d like to explore the importance of the following:
- Workplace happiness
- Competence and enthusiasm
- How the aforementioned relate to one another.
It wouldn’t be fair if I just commented on my own horrible ways of working, so I’ll dob in some other things that I’ve seen in various environments.
One of my favourites was seeing hardcoded credentials in a remote repository that would recursively drop and delete the production database of an AWS-Snowflake instance. I too, have done janky things in the past, but this is pretty bad. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, this guy both thought that he was genuinely good at his job and was very pleased with the solution he made (although to this day, I am still unsure as to what he was trying to achieve). He was in a senior position and was in-charge of managing the database environment.
On the absolute flip-side, I once worked with an incredibly talented mechanical engineer who had the greatest programming chops I’ve seen to this day and could convey deeply technical concepts to almost anyone. He realised within the context of his workplace, that his skill was largely wasted on busy-work that he could complete in a couple of hours in an 8-hour work day. So, instead of making horrible things he would complete his tasks for the day across a very slow-chilled out pace and intersperse breaks between them. He was always stress free and got to do heaps of hilarious antics during a typical work-day. Funnily enough, we were assigned to the same project when I was very inexperienced and he helped me become significantly better than I once was. Hell, we even became friends by the end of it!
I reflect on my reasons for applying for AWS and I can genuinely only think of bad reasons for them. Namely, ‘yo, I worked at AWS fam then I quit’ was one of my motivations. I think of my current position and think of all the reasons I could jump ship to somewhere else – but is it even that important?
I realise you can meet both bad and good people when moving around – it’s never a bad thing to leave your current ‘comfort’ zone to go somewhere more technically challenging. Although, if the case is that you’re surrounded by people who are miserable OR you’re surrounded by people who have no idea what they’re doing is it possible to find a ‘goldilocks’ zone?
I suppose if one is competent enough to complete their duties at work without being horrible at it, that seems sufficient to at least consider staying and gathering experience. Alternatively, going to a huge conglomerate would also be an experience within itself; it’s hard for me to justify changing if the result in the end is the same as what I have now, just at a larger scale. Additionally, there is a certain freedom to not being 100% invested in your workload where you have a lot of time to pursue things you enjoy greatly.
Anyway, this article has meandered long enough and I believe I have made my thoughts incarnate in the real world without managing to say anything important. Food for thought.