Twenty five years into my career and I finally figured out my mission. This was after patterns, after xUnit, after TDD, after Extreme Programming. Only then was I able to step back and say, “What’s the puzzle of which these are the pieces?”
I (like many of us) am going to be taking some risky career decisions in our new macro-economic environment. I’d like to be as clear as possible about the map I’m navigating on.
Here, then, I take apart my personal mission.
Help
I can’t make anyone feel anything. The most I can do is offer help. The first level of help is living my truth myself. Only when I’m living it can I write or speak about it with integrity.
Setting the bar at “help” makes it difficult to monitor progress and difficult to claim credit. Actual impact often trades off against perceived impact. Boo hoo. I’ll focus on actual impact and mostly count on others to slice the credit pie.
Geeks
GeePaw Hill defines a geek as, “Highly technical, highly creative, & highly desirous of being both.” These are my people. Sometimes (as with me) this comes with social challenges we can work to improve.
Some of my peers went from helping geeks to helping the whole world. That’s too much for me. I’m confident in the things I say because I use them on myself first. Trying to address the whole world seems like a stretch.
If some of what I say crosses over (as XP did briefly with the business community), that’s great. But it’s a bonus. My mission is to help geeks.
Feel
My mission is focused on feelings because geeks are generally already pretty good at thinking. Not perfect. Smart doesn’t equal right. But the big deficit is in managing emotions.
For example, I’ve learned to “insert logic” in situations where my emotions otherwise tend to overwhelm me. When ADD is pulling me in half dozen directions I say, “Alright,” & that reminds me to do one thing.
Safe
My goal in this career-long project is congruence:
- To feel safe when I’m safe.
- To feel unsafe when I’m unsafe & do something about it.
What I noticed when I started actually experiencing my emotions was that my feelings often didn’t match the facts. I’d walk into a party and immediately feel overwhelmed. I’d try to pay attention to everybody and everything. I was safe but I didn’t feel that way.
The reverse happened too. I’d be talking to a manipulative, dishonest wacko and feel fine, aroused even. I was unsafe, interacting with someone who didn’t care if they harmed me (or actively tried to harm me) & I felt perfectly safe. Those feelings don’t match the facts either.
In The World
Just because I’m weird, I’m still a member of the human race. I share responsibility for its follies. I’m only whole when I’m socially connected (primates still). I could probably figure out how to be a pretty happy hermit, but I’d be missing out.
I’d be missing out on another aspect of my mission: explaining people like me to people unlike me. We’re different, but we can find common ground.
My mission treats with the world and its people at the intersection of its needs and my capabilities.
Mission
My mission: help geeks feels safe in the world. Everything I’ve done fits somehow:
- Patterns. Isolate the repeating parts of problems and solutions so the unique aspects come into clearer focus.
- xUnit. Transmute worry into tests that replicate confidence.
- TDD. Break overwhelming problems into a stream of test-code-design-test-code-design.
- Extreme Programming. Create a rhythm and structure for safe social interaction that results in solved problems (often involving code).
- 3X Explore/Expand/Extract. Fit the punishment to the crime. Neither over- nor under-do rigor, creativity, safety, planning, and reaction.
Your Mission
There are ways my mission began the day I walked out of my first college CS course grumbling, “I’m going to change how people do this.” However, the whole picture only came into focus after decades of detailed work. That’s what I’d recommend to you if you’re beginning your career (you know, the first decade or two). Instead of coming up with high-falutin’ words, write more programs.
Once you have enough puzzle pieces, then you can arrange and rearrange them and see what picture pops up.
