What’s lacking in my software development career

We are the assets of their business, not our playground to play with their source code just to improve in the process. We needed to produce an output.

Learning different technologies and tying or meshing them up together are one of the coolest things I ever did in my career as a software developer. It makes my work exciting too! In fact, immersing my career further towards web development made a huge leap of improvement to me. Thanks to that I am a full-time web developer that can develop web apps in a short span of time thanks to the evolution of IoT.

At some point it was exciting. Learning new technologies and programming were my thing when I’m not doing anything at home. It became a sort of hobby and a habit to me. Until I hit a plateau.

Why? Learning new technologies and cool programming techniques alone weren’t enough to take my career to the next level. In fact, it was lacking a sense of purpose.

Okay, let’s start with this question: Why exactly do we software developers learn to program? For what purpose? Why do we spent so much time in mastering different kinds of programming paradigms and layouts? What exactly are we accomplishing by doing this?

Exactly! To create apps!

Programming and technology are just tools for us Software Engineers to use for developing different kinds of applications to innovate the world. It’s just a simple logic and plain common sense to think of it. But over time I get excited in learning different kinds of technology, I tend to forget the original purpose of these things.

And that is why I hit a plateau, because I don’t know where to use these knowledge that I’ve learned upon myself. I still can’t get to create an app that will utilize my skills to the fullest. Only my full-time job can get me to use the skills I’ve learned in my self-learning process.

So I decided to have lots of ideas and create something out of that idea. Just ideas enough to create sample apps in which it also demonstrates real-life solutions will do so that I could further hone my skills at my own pace. I can’t expect my employers to be happy by just simply making their projects my training ground to hone my skills. Business doesn’t work that way. We are the assets of their business, not our playground to play with their source code just to improve in the process. We needed to produce an output.

I noticed that habit with lots of developers taking this profession. They train at their day-to-day work. They make it as their training ground. While it makes sense in terms of career profession, this doesn’t make sense in business perspective. Unless if you’re just an encoder or some job with a little or no impact to a business, or you’re working in a company that doesn’t encourage technology, Software Development is a serious business. We create a product, we develop, we innovate. And it’s business!

So what’s lacking in my software development career and to other people who pursue this career is probably this one: “Brainstorm ideas. Build more apps!”