How to become a software developer that everybody love and respect

Muhammad Umair
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

Today, I will share a small personal story

Out of university when I join my first job, the initial days were a breeze. No one expects anything real from me. They want me to get familiar with their products. So no programming work.

But when I see people around me talking about the programming stuff I feel like I am nobody in this arena. They were discussing things like ‘running programs without an O.S’ and ‘user mode vs kernel mode programming’. I thought these senior people are geniuses and they know things that nobody teaches at the university.

Six months down the road I find out that I was at the bottom of the barrel. One day I was struggling to debug a code and out of frustration, I thought that I have chosen the wrong field. Programming is hard and proving yourself a good programmer is even harder. For me, the only way to survive is to prove myself in front of my seniors.

The biggest hurdle in proving myself — there was nobody to help me. Books were limited to mediocre examples and there was nothing specific to my problems in the documentation.

Senior developers were no help. They have assumed that a junior developer got to know the ‘obvious’ things. They forgot that they were junior once and these things that are obvious now were ‘harder’ before.

Anyway, in the quest of proving myself, I think about a graph feature in a product and started working on that. After programming, for a while, I thought when I show the graphs everybody will cheer me. But when I showed them the beautiful graphs their response was mediocre and worst of all nobody has used that feature for the lifetime of that product.

Next time I went a little functional then graphical. I tried to improve the performance of an existing system. But the performance bump was not significant to ring the bell in the ears of management/seniors.

One and half year was passed and I was unable to achieve anything significant. I was tired of minuscule jobs like installations, documentation, grunt work on excel, minor code fixing and other menial jobs.

I was so furious about proving myself that I tried to show my personal product on a company’s demo day. That was too courageous. Or foolish. It could have failed miserably and ruined the company’s trust. Fortunately or unfortunately just before the final demonstration, the hardware required to run the software was failed and I could not show my product. I still think about that event — how childish I was.

A typical Demo situation. Stressful day for developers!

Then on a casual day, I showed the same product to my boss. He liked it. Then he showed that to his bosses and they loved it. In a couple of months, everybody was talking about it and it became a super hot product. Finally, I got the reward in terms of respect and recognition.

How did I pick the idea of that product? I just listen to seniors. I listen to their problems. They needed that product desperately but they did not have time to work on that product. I picked it and work on the solution for about 3–4 months — silently.

The moral of my story is if you want to prove yourself you have to make things easier for your bosses or customers and focus on solving their problems. You will get the result you desire :)

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