“I want to work on a cool project!”
“Hey man! Long time no see! How are you? How are the things at work? Are you still with that cool company you worked for?”
“Hey dude, yeah… I am still there but you know… It’s not that good any more. We are not using new stuff, we are still using some last year frameworks. I am thinking about changing something…”
This is the talk between two friends, two IT engineers. One is clearly not thrilled about technologies being used in the project he is currently working on. He is growing unhappy.
What’s making him feel like this?
— One year old technologies, as he said.
Are those frameworks user friendly? Do they have nice APIs? Do they do their job nicely?
— It’s probably “yes” for all these questions.
Do those frameworks lack any features or prevent him from solving some problem? Is his team failing to deliver because of those techs?
— No. On the contrary, the team is performing very good.
Is there any sound reason why those one year old frameworks should be substituted with new ones?
— Well, no.
So why does this guy think they should?
— He is probably not so sure about it either. He simply feels they should.
Truth be told, there is nothing mysterious happening here. This guy is just not being honest with us. He knows business decisions like this one should not be made based on feeling only. There should be a clear benefit in sight which would justify the move.
As I am not personally interested in potential costs of this technology switch — and you shouldn’t be either — I will just skip that part and move on to the reason making this guy unhappy.
The reason is the feeling we, tech people, very often have. That hunch which makes us believe our career is going down the slope if we are not using bleeding edge technologies.
We let it overcome common sense as we slide into darker corners of our minds where unhappiness dwells.
That lust for new versions of our project dependencies and bitterness in our hearts if we are still not using them.
We want new versions. Even when we don’t know what LMAX Disruptor is and when we are sure our project doesn’t need async logging, we still want that new version.
Being part of the workforce market which is not covered by EU laws doesn’t help either, for instance.
How are you going to satisfy your hunger for BigData technologies if clients don’t want to let you touch the data because of data protection policies?
It is just one more reason to feel less significant and unable to fully develop.
If you let the circumstances get you.
It is important to know your place and your current possibilities. Give your best to learn and grow inside those boundaries but work on moving those boundaries further away, too. Don’t let them box you.
Seize opportunities as they come and create them on your own.
The unhappy guy from above could do a research of the new technologies and present it to his colleagues. He doesn’t need to wait for his product manager, project owner, scrumban kick-master or anyone else to make him do that. He can do it himself.
We often measure our careers by hype levels of technologies and frameworks used. The more hype around the tech, the happier we are.
This is not only untrue — it is also very shallow. Career success cannot be computed as a sum of hypes.
Career represents personal development and growth.
How much more do I know? How much have I improved over time? How much more value do I bring to my employer and my customers?
These should be the questions we use as metrics when making a decision whether we are happy or not.
P.S.
Ah, yes… There is also the career-money metric, measuring how well you are doing by looking at how much you are earning.
From my point of view, it is not as accurate as most people think. And I don’t want to talk about it because it is a bottomless hole from which nothing good ever came from.
