Stop working as if you have 1000 years left
How I used Holland’s Code to find my ideal career path
Three years ago, on a cold winter night in Melbourne, I fired up my laptop to do another practice exam. This time, it was a ‘Cisco Certified Network Associate Exam Simulation’. I felt tired just looking at it, and wondered if I would fall asleep at my desk like I had the night before. Then my newborn baby started crying, only 15 minutes after being put down.
Just as I was getting up to give my wife a break, I received an urgent work call. At the time, I worked as a telecom integration engineer, and the deployment we’d planned had run into some technical hurdles. The next deployment window wasn’t for another week, so I wondered whether I should drop everything and jump on a conference call. As I tried to decide, my baby’s crying grew louder.
Sleep deprived and stressed
My life wasn’t always as stressful. Five years earlier, I started working for a global telco as a graduate engineer. I was getting paid to work on some of the world’s most expensive telecommunication systems that only a handful of people have the skills to work on. I lived in a cosy rental apartment in South Yarra with my newlywed wife, and my weekends were spent exploring Melbourne, meeting new people and planning my next overseas holiday. Everyone was happy, even my parents.
So what happened? Well, we had a baby, which meant our household income halved while my wife was on maternity leave. So I took on more responsibility at work, spending my days (and nights) keeping critical infrastructure running incident free. My seniors grew increasingly busy, which meant there was even less time for me to up-skill by shadowing them. On top of that, my dad made some investment mistakes and his restaurant business in China started to decline.
Oh, and did I mention that I had a newborn baby that didn’t sleep? My daughter’s birth was a milestone in my life, but it did keep me up at night. Not just in the literal sense, but also in the sense that it made me question my approach to my career growth. I realised that I needed a change and I needed it fast. If I was going to have less time and energy over the next decade or so, I needed to spend both carefully. If I wanted to become somebody someday, then I needed a plan.
Doing an audit of my career
I knew I wanted to be doing something I enjoyed for eight hours a day. But I didn’t know what that was. To figure it out, I did an audit of my current ways of working, listing all the responsibilities in my current role and ranking them based on how much I enjoyed them. For example, running API workshops and doing code demos were at the top of the list, because I enjoyed those. Software testing and firefighting incidents were at the bottom. I also started logging the time I spent on each task in 10-minute blocks for the next two weeks.
What I discovered was fascinating. I was spending almost all (80%) of my time on things I didn’t enjoy doing, and only a bit of time (20%) on what I loved! I also realised that the things I loved happened to be the activities that were of the most value to my employer — creating successful partnerships for my clients by helping dev teams integrate to our products faster and better. It was the tasks that required a balance of people and technical skills that I enjoyed the most.
After my audit, I shared findings with my manager, who gave me the authority to say no to certain tasks, and a budget to automate others. Things were better, but it wasn’t enough.
Finding my dream role
Most IT professionals’ career paths look like the letter ‘T’. They start by gaining a breadth of technical skills like the top horizontal line of the ‘T’. Then later on, specialise in one area like the ‘I’ at the bottom. I felt like I had mastered a breadth of technical skills, but couldn’t make that next step to the specialisation that I enjoyed. So after 18 months of adjusting the responsibilities in my role, up-skilling and looking for other opportunities in my company, I decided to start looking elsewhere.
When I saw a job ad for a developer evangelist at Xero, it felt like I’d finally found my dream role. It required both technical and people skills, and would also allow me to work on the thing that gives me the most satisfaction: helping developers to get from A to B with an API integration. My interviews ran so smoothly they didn’t feel like interviews, just a few people having a chat. To my relief, my coding skills did not disappoint either.
I later learned that the method I used to analyse my work happiness is the same approach used in Holland’s Code. This is a popular theory developed by American psychologist John Holland in the 1970s. He reasoned that people and work environments can be loosely classified into six different groups, and that people work best in work environments that match their preferences. Most people will fit into a few of the categories. These are:
Realistic: practical, physical, concrete, hands-on, machine, and tool-orientedInvestigative: analytical, intellectual, scientific, explorative, thinkerArtistic: creative, original, independent, chaotic, inventive, media, graphics, and textSocial: cooperative, supporting, helping, healing/nurturing, teachingEnterprising: competitive environments, leadership, persuading, status focusedConventional: detail-oriented, organising, clerical
Auditing my work tasks based on how much I enjoyed them and shifting my career to one that would make me happy is essentially what John Holland tried to teach the masses. Because when work suits you, it makes you feel better. It energises you, because it aligns to your personality. By the way, if you want to find out what your category is, you can Google Holland’s Code — there are lots of free online tests to choose from.
A better work-life balance
Two years later, I am still loving my role as a developer evangelist. I particularly enjoy working with hundreds of Xero’s app and developer partners on their integration ideas, and helping them build technical solutions to solve our mutual users’ problems. I do everything from writing blogs and running webinars, to speaking at developer roadshows and attending technology events. I also get to craft developer tools such as software development kits, and have recently started a meetup group called DevRel Australia.
Yes, I work later than I should on some days. But these days, family comes first and I only do extra work occasionally and for good reason. And I still study at night, but I rarely fall asleep because the tech I’m learning about is so interesting. Instead of treating work and life completely separately, I’ve aligned my personal goals and my career goals so they are integrated. Work is an extension of my personal growth — it’s who I am. That means I can bring my whole self to work.
So what did I learn over the last few years? I’ve realised that I don’t have 1000 years left in my career. Life is short, your work life is even shorter. When you think about it, most of us will only have three or four decades to build our career. That translates to 1500 weeks, or 360 months. To me, this creates a lot of urgency. The best career decision I made was to stop spending my time on things I don’t enjoy doing, thinking that I will chase my dream job ‘someday’. Someday will never come, so why not start now.
