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SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
As a Software Developer, Would You Rather Be a God in the Open-Source Community or Have an Outrageous Salary?
How Do You Measure Your Success as a Developer?
I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart,
But you’ve got being right down to an art,
You think you’re a genius…
…That don’t impress me much
— Shania Twain, 1997
You’ve clocked in the hours. You’ve closed numerous tickets. You’ve consumed plantations worth of coffee beans. You’ve endured mind-numbing meetings. You’ve reported “no impediments” in scrums more times than Trump has claimed “election fraud.”
Overtime hours? Let’s not even go there.
At what point in your career did you stop, take a long pause, give yourself a pat on the back, and think to yourself, “I made it!”
Or even better, “I f***** made it! I am the sh**!” (In a good way)
I’m a career software developer. I took the college route. The boring route, you might say. The one somewhat prescribed by my parents. It’s been two decades and I’m still going at it.
Along the way, I met tons of developers who got there via many different paths. Some arrived via the military. Many were self-taught. Others took the bootcamp approach.
Roughly a third of the developers I worked with had previous careers in other fields. Developers, no matter where they came from, have one thing in common, a love of problem-solving.
The First Rewards
Software development, at its very core, is coders working on one big-ass puzzle they’re trying to solve…that they’re also creating as they go.
Solving the puzzles can be quite rewarding — just ask any college student who’s spent — or rather, lost — a weekend, tracking down an elusive bug in their programs. The dopamine rush can be addicting.
But is it rewarding enough to merit the brand of success? In the early stages of programming, yes. In college, or in the learning phases, I remember feeling accomplished…
