Are you good at what you do in your day job?

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A2A, just so people don’t think I’m tooting my own horn just for the heck of it.

I am shockingly good at my day job. I’m so good at it that I have to measure carefully exactly how good I want to be at it. Having had programmed computers and worked on weird, hard-to-grok systems without much in the way of help or documentation since I was in the fourth grade, there is nothing about the task of building websites that even remotely challenges me. I have no desire to be challenged in this area, so don’t bother trying to tell me that X coding is way harder and that I should be doing that instead. I’m not looking for challenge. I just want to cash my ridiculously large paychecks (to me anyway, $105k isn’t really all that ridiculous when you boil it down) and go home at 5.

What fascinates me about my job is the human element, and this is where ‘measuring how good I am at my job’ is important. The thing I prize the most about my career is stability. Doing the job of three people by myself and pushing them off the project is liable to get me fired, or at the very least reassigned to somewhere where my talents won’t cause too much political fallout. Perhaps I can pull that off but being callous about other people’s careers, but really I don’t want to risk it. There’s just no reason to compared to just punching the clock and doing the job I was hired to do, not act like a power-hungry asshole.

My last job was even easier than this one. I spent a few hours a week making work for myself, the rest of it reading and studying. In the beginning I thought I needed real, serious projects to get better with, but after unilaterally embarking on projects and finding myself chasing my own tail too much, I realized that projects that aren’t seen, used, and defined by others are more or less useless. So I worked with my boss to come up with something better. That project died when my boss left the company. I tried to keep it alive, but as nobody else was interested, I went back to web browsing and side projects.

When I accomplished my main goal of moving the company to a new platform, it wasn’t through building things or effective engineering but through effective reasoning. It also had the effect of pushing me out of the company, as I was not about to take a perfectly good budding Rails career and paint a big fat scarlet letter on it by switching to Magento. My next job came with a nice fat pay raise, a team that I could work with and influence, and swank new digs.

The most career-impacting thing I’ve ever learned is that everything begins with people, not with technology. Technology can be part of a solution, but the solution has to be used by people, and so they are the most important moving parts. I can use that fact to great advantage. For example, the requirements they give you, if you implement features that only meet those requirements, and nothing more, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of time and you make yourself look really good. Keep doing this and you find yourself with a ton of free time.

Trying to fight this is completely useless for me. You can try asking for more work, but after awhile you just start looking like a pain in the ass rather than an effective employee. Making your own work runs the risk of making yourself irrelevant. Trying to roll that free time back into productive pursuits that benefit the company hiring you doesn’t take too long to become counter-productive. Eventually you’re just making work for yourself and you’ll eventually burn out.

Programmers are masochists, they often don’t want more power and less work. The best reward for most effective programmers is more things to program. They want less power and more work, ask them to take on management positions and they recoil in horror.