Dicking Around, Professionally

As far back as I can remember I’ve been quietly obsessed with almost all avenues of human creativity. The imagination and craft that we have applied throughout history is nothing short of incredible.

I have nothing but admiration for those who master their craft and produce truly breathtaking, almost transcendent creative works. But to become a master, which I believe everyone has the potential to become, requires thousands of hours of dedication, sometimes at the expense of everything else. This is not a commitment I’ve ever been willing to make. There are simply too many things I want to try in the fleeting moments I have on this planet. And for a long time, that’s exactly what I tried to do.

Throughout my formative years I turned my hand to illustration, painting, animation, film making, photography, music, carpentry, electronics, metalwork, even tattooing. Even now, there are still many things I want to have a go at. But the trade-off I made with my quest to try it all is that I never got really good at any one thing. In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t really live in a society that rewards this kind of experimentation (or at least its not promoted). There isn’t really an educational path for “all of the things”, a fact I tested thoroughly by starting three separate degrees. The problem in each case was not the subject, but the requirement to close the door on everything else.

Unfortunately, this meant I left education without really a clue as to what to do next. I’d tried a lot of things, enjoyed them all, shown promise in some, but without a willingness to commit to any one thing as a career, it was hard to know what to do. So like any young person struggling to figure out where they fit in the world, I just carried on with my dead end job in a Comet store warehouse.

Over the decade that followed I bounced from job to job, working in a call centre, then IT, and finally InfoSec. I met some truly wonderful people along the way, but hated every single minute of the work.

In that same period, I married the love of my life and we welcomed our daughter in to the world the year after. My life at home was everything I could dare to dream of. I’d known plenty of people who were accomplished in their careers that would freely admit that all they really wanted were people at home to share it all with. I felt like I had the better half of the deal, so just sucked it up, a job’s a job’s a job.

But here’s the rub, no matter how great your home life is, guess what? You’re going to be spending roughly 20% of the waking hours in your life at work! I don’t know about you, but I don’t just want to switch my brain off entirely and trade in that time for cash alone. I’d like some payback in joy and fulfilment thank you kindly.

Around 2019, I started to grow particularly frustrated with myself and the fact I’d seemingly laid waste to my working life without ever really giving myself the chance to do anything worthwhile. After much research and soul searching I settled on web development as a potential option for checking a few of my boxes. Throughout my teens I’d dabbled with building websites and I’d really enjoyed it (RIP GeoCities). At worst, I thought it would provide me the opportunity to still make bank, whilst scratching that long neglected creative itch. At best, I’d find myself right at the centre of that trite, super cringe Venn diagram reposted ad infinitum by every would-be career coach on LinkedIn. But isn’t the goal for all of us in a capitalist world to find someone to pay us to do the things we love?

In a somewhat serendipitous turn of events, I had the chance to take voluntary redundancy from my InfoSec role, which afforded me a few months to retrain as a developer. Because I’d dabbled so much with various things over the years, I felt like the whole thing came together really quickly, and after a slightly longer time out of work than anticipated due to a certain global pandemic, I landed my first job as a Software Engineer in the latter part of 2020.

It felt too soon in honesty, I was working at a consultancy, and project after project I felt completely out of my depth, at any point I expected a tap on the shoulder to ask what exactly I thought I was doing there.

To my surprise, I kept receiving praise, kept getting pay bumps, it was an utterly confusing experience. I thought maybe the company didn’t know what they were doing if they thought that I did.

I decided consultancy work wasn’t for me, and I moved on, in some ways, I considered it a ‘reset’, and interviewed like the junior I thought I was.

Yet again, I was praised, promoted. What the fuck was going on? How had I had such a successful start to my career, yet felt like I didn’t really bring anything special? I wasn’t the SQL guy, I wasn’t the TypeScript guy, I was just a guy who could do a little bit of everything, but nothing especially well. Had I become a software engineering charlatan without even realising? Blagging my way upward on confidence and good will? Surely I’m going to get found out and the whole thing is going to collapse in on itself?

Anon, one morning, I was in a feature planning meeting that had ran aground. On one side of the table, the designer with a vision for something clean and elegant, on the other, an increasingly exasperated engineer explaining why we couldn’t build it. I’d sat in enough of these to recognise what was happening, the designer didn’t care specifically about the solution, but they cared very much about the user getting frustrated and lost in the UI. The engineer, wasn’t being obstructive, they were correct that our current architecture would make what was being asked for hard to implement. As I often do, I said something like, “Maybe we could consider something like Y instead of X, I think that’s buildable within current constraints, but still provides the experience I think we want”. Great. Time for lunch.

Afterwards, a colleague and good friend, who also believed he might not get his lunch, said something like “Good job! You always seem to join dots nobody else can see”. Ha! Yeah, I thought, tell me about it. Oh wait… lightbulb moment!

I thought I’d spent twenty years refusing to pick a lane, just dicking around and wasting time. All of that restless jumping from one thing to the next, even time spent in what I considered dead-end jobs, it was all its own kind of training. Not training for any specific craft, but training for how to navigate the spaces between. In between the things is where I’ve always lived, and is where I love to be. It just took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that the wandering is the work, and the spaces between are exactly where a lot of people get lost. Turns out, people aren’t paying me in spite of the wandering, they pay me because of it.