“Absent love for your field, you can’t be a genius. You can’t.”- Malcolm Gladwell
Scott Hanselman posted this quote on the Internet last week and it really resonated with me. It is no secret that I work in an industry full of “geniuses” and we were all most likely the smartest kids in our schools and among our relatives. Some of us (full disclosure: I can definitely be guilty here) still like to occasionally hold a somewhat lofty view of ourselves among the ranks of “the geniuses”.
Mr. Gladwell has written some very good books about ideas, intuition, and observation. I generally enjoy his writing and here I believe he is right on. I keep coming into contact more and more with developers who are not passionate about what they do. By not being passionate, they are doing their employers and themselves a disservice by not maxing out their genius potential. There are several reasons for this lack of passion – I’d like to focus on two.
The first group to consider may have at one time been passionate developers, but have since burned out. I know for a fact that this is fairly common and have come close to burnout a few times myself. Preventing burnout is a broad topic for perhaps another post, but it is beyond our scope here. I don’t think that I’m breaking new ground to suppose that burnt-out developers aren’t blazing the genius trail.
Our second group is made up of those developers who only do this because they were pressed into service at their jobs or they entered this profession because it pays well. If these people suddenly became wealthy, coding is not how they would spend their time. What that means is they are likely also not spending their free time on this craft.
I’m not claiming that individuals in either group are bad people. They are not. At the same time, however, I believe that individuals who don’t love their field will never attain guru/ninja/genius status. You cannot just put in your 8 hours and expect to be on that “next level”. This goes for lawyers, physicists, and therapists, too. If you aren’t putting in your own time reading journals, blogs, attending seminars, or just “thinking the big thoughts”, you aren’t going to grow.
The bright side is that this love can be cultivated. Much like marital love, you can rekindle your love for your craft. The same principles even apply. A common recommendation in marriage counseling is that you really get to know your spouse. Find out things about who they are and who they’ve become that you didn’t know. Fall in love all over again.
In development, that means finding out different things about programming that you didn’t know before. For instance, if you’ve only ever done middle tier work, learn the UI. If you’ve only programmed application code, learn the database. If you’ve only ever worked the Microsoft stack, give Open Source technologies a try. Make the field new, exciting, and alive again.
Even if you are someone for whom life or finances has guided toward technology, you also have hope. Much like individuals in arranged marriages can “learn to love” or “grow to love” their spouses, you can learn to love your profession. Like the last group, branch out and find a niche you are passionate about. Computer science is a very broad profession. You may find you love writing compilers, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile applications, web, rich media, etc. However, if you only ever log your hours and go home, you’ll never know what is beyond your 9 to 5.
I don’t want to sound preachy, but I truly felt compelled to write when I read that quote. Remember the old adage that when you point one finger, you have the rest of them pointing back at you. I write as much for my current and future self as I do for my readership. While I am “on fire” and “in love” with programming now, the natural ebb and flow of life may take that away from me. When it does, my natural desire to compete and be great are going to remind me of this post and I will have to heed my own advice and find something new that excites me.
I hope you have something that excites you, too.
Being a lifelong learner, I believe that what I call “Extracurricular Learning” is very important. I define that as any learning that you do outside of your job or school either for fun or to better yourself due to your own drive or passion. Maybe you like to use books, or screencasts, or conferences, but you actively make learning your own responsibility.
Some developers that I know or have run across are really into JIT (just-in-time) learning. They fly by the seat of their pants and, as Jeff Atwood puts it, “page fault” in knowledge. I am by no means against learning things as you go along. If you don’t do that, you are probably a pretty terrible developer. However, I think that if you don’t do some preparation in advance, you won’t be as good at “page faulting” your knowledge as you could be.
Let’s imagine that I’m working in Ruby for the first time. I may google ruby loop or something to figure the syntax of how to do a loop. Or, let’s say I need to do some task X. What I’m likely to do as a .Net programmer is to think of how I’d do it in C# and then google for the way to do X-C#-Thing in Ruby.
What would be better is if I had immersed myself in this technology ahead of time. I don’t mean become an expert before you begin, I am talking about doing due diligence before getting involved. If I have read Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby and watched a few TekPub videos about Ruby and attended a few Columbus Ruby Brigade meetings, then I would have a very broad overview of how to “do” Ruby. And while I wouldn’t be an expert, it would make my google-fu so much better because my searches could be targeted toward getting me the *right* information.
As I’m getting more and more into Asp.Net MVC 2 for a project at work, I find the “leg work” that I did watching the TekPub videos and reading blogs to be invaluable. If I hadn’t done the Extracurricular Learning, I probably would have attempted a lot of WebForms inspired nonsense instead of finding out about how much “magic” is available to me via the built-in framework. Much like Rails, I can get Asp.Net MVC to do a lot of work for me (especially when combined with jQuery) if I just know how to rely on the scaffolding/convention over configuration inherent in the product.
I’m not wrong on this. If you want to be a great developer, you need to be involved in Extracurricular Learning. If you aren’t, you will stagnate and be guilty of “writing FORTRAN in any language”.
If you would allow me a personal moment for a second, I promise I’ll tie it in to something technical and relevant. Recently, my grandfather passed away at age 84. He was a brilliant man in both quantity of knowledge and the application of that knowledge – especially in the realm of finance. I won’t quote his accomplishments here in the interest of time and topic, but I assure you they were many.
As my father and I were handling all of the things that need taken care of following the death of a loved one, I got to thinking about my grandfather and what he knew. I got down a little bit thinking of how his lifetime of knowledge and wisdom has now been lost and humanity was poorer for it. However, upon further reflection, I realized that these things were not lost; they lived on with my father and me.
My grandfather raised my father, teaching him and guiding him along the way. My father in turn raised me with many of those same principles and my grandfather was there as well for help and guidance when called upon. Many of you know where I’m going with this… you knew two paragraphs ago, but I’m going to say it anyway… We need to mentor other developers in this same style.
We need to have Code Children and Code Grandchildren, Code Cousins and Code Siblings. Each developer goes on a journey; learning little by little along the way from books, blogs, user groups, trial and error, forums, etc. However, in my experience, I’ve seen very little “direct mentoring”.
“Direct mentoring” (according to me) is the deliberate pouring out of your knowledge into another person. You take ownership in their learning process; you become an essential piece of their growth. I’m talking about something different than “drive-by” question answering where we offer a little help and move on. True mentoring is a deliberate act. You have chosen a person (and they have accepted you) and you become someone taking an active part in their learning and development. You can suggest books to them, peer review code, answer questions, and be a person who holds them accountable on goals like learning a new language a year or reading a book a month.
I know that I am not covering brand new ground here. I also know that there are other people talking about this very thing. The “developer as a craftsman” group is very into this idea, describing it through parallels to apprenticeship in other vocations. I would like to see developers begin to mentor others and to in turn also seek out a mentor so that we can all learn from each other and give all of our hard earned knowledge some new legs by passing it on to someone else.