What Challenges Have You Faced on the Journey to Development Success?

About this Episode

Today, we talk about challenges that we went through on our path to building a software career.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I've got with me Eddy, Tad, and Kyle. And today, we're going to be talking about challenges that we went through on our path to a software career. Those of you listening will be able to find both hope as you're going through the tough times but also find things in common, like, oh yeah, I relate to that. It's not just me.

I've been thinking about where I'd like to start our episode today, and I think that I'm going to start in 2002. If anybody was doing their career at the time, in 2001, there was the horrific attacks on the skyscrapers in New York on September 11th. And it was, you know, a great tragedy for everybody involved with that. And another consequence of that is that it precipitated the demise of the bubble in investment that had taken place in tech at the time.

During the late '90s, there had been a bunch of investment in this new internet thing. [laughs] And people were trying all kinds of business ideas on the internet to see if they'd work. Some of those, famously, were ideas...they lost money on every transaction, but they made up for it in volume. [laughs] A lot of those business models...famously, I think pets.com at the time was just losing loads of money. Investment kept them running. But once the investment dried up when people got scared, the whole tech economy just tanked, and there was a bunch of layoffs.

It was kind of the seed of a lot of new stuff in tech as people said, "Oh, wow, I can't work for that company. Well, maybe I'll go try something new." And it worked out in the long run. But it was not a great time to be looking for work. And I had been doing some tech work at the time. And I was finishing up school and went out to get a full-time job, and there was just nothing. [laughs] And I was in a bad spot.

I remember just every day feeling like I am so useless [laughs] because I was unable to find anything. I put out lots of resumes. Nothing ever came back. The people I interviewed, with I didn't always hear back from. So I spent several months working part-time doing some kind of freelance work while looking for a good full-time job at the time.

Eventually, I got a full-time job. It didn't pay very well. But I stayed there for a while and built it up over time and have been full-time in development ever since. And I think those three months humbled me [laughs] and taught me a lot about keeping on going, even when it looks like there's not a whole lot of options in front of you.

And that's kind of where I wanted to start is there's one anecdote from my career from a dark time, dark time for the world really being scared at that moment but also difficult for somebody seeking a career in tech that, you know, it may look bad at the moment, but things do look up. What experiences have you all had?

KYLE: My experience was a little bit interesting because I came from a small town where if you had any interest in computers at all, you did everything with computers. And my only knowledge of the field was, okay, well, I'm going to go to school. And the first thing that I saw, you know, was computer engineering. I was very interested in hardware at the time, so it was a perfect fit. I'm still interested in hardware. But that's what I ended up focusing on was computer engineering.

I didn't know about any of the fields that were available. I was actually in a calculus class. And one of the guys there that I had been becoming friends with, you know, he's just basically like, "Hey, do you need a job? Come interview at my company." You know, he's telling me about this QA testing and IT, you know. I had an idea of what IT was, but I had no idea what a QA tester was and what that even did in software.

So I went and interviewed and landed the job, luckily, and got into the field. And that was one of those things where it was kind of exposure. You know, all of a sudden, I'm learning there's software engineers. There's IT; there's DevOps, there's implementation specialists. Just all of these different branches of software that I'd never even heard of didn't know what they did. I thought a computer guy just did computer stuff. [laughs] And it was very humbling in that sense. So that was something foreign to me at the time.

And I ended up going through my career in the sense that, you know, I started out in manual testing. I went to QA automation, went to load testing, and found myself on a DevOps team when none of those paths were what I was originally thinking that I would even do.

MIKE: And it's interesting. You weren't even aware that they existed, right? [laughs]

KYLE: It's one of those things, like, even to this day, it's, like, if you're not in tech, you know, people ask me, "What do you do?" "I'm a DevOps engineer." "A what?" "I work in software." You know, it's something that people just they have no idea about this. You know, even if you're interested in it, like, and then explaining outside of the industry, like, what it is that you do, I mean, DevOps engineer, systems engineer, right? At least people will go, "Oh, okay. I know what a programmer is." And, from a high level, what I've found is [inaudible 05:12] that's about the best you get.

MIKE: And, interestingly, DevOps, in particular, is a relatively young field, right? Much younger than software because it used to be you just had system administrators [laughs] and figuring out how to make that work and treat it as a development-type thing where you have configuration management. And I've heard it well-put; you treat servers like cattle rather than pets, [chuckles] where they're just a herd of things. You don't treat them individually, but, you know, you manage them as a group. That's a different take that's really only been a meaningful field, and for about what? Ten years, Kyle?

KYLE: Yeah, and it's even expanding, right? Because even those of us that have been doing DevOps now for a few years, it's, oh, I was in systems engineering. Well, I kind of do more DevOps-y stuff now, right? And then now there are several other, you know, buzz titles is what I'll refer to them as. You know, you've got SREs, Site Reliability Engineers. That tends to fall under the DevOps category. You've got cloud engineers. You've got...what's the name? Platform engineers, right?

And it's trying to navigate and figure out, like, with my DevOps skills, do I land under those? Am I more geared towards that? And I think what you're getting at is, you know, we started out managing, like, on-premise servers and setting up workflows there. And that has evolved into a world where it's all in, like, on the cloud, and you're managing on-demand hosts, and, you know, you are treating those as pets, right? Each of those had a name, and you cared about them.

And now we're entering into a world where hosts are disposable. If you're not using it at the time, why keep it around? You don't want hosts that are sitting there doing nothing. So, yeah, they're like cattle. If they're not doing anything, if they don't have anything running on them, just go ahead and kill them. Get rid of them. You don't use them, you know. And we have orchestration tools, which is a new tech, which manages that and tells us how many cattle we need at a time. It's a very rapidly changing field of software.

MIKE: Yeah. And you were going exactly kind of where I was thinking is it evolves and changes, and some of the subfields there didn't exist even a few years ago. Web development, as a field, didn't exist when I graduated from high school because there was no web. [laughs] It wasn't an option because that field didn't exist. Likewise, with DevOps, there's something to be said there for that need for continuous growth and recognizing that it's okay if we don't know about the field because maybe [chuckles] it didn't exist a couple of years ago.

KYLE: Even in software, it's the same way, right? I mean, it used to be that, oh, I'm a programmer, you know. And, like you're saying, well, now there's web programmers. Well, to expand on that, you're not just a programmer anymore a lot of the time. I hear the term software engineer used as more of that blanket statement anymore. But if you're a programmer, you're a Ruby dev. You're a Python dev. You're a front end. You're JavaScript. You're Node, you know. There's 100 different languages now, and people are specializing in those.

And to even get deeper into that, you're specializing in what libraries in Java for the web development, right? Like, on the front end, you've got all these different front-end libraries to manage the front end. And it's you have specializations there just because those libraries are so huge anymore.

MIKE: Absolutely. You learn a framework, and you define your career. And we can talk a lot about web development, but then there's machine learning, or, you know, systems coding, or desktop development, game development, all so specialized that we don't tend to crossover between them very much.

KYLE: Yeah, that's true. I mean, speaking of things that are new, if you did system programming for the longest time if you didn't do it in C, you basically weren't doing it. It's been within the, like, what? Last year or two? All of a sudden, Rust has come on the scene, and they're starting to do that low-level stuff in Rust.

MIKE: Yeah, Rust has just really exploded. [laughs] It didn't even exist a few years ago. Oh, we've talked a bit there about that need to recognize that new things are popping up.

Tad, I'm interested in what thoughts you have about the challenges you've gone through in your career.

TAD: It's interesting. When you first posed that question, I kind of stopped and thought for a bit. And I think I've got maybe two stories that probably contrast and are interesting.

I was actually thinking back to the first time I ever contributed anything to open source, and this was back when GitHub was pretty new. And everyone was talking about open source and how important it is for you to get out and contribute and things like that. And I was a fairly new developer. And I don't know that I was terribly confident in my skills probably at the time.

And so I found this project, and I'm like, okay. I think it was called, like, a Cookbook or something like that. And people were contributing a bunch of code samples to it. And I noticed that none of the code was syntax-highlighted, really. And there was this really popular theme going around at the time. I can't remember even what the name of it was.

And so I'm like, okay, I can figure this out. I will clone the repo. I will format all the code samples with this new theme. I'll figure out how to do the CSS for this theme that everyone seems to be liking, and I will push it back up as a PR. And that will be my first kind of dip my toe in experience to software development and the wider world of open source and things like that. And I submitted it.

And the first comment was, "This makes my eyes bleed. I hate this. I can't believe someone would think this was good," [chuckles] right? And I remember just reading that. And after someone says something like that, you know, there's sometimes pile on and like, yeah, this is terrible dadada. I'm like, oh, oh gosh. Uh, oops. [laughs]

You know, it's one of those things where you're like, I thought I did something awesome. And I thought I was sharing, and I thought I was doing great. And to just have someone else come along and just kind of, like, pound you down is just...it's a little rough. And, unfortunately, in our domain, there's a lot of, like, you can kind of accidentally run into some of that harshness.

Like, some of the first questions I ever asked on Stack Overflow, same thing. You know, like, "Oh, this is a stupid question." "Oh" [vocalization]. You know, like, oh, [vocalization]. All right. Okay. You know, you kind of, like, tail between your legs. And you're like, okay, I guess I won't contribute to that platform anymore.

And I think that has been an interesting challenge that I've seen sometimes with younger developers is that they need to kind of be nurtured and sometimes protected from that kind of thing. Because I remember joining my first Linux group, and it was just email threads, like, yo, RTFM, RTFM. Like, anyone would ask a question, and they're just like, yeah, read the manuals kind of thing. And so that's been interesting to see. Hopefully, it's been changing. And, hopefully, we do a better job of kind of nurturing young talent.

But, Mike, I think when you were talking about that, I graduated the same time as you roughly. I think a little bit later than that. I came into a world post-bubble. I'm like; I can't even find a job. I might not have the skills. So I actually went back to school and got more skills and then joined and had a little bit more success. But, anyway, that's kind of some of the challenges that I saw when I first started out.

As a contrasting story, I think I'd like to sing the praises of a guy. Unfortunately, he's passed away now, but he used to be really big in the Ruby community, named Jim Weirich. And I remember one of my first projects; my company just decided this Ruby on Rails thing looks interesting. Maybe we should try it. And I was learning Ruby and trying to figure things out. And I needed to do XML for something. I don't even remember what it was.

And I found this gem called...I think it was XML Builder. And I'm like, oh, this gem doesn't work for what I need. And so I thought, well, I'll email the author and see if he can include this feature in his gem, and then it would work for me, right? And I just kind of naively sent him an email. He actually pointed out to me, he's like, "Oh, actually, my gem does exactly what you need it to do, and this is how you would do it. Your approach would work okay, but here's a different approach." And he sent me some code samples and kind of guided me along. And I was like, oh, wow, this is really good. This is good stuff.

And I didn't know who he was. [laughs] It turns out, like, those of you who are kind of in the Ruby community, he's the guy that wrote Rake, and he was really involved early on. And he did some of the bigger gems, like, early on in Ruby's history. And that has really stood out to me that he could have easily told me, "Oh, that's in the documentation. Go figure it out." And it turns out it was. I just had overlooked it. And I didn't have enough Ruby experience to have understood that what I was looking for was there. I needed to experiment a little more and figure it out.

But it was really interesting to see. He's like; I'm just some rando on the internet sending him an email. And he took the time to very carefully and very thoughtfully answer my questions, point me in the right direction, and make me feel better about what I was working on. And I think I'm lucky that I've had those experiences as well, or else I might have just dropped out of computer science and programming and things like that. Because I'm like, I don't know, this is a hostile place. This is not fun to do.

MIKE: It's interesting. I started by talking about kind of environmental difficulties, like, oh, we were going through a bad economic climate. And Kyle talked about difficulties of just knowing what was out there. You're talking about the human difficulties, and sometimes those are the hardest, right?

TAD: Yeah.

MIKE: Dealing with people who are unkind can be really crushing. But you found people who saw your worth. It made a big difference.

There's probably somebody listening who's feeling like, yeah, there's somebody who acts like a jerk to me, [chuckles] you know, because it happens. It's one of those things that happens in life. I think it's important to realize that sometimes people will act like that. And you should probably remember that it's more about them than it is about you.

You know, even the theme that you'd put out there, CSS can be changed. Colors can be changed. [laughs] And the idea of adding a style is a great one. And somebody who has a difference of opinion as to what the colors should be, we call that bikeshedding, where you argue about what color the shed should be painted. And it's really not the important decision. What's important is, like, how do you build the nuclear power plant? There are some very serious decisions that go into there, and what color the bike shed is painted doesn't really matter.

The fact that there is a nice shed that you can park your bikes in is the important part. But sometimes, you need to recognize that there are people out there who are not as capable socially as others. You know, some people may even be suffering from some challenges there. They have difficulty responding in social situations. In general, you should not take it too personally. Again, that's hard, but you got through, Tad.

TAD: Yeah, that's the thing is, like, I've made some really major contributions since then to open source. Like, I'm just hoping that talking about challenges for people listening to our podcast, I'm just hoping to give people some hope. And say, like, I think everyone starts out new, and inexperienced, and rough. And I think a lot of people have wondered, do I keep doing this? [laughs] And then you find something that kind of keeps you going, and turns out you can do it. And it turns out you can get better. And it turns out there are resources out there. You can find a mentor, or you can find other people that will be your cheerleaders instead of your detractors.

KYLE: And just to point out, you know, that I've had similar experiences. When I was starting out, I got ripped because I didn't know how to use Git. And I had a developer that just...he tore into me. And I ended up feeling pretty bad about that and going back to another one of the engineers and just like, "Should I know how to do this?" And they were level-headed about it. And it's just like, "You're new, right?" And it's like, "Yeah." "Did you learn this in your classes yet?" And it's like, "No," you know.

But I've come to realize that it is the bad days, or it is those people that have a challenge communicating. There's going to be people that are bristly everywhere. But it's one of those things where, okay, if they're going to be bristly, go to somebody else; ask them for help. And then you expand into the internet, right? And nobody knows who you are. They don't care who you are, for the most part.

I've had that experience where it's one in five, one in eight, or whatever the ratio is of what I'll post on, like, Stack Overflow questions there, on if I'll get a bristly response or, you know, and people do pile drive. If one guy is just like, "You're an idiot. This is a stupid question," they'll jump on it, and you get downvoted into the floor. But most of the time, people are willing to help.

And I always go back to the situation where maybe it is a stupid question. But nobody knows it's a stupid question until it's a stupid question. And I'm sorry, but I search for those stupid questions all the time on the internet. I want to know answers to those stupid questions. So, if you've got stupid questions for the love, please ask the stupid questions so that I can find them and get through my tasks as well.

TAD: Right. I think there's nothing more disheartening than I've got a question; I search on it. And I get a Stack Overflow response, and the person has the exact same question as me, but there aren't any answers. It's just critique. And you're like, oh, dang it. [laughs] Like, ah, you had the exact same...I wish someone would have answered it, and both of us could have gotten something good. It's just frustrating to see that people aren't getting helped. And you who needs the same answer also didn't get help eight years later or something.

KYLE: It almost feels like a lot of those responses; they took more time to tell you that you're an idiot than it would have just been to say, "Oh, well, it's easy, this one-liner."

TAD: Right.

MIKE: You know, in more in-person situations, in meetings...but it applies kind of universally to ask the stupid questions. [laughs] If I'm feeling a little bit lost about something, I try to put myself out there and ask the dumb question first. Because I've learned that, in most cases, there's several other people who had the same question as I did and are trying to figure it out, and they really appreciate somebody giving an answer to that. So, if I can expend a little bit of social capital to [laughs] get my question answered, it's generally well-appreciated.

And, in the end, there usually isn't that much social capital expended asking those questions that may seem personally dumb. Yes, there are people who will treat you bad. But, in general, you ask those questions, and people will be like, oh, did I miss that? And they'll go back and revisit their assumptions.

Communication is hard sometimes because you don't necessarily have shared understanding or assumptions to begin with. And the person talking about it may have more comprehensive knowledge and leaves out important pieces of the story. And, if you don't ask those questions, you miss those pieces. And it wasn't deliberate on the person who was talking about it. They just didn't know that the people in the audience had that gap. It makes sense to ask the question.

KYLE: I would even say, too, those of us, you know, maturing in our positions going into more of the senior level role, right? I feel like a lot of my growth, at least, is learning what it is that I'm not communicating and responding to the quote, unquote, "stupid questions" and going, oh, how did I not explain that? Why is this person not understanding me? So I feel like there's growth on both sides that can be had from these types of situations.

MIKE: Absolutely. Like I said, communication is hard. And I know that I'm going to leave some things out, not deliberately but just because I'm fallible.

We've talked some about the environmental issues that come up that make things hard and just keeping on working through them. You know, economic downturns happen. There's been a lot of layoffs. We're recording this in 2023, and there have been a lot of tech layoffs over the last few months. And that can be really rough if you're one of the people laid off. That doesn't mean that there aren't jobs out there, that there won't be jobs out there forever. There are cycles in the industry, and it's always come back up. It's not permanent.

TAD: From what I've seen, there are still tons of tech jobs out there. It's just some of the bigger companies maybe overhired and needed to make some correction. Because, from what I've seen, there's still plenty of stuff out there. I mean, software is still everywhere, in every industry, in everything. I'm not too worried.

MIKE: No, me neither. And I've seen unemployment rates in software, and they're not high. [laughs] People are just leaving some of those big tech companies and going to smaller ones. You know, those kinds of environmental challenges that you might have to deal with, but you work through it; you'll get through it. [chuckles]

And then there's, you know, the knowledge gaps that you might have to work through. Again, we all have them. Because the industry moves forward, it's inevitable. It's built into the structure of the system that you're going to have knowledge gaps. And by continuing to embrace learning, you can fill those and, you know, and thrive within your niche that you find yourself in.

And, finally, there's, you know, those human issues we've talked about that are maybe most challenging and recognizing that it doesn't say everything about you. And it may say nothing about you when people are unkind. It may say more about the speaker than it does about you.

TAD: A lot of times, we talk about learning new things. Some people see that as an opportunity. Some people see that almost like a death march. Like, I can never stop. I can never rest. I have to keep learning all the time, and I'm constantly paranoid that my skills will become obsolete. Because we're talking about challenges kind of in our field, how do you navigate that? Meaning, how do you navigate the constant learning without it being a death march?

MIKE: That's a great question. As you said that, I want to reply to that by talking about my two-year-old. He gets up in the morning, and as soon as he's finished yawning, he'll get down, and he will start running and finding the nearest thing that he can touch, and manipulate, throw, step on, jump off of, dismantle, put together, and do something to try to influence it and see what happens.

He'll do an experiment, like, how does this work? And try to figure it out. And then he'll run over and grab a book and bring it over and say, "Read this book to me." And I read the book to him. And then he'll run over and bang on an instrument, any number of things. He just spends his whole life experimenting and trying stuff because that's what life's about. It's joyous.

And somehow, between ages 2 and 42, we sometimes forget just how fun it is to learn stuff. And I'm going to take that a step further. I would argue that the definition of fun is learning stuff. Looking again at my two-year-old, what's fun for him is to go and experiment with stuff, right? Play mad scientist [chuckles] and try stuff and see what happens. Because there's that thrill of wondering what's going to happen, wondering if what you thought would happen is what's going to happen.

If I were to express it in scientific terms, grown-up terms, he's wondering if his hypothesis or wondering if his model accurately represented the world. And if it doesn't, like, oh, cool, I was wrong. What can I learn from that? Now I have to revise my model and understand the world differently. That is fascinating. Fun is about trying stuff and seeing what happens. And, you know, as adults, we say, "Oh, I want to have fun. I want to go on a vacation somewhere to someplace new." And we do that because we want to go see someplace new. We want to go learn something we didn't before.

What's boring is doing the same thing day in and day out. I think that fun, by definition, is learning new stuff. And if we remember that, remember that learning is fantastic, [laughs] it's what we were born to do, then it kind of changes our perspective. And it also changes the way you study. Rather than thinking that everything has to be formal, go help with an open-source project, right?

Go do something that interests you because that'll keep you engaged and get you through the tedious aspects that are part of learning anything. You know, sometimes it's a lot of repetition. Maybe always, it's a lot of repetition. But if you're doing that in order to, you know, climb up to a higher plateau, you know, if you're climbing a mountain, there's a lot of climbing before you could get to that plateau. But we do it anyway because we want to get to that higher vista. There's my answer.

KYLE: While you were talking about that, I was thinking about, you know, how this paralleled into our fields. And we'd been talking about cattle earlier. And, with DevOps, we've already discussed how fast that's moving, that kind of, you know, same thing. You kind of have to enjoy the new stuff, right? And you have to not get attached. You can't really get attached to a specific brand or a software or even a library.

It's one of those things where you might have maybe deployment software that is just the bee's knees right now. But here, in two months, there might be something that completely stomps it in features. And being attached and not willing to pivot to that new software is just something that will hold you back in your career. It'll hold back your company, your team, you know, it'll just hold everything back. You're not willing to go to the new product and explore that and figure out, you know, is this better for me?

It made me think, too, as you were telling your story about your son and stuff, you know, I'm sitting here drawing that parallel. Even the stuff that you're interested in...I'm sitting here thinking about disc golf. When I first got into disc golf...and I'm not sure how many of our viewers can relate here. I'm hoping that...I'll call it ball golf or just normal golf, has the same thing with the different drivers and woods. And I don't know the terminology very well, that's why I'll stick to the disc golf.

But it's one of those things where, you know, you're learning, and it's super fun. You know, at least in my mind, it was super fun. I'm getting better, you know. And what kept me interested was figuring out, oh, what do I need to change about my form? What do I need to do here? And regardless of anything, there's new discs coming out all the time that just have different flight patterns, different characteristics. And it's like, oh, well, I need to go try this. I need to go try that.

Some of these things are not going to be better. And some of these things might even be repeats of what you already have in your bag. It's not uncommon in the community to have hundreds of discs, you know, at least tens of discs. And it's like, well, how many do you carry on to the course? Well, you know, 10, you know. So you've just got a bunch of these that are laying around, but you've wanted to try them. You've had that investment because it's something you're interested in.

And I feel like software is that same way, you know, maybe the new tech doesn't give you anything that you need, but maybe it will. Maybe it's something that you want to put in your bag of tricks going forward. I think that analogy and just pointing that out is really kind of cool. In my mind, I hadn't really drawn those parallels.

TAD: As we've been talking, I've actually...suddenly, I've been reminded of a really excellent presentation by one of my friends named Brandon Hays that did at RubyConf (I forget which Ruby Conference. I've gone to a few.) about surviving the hype cycle. And in it, he talks about the different stages of, like, software and the different types of people that are attracted to each stage and compares it to, like, settling the Old West.

So, when you're settling the Old West, first of all, you had, like, the trappers and the explorers that just went out and kind of found stuff. Nobody knew what was out there. They went out. They lived by themselves. They were just thrilled by discovery, and that's great. But then you needed people who would come along and build roads. Like, you'd need people to come along and map these places that they'd heard about and say, like, "Okay, we need some ways for some other person to get there."

And then, eventually, you had, like, your small settlement and people who were good at, like, setting up the small settlement and clearing the trees and things like that. And then you had the people who would come in, and it's like, okay, now let's make a proper society, and have laws, and roads in our city and things like that.

And I know, for me personally, I look around, and I see something like, oh, there's yet another new JavaScript framework out there. And, oh gosh, like, [laughs] I don't know if I could keep up with every JavaScript framework. But there are some people that love that stuff. And I think trying out the new things and trying out the new framework, and those explorers, right? The people that move in and like to figure things out.

And I've discovered about myself is I'm probably not that guy. The idea of keeping up with every new JavaScript framework makes me feel a little tired inside. But I'm maybe, like, a generation or two past that where I'm like, okay, I'm not looking at every new thing. But now that there's a few established frameworks, maybe I'm going to look at Vue versus React and see which one I like better. That's what I'm going to learn, and that's what I'm going to do. And then maybe come back and tell my team about my opinions about that sort of thing.

And there's some people that are like, you know what? I like to be at the tail end. I like the boring technology. I like, you know, my old reliable Java framework or whatever, you know. And that's great, too. For me, the challenge was figuring out what type of developer I am and sticking in that lane and not feeling bored by the old and boring, which to some people is great. For them, it's like, familiar, and this is what I'm familiar with. And this is what I'm an expert in, right? And feeling overwhelmed by the new and shiny.

And I found that I fall somewhere in the middle between the two that if you find that spot along the continuum that appeals to you, then it's a lot less challenging, I guess because you kind of found your fit.

MIKE: That's interesting, talking about those groups of people. Because in every one of those groups, there is room for fun, for experimentation, for discovery.

TAD: Right.

MIKE: You know, you could be the person out discovering new peoples, and landscapes, and geography, and [chuckles] oceans. Or, you could be the person many generations down; you're the plumber who's figuring out every day how to make those pipes work because every situation is a little bit different. And both of them involve discovery, novel situations, creativity, learning something new every day. And they both have value. And they both can have fun. And finding the fun within those different fields is kind of how you grow your career and find the joy in it.

KYLE: Kind of the breadth versus depth concept. You kind of need all of those kind of people in software clear through the span, you know. I'm sitting here thinking and, like, kind of what we're saying here, like, I'm almost going into a phone analogy just to kind of describe the different people.

And I'm thinking, you know, there's those people that they need the new iPhone. Every time a new one comes out, they need the new one. And then there's those of us that, ah, my phone works. I don't need to upgrade for four or five generations. Then there's those people that, you know unless it gets an improved camera, or unless we get a new cell technology or something specific, some special feature about it, they don't want to try it.

And then there's those people that, like, oh, that's a cool feature, but I'm going to give it a few generations to mature. Like, I don't want to be on the bandwagon. I'm the beta tester testing out this new feature. I want it to mature a bit.

And there's just these people, I mean, and that goes into the software too, the libraries, you know. Maybe it's, you know, a language. I got to use the new language. No, I don't want to use the new language unless they have something special that I need. Well, maybe it's a library. You know, you can kind of drill down. And those different aspects, those different tiers, are going to be exciting for different folks. And you don't have to be all in on one way or the other.

TAD: So, I've got a question for you, Kyle. I think it was you that mentioned Rust. Do you feel like, oh my gosh, I've got to go learn Rust, or else I'm going to fall behind, or else I'm not going to keep up? Or is Rust something where you're saying, like, okay, that's really interesting. There's other people who are developing a bunch of stuff with Rust right now. But where I want to be is, you know, maybe I'll wait until the DevOps tools have matured a little bit before I look into Rust. Or maybe you're like, that's awesome, but I'm just not going to worry about Rust at all.

KYLE: If you're asking how I'm feeling about it from my computer engineering background, I think it's very interesting, you know because I came up developing in C. And I would like to get into it. Have I done much with it at all? No, no. It's very interesting tech to me. But I'm very breadthed [SP] in what I'm learning in DevOps. There's a new monitoring tool every week. There's a new way to, you know, utilize monitoring every week. And so that's where my focus is.

It's one of those things where when the tooling comes, I would be happy to try out some of those Rust libraries. But it's not something I'd personally be into. I know that there's just people that are, you know, stumbling over themselves to get in there and learn it as fast as they can and get new libraries written. But yeah, I mean, that kind of goes into the topic. What's your interest? What's fun, and what do you have time for?

TAD: So, is the takeaway find the thing that you enjoy and find the niche where that fits, rather than trying to feel like you got to keep up with all the things all the time?

MIKE: If you think that you can keep up with all the things all the time, I'm sorry. You've got a rude awakening coming. [laughs] You know, people talk about finding your passion, thinking, well, I got to find the thing that I love. I've read that that's maybe a little bit misleading. You need to find the thing that you're willing to do even when it's a struggle. That's what you care enough about.

What's the thing that you're willing to keep doing, even when it's hard? And if you've found that, then you've found your niche. You've found your place that you can thrive because you're willing to keep working on it because that's fun. The cost is worth it to you.

TAD: Yeah. And I'm asking these things a little bit just because I've talked to kind of newer developers, and they often do feel overwhelmed. They're like; I'm starting my career. I don't know if I should commit to something or not. What if I commit to the wrong thing, and I totally miss the boat? And I become an expert in outdated technology and, you know, I can't put food on the table for my family, and I can't find a job. And, like, these are, I think, real concerns, but there are still COBOL programmers in the world, right?

KYLE: They're high-paying right now, right? Because there are so few of them.

TAD: Yeah.

MIKE: And, even further, if you go and become an expert in a language, it transfers over. Most of those skills transfer over to a new syntax. The skills that are most important are at a bit higher level than that, above the language. Now, of course, knowing the intricacies of the tool you're working with is important. But you can spend a lot of time developing a skill in one tool and then transfer over to another one and get up to speed pretty quickly. Because, you know, architecture, and design patterns, and, you know, understanding data processing and best practices are not going to change from one framework or language to another.

Talking about my two-year-old running around, seeing what he can take apart with a fork, is probably not going to directly translate to what he's doing in his adult life. But the motor skills that he's learning, understanding the physics of how things work, you know, understanding of materials is. [laughs] Understanding the difference between a piece of metal and a piece of sheet rock that matters. And he just needs to be trying something. And I think that that applies to our career as well, go out and try something. And the skills may not directly transfer, but they'll probably still help you.

KYLE: I'd say, too, don't be afraid to pivot at all. Because just my example in my career, you know, I wanted to go into hardware. Well, I learned about software, you know, and I wanted to be a developer. Well, I went up the QA track. I really liked the QA track. I landed in DevOps, and I really love DevOps. You don't know what you don't know until you know. [laughs] There's probably a better way to state that. But, like you're saying, try everything, and don't be afraid to explore.

MIKE: Eddy, in particular, I don't know that we've heard from you yet. Did you have anything you wanted to share about challenges that you've worked through in starting your career? You're kind of at the beginning of your career, so you might have some interesting stories.

EDDY: The initial difficulty for me really was just trying to hash out whether development for me was the right career path. In the beginning, I jumped around with ideas. I'm like, oh, I want to be an artist. I want to be a psychologist. I'm like, huh, well, maybe I think it's time for me to really sit down and see what is the most viable option for my future, something that I can sustain a family?

I landed upon development, but even then, you don't know if that is something that you're passionate about until you, like, sit down and really, really start hashing it out and see if that's something that's really for you. So my difficulty in the career that I've started was if this is something that I...was really something I was cut out for or not. And once you get over that hurdle, and you realize, huh, yeah, maybe this is for me. Maybe this is something that's worth my time to be invested in and get really good at. That, for me, was the most difficult hurdle.

MIKE: You say you tried it. [laughs] And if you hadn't tried it, you wouldn't have known.

EDDY: Exactly.

MIKE: There's a recurring theme today of experimentation, play, [laughs] doing new things. And you learned by trying. Sometimes that's intimidating because, like, well, I don't know if this is going to work or not. Maybe it won't work out. Well, maybe it won't, but you're never going to know unless you try.

EDDY: It also helps to be surrounded by people who do the same thing. The hardest thing for picking up new talent is having the discipline to keep going. And being surrounded by individuals and constantly communicating with everyone really helps to fuel the fire.

MIKE: Definitely. Find people who are good mentors [chuckles], and it will make a huge difference.

KYLE: I would just quickly point out, too, that Eddy was saying that he wasn't quite sure where he wanted to focus; you know, he's interested in art, and I think he said psychology. And the one amazing thing that I've seen with software is it's cross-industry. This is something that if he finds that he really, really enjoys software, he doesn't have to give up on the art or the psychology. He can find software where he's doing art, or he's focusing on psychology, you know if that's a route that he wants to go.

EDDY: It could be argued to some extent that code is art. And there's also some psychological aspects to development as well. So, like, some of those attributes did kind of play its [inaudible 41:44] role in my career as well.

MIKE: There's a great deal of art, I think, in any trade and in software where you're building things from nothing, and it's dramatically so. And it can be fun.

EDDY: Do any of you ever look at a file with the code being written, and you're like, "Oh, this just looks beautiful?" And, like, to some degree, we're comparing that to art. And you're like, "Ah, this reads beautiful." This looks beautiful. You know, we're comparing it subconsciously, you know, to some sort of art.

MIKE: When I see a well-written unit test that's wonderfully clear, has excellent contexts, covers every branch of logic, doesn't go beyond the boundaries, just excellently follows best practices, I look at that, and I just grin. [laughs] It resonates with me. I like it not just from a professional sense but aesthetically; I find it wonderful. [laughs] Absolutely, I see beautiful code.

KYLE: I would say, too, that I feel like I find voice in code. And what I mean by that is once I've worked with developers long enough, I can look at code, and I can be like, oh, XYZ developer wrote this, you know. And you can kind of see kind of like an author would, right? You'd be like, this book is obviously written by this author. If that translates into code, too, it's kind of interesting.

EDDY: Actually, I want to ask point blank to everyone here, thus far in your career, can you genuinely read a file and just be like, oh, this is the flavor of Kyle? Oh, this is the flavor of Tad? I know because he enjoys using rockets versus --

KYLE: Well, and that's what I'm talking about. I feel like if I'm around an engineer long enough, I can definitely do that. I can just look at the file, and it's like, oh, yeah, Adrian wrote this. I know who did this.

EDDY: That's awesome.

MIKE: Absolutely. [chuckles] It's interesting. You can see the stamp of the artist. We started from what are the challenges to hearing about the distinctive style of the artists at their work, that as you grow, you get good enough that you actually leave your own fingerprint on things. And maybe that's a good place to stop today, that you can get to that point. That even though you're going through struggles in your career (You'll run into those times that feel dark.), it can become a joyful artistry that people even recognize your fingerprints on.

It's been great talking today. We look forward to next time. And I'll see you next time on the Acima Development Podcast.