Do what you need to do: The importance of doing the basics with excellence
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A while ago I had an acquaintance who joined the company where I worked as a backend developer. As a member of a team I was closely associated with, I observe how well he performed in some tasks.
No one designed workflows like him, and his communication with the business area was excellent. He was loved by the entire team because he was always very present, always very willing. However, some members of his team expressed concern because he seemed to avoid more technical tasks.
A few weeks ago, a post went viral on LinkedIn: A company had the idea of firing an employee in a humane way, with a decorated basket of treats and words of appreciation.
Many people criticized and opposed this attitude: How does this help a professional in such a delicated situation?
These are very pertinent criticisms.
The idea of a management that treats employees well is important, leaving in the past the rigid hierarchical concept, but there is a limit.
The day before yesterday I received an email with a simple question:
“What do I need to do to start and thrive in my web developer career?”
The direct answer is easy: study, train and learn from experiences. In eagerness to be done with my inbox, that’s what I thought of answering.
But it’s a good question, and if you start to dissect the idea a little, you realize that while the straight answer isn’t wrong, there are some points that will be more stressed throughout your career, and if you can strengthen those points, it will help not only in your entry and stabilization in the market, but it will also serve as a base when you are already experienced.
A few years ago I came across a text by Gabs Ferreira talking about the need for content production in Portuguese, not only in the IT area, but especially in it.
(go read the whole thing. It’s a good text)
I know I’m not a big content producer, a famous blogger, or a relevant figure in any way in the community, but that post resonated with me. While one of the goals of maintaining a blog in English is to keep the language sharp and actually learn to build ideas directly in another language, how much do I limit the reach of ideas (which are the main objective of this “communication” thing) by making the decision to ONLY write in English?
Sometimes I miss the adrenaline of decompiling a jar file (because the source was lost ages ago), adding a feature and putting it back in production. But, believe me, those days sucked.
In the bad old days, people pushed to production without any kind of automated testing. We would just build the features needed, tested locally and copied the files manually to a server, usually after midnight, accompained by pizzas and fear.