I’ve had a rocky relationship with commitment. For the most part, this has been confined to my professional activity, Which is to say my most enduring trait in the working world has been to quickly realize that I could find something better out there, that whatever value tag I had attached to myself on the last negotiation with reality wasn’t enough, and then I was ready to move on to the next adventure. Like a cartoon of a kid pretending to be a vagrant from the 50s, I would pick up my stick, a colorful dotted and suspiciously large handkerchief and pack up my belongings.
The downside has been that I’ve never felt like I stayed long enough to make a significant change in any place. By the time I had a (basic) grasp of my environment, the office politics, the ways of working, and the overall idiosyncrasy, I had grown bored and frustrated by the limitations of the place (or maybe my own limitations). The upside, though, has been that I got to experience several different set-ups, and more importantly, I got to see myself iterating over the same action: Joining a new place. With time, feelings and actions that seemed spontaneous gave way to patterns. And now I’d like to bore you by going over the overarching stages I’ve noticed during my own journey, with the implied premise that these might be universal (ish)*
When joining a new place, my immediate fear was that I did, in fact, not know anything™ and that I had once again finessed my way into a job by the alignment of the stars, the good grace of my interviewers, and the last baby goat sacrifice I had performed on a forsaken shrine. I would attempt to overcompensate by doing two opposite things at nearly the same time. On the one hand, I would weaponize my ignorance and approach anyone willing to listen, and I’d introduce myself: “Hi, I’m Paul; let’s pretend I don’t know anything at all, so why don’t you guide me on the processes you handle, and your role?”. On the other hand, I would jump at the opportunity to solve the obvious problems that I could find, armed with the knowledge that my previous company had faced the same issue, and their implementation had been good enough to make it worthwhile to copy, or bad enough to use as a cautionary tale and try something different. In effect, during that particular period, my state would be a quantum superposition of trying to learn as much as I could starting from the most basic of questions and trying to bring immediate value to confirm (to myself, mostly) that I was useful.
My fear and my eagerness originated from the same source: I was now in a brave new world, and the only SOMA available to me was adapting as fast as possible. I also call this stage the honeymoon period, because I’m usually enamored (or impressed, which functionally is the same for short periods) with my new place. They are awesome, and I have to rise to the circumstances. I still visit LinkedIn, telling myself it’s smart to have a fallback plan for when they wise up to my act and banish me.
Some months down the line, I would be trusted with the “keys to the kingdom” (mind you, it was always a small kingdom, being able to push stuff to prod, set up variables for data gathering on our website, or define the architecture of some of our marketing schemas, always within the realm of data and BI), and my critical eye would go from looking inward for any faux-pas I might incur, to observing my surroundings. Like Sauron’s tireless eye, I’d scour our ways of working, or our existing set-up until I would locate the structural issues that couldn’t be fixed with a simple one-man job, and would require collaboration between peers and a good amount of buy-in from the powers that be. I’d then try to change them, or argue that we should know better. Sometimes I’d find that my colleagues were missing some contextual information that seemed (to me) to indicate a crucial deficit within our organization. Other times I would encounter leftovers from a bygone era (old tags on sites, still loading; tables in production being dropped and updated tirelessly each day with no real consumption or querying pointing at them; or 3 dashboards that did the same thing, created one year apart), and I would invariably grow frustrated. How could it be that me, a qualified moron, was finding these issues, yet the rest of the company could continue marching forward without grinding to a stop under their weight? Clearly, our upper management was at fault, and their constant urge to find the next thing and push us forward was motivated by the very evident fact that if we stopped moving, we would fall into a precipice, much like the Coyote chasing the roadrunner.
At this point, I am looking back at the previous months and wonder why was I ever so worried about being unmasked as a fraud. Clearly, it’s them who don’t know shit. And this “them” is usually very large and composed of half-formed people. A colleague will never be fully incompetent, but they might have glaring areas in which they’re out of their depth. On the other hand, bosses and higher-ups are never the extent of the grace of reality, and in my idealized mind they just suck because clearly their
The honeymoon period is over, and what seemed like a shiny and bright new place is revealed to be bright only under the constant trash burning inside. If I find decisions from upper management that go against my principles (let’s spread a team because we said so, let’s force people back to the office because ‘it boosts performance’ but let’s never show any performance indicator or clarify how we tested), I start fantasizing about a new job at this stage. I open LinkedIn and sift through the seasonal wave of recruiters that say, “Your resume really impressed us; you mention partial knowledge on microwave usage inside offices, so we think you’d be perfect for the role of head carbon griller at our restaurant” until I find the two or three offers that seemingly checked what it is that I do. In my mind, my current job is one cornerstone away from crumbling, and while I don’t think I’m that cornerstone, I tend to feel I might be stone-adjacent.
The last stage, which could be dubbed acceptance, is one in which I come to the realization that neither of us (the I-them team that forms the entire work structure) are perfect, and that in my eagerness to prove myself, I’ve done nothing more than demand the impossible from me and expect even better from my surroundings. I relax, I crack more jokes around this period (although colleagues will argue that I’m mostly in a state of almost-joking) and generally ask myself if this is it. We’re all flawed human beings, and that’s part of our beauty. We manage to do anything at all because, in reality, already doing something, even badly, or specially because we do it badly, is enough to move on to the next thing that we might do a bit better. The left-overs from a bygone area aren’t proof of how bad we’ve been running our ship, nor how lucky we are that we didn’t face “random catastrophe # 1325”, they’re proof that we iterated. That someone else before me came along and said “we can do better”, and tried. Like a constant fight against chaos, a semblance of order was made at a lower magnitude. And for a small moment, things seemed ok.
Sadly, it is at this point that I realize I mostly learn under intense pressure (“like a diamond” would argue someone who likes me. My ego responds that “like a moron” is more likely), and that I’ve been stagnating in the last couple of months. I look back at my [projects/tickets/cards/dashboards/unit of value to determine if I performed something during my working hours] and find it hard to justify the urgency that they seemed to have at first. If I look with even more attention, I shake my head at the bad and convoluted code I created to solve issues that, now, more at ease with myself, I think could be done way better. And instead of refactoring my work, I realize that “good enough to work” is the perfect amount of work for most tasks. Because these tasks aren’t the end goal, but a stepping stone towards something else, they don’t need to be perfect. I open LinkedIn once more, curious to know what other colleagues of mine have been up to. The more socially active of them share their shiny new certifications and acquired knowledge, while the most industrious present yet another Medium blog article about how they achieved cold fusion using a bag of rice and a spoon (or more likely, how they go to have a self-documenting data warehouse, automating the process to keep table metadata up to date by 90%). And as I browse amongst the triumphs of others, I decide to give my profile a bi-yearly update and trim. Shortly after, I check through the recruiter messages in between meetings and projects, until a new shiny beacon of order and progress, having hired only really-smart-and-talented-people launches a job search for which I’m, according to LinkedIn, 70% of a match for.
And the cycle continues.
As I find my next diagonal move and remind myself that maybe next time I could be a rook and not a bishop, and I embark on the long and tedious process of creating a handover document for the next poor guy that will have to mantain my shitty ideas, I pick the colleagues I bonded with to a degree that surpasses professional courtesy and drags them dangerously close to “people I’d actually like to spend time with”, and I add them to whatever social media I might be using at the time (or I train a new messenger pidgeon to go over to their place and back). I pack my silly vagrant bag with the swag I obtained in the last 9 to 18 months at JOB_PLACE, leave some well intentioned jokes in non critical documents (or create complex red herrings and guessing games with automated “send-later” messages, which will act as a dead-man trigger before IT deactivates my account, sending quizzes to team chats as a spooky ghost), and say “so long”. Professional curiosity is, in my case, fed with professional courtesy, so I try to keep in touch with some co-workers for a short period of time. I want to know if their last big project was a success, or if finally “we” (they) are going with decision B instead of A. I learn from them that someone mentioned me in a positive light, explaining to a new person that yes, my stuff wasn’t built extremely well, but “he did the best he could at the time.”
*: One of these days, I should really delve into what universal-ish means. Are we Pareto-ing the universe? Do we consider an event that happens within 80% of the population significant enough to say, “The entire population goes through this!” ? Or am I hiding my complete lack of understanding of probability under the power bestowed by the mightiest of suffixes, Ish. Probably the second one.