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Stay Close to the Code
Everyone wants to progress in their careers. To go from junior to senior; from associate to partner. Maybe you want to move into management.
It’s a noble pursuit, and for most of us, with enough work and skill, we will get there.
And as we do, there is a phenomenon that happens: we spend less time doing and more time deciding. As Ryan Holiday writes in his book Ego is the Enemy:
As you become successful in your field, your responsbilities may begin to change. Days become less about doing and more and more abouthing making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership.
As a senior engineer, I can attest that this is true for engineers as well. As we progress, we find ourselves reviewing documents, thinking about long-term strategy, and maybe even starting to look at those dreaded budgets.
And while this is good and important to our career development, we often stop paying attention to the very thing that helped us progress in the first place: the code. We aren’t “getting our hands dirty” as we once did. We become distant from our codebases, not understanding the nuances or gotchas of the code our teammates are working on most of the time.
I think this is a pattern to change. We have to stay close to the code as long as we can before our responsibilities truly dictate we move away…
