The Worst Job I've Had...

Posted by Michael Doyon / on 4/07/2009 05:46:00 PM / /

...was likely the best thing possible for my professional career. Though this may seem strange, let me explain the reasoning. I am currently one of the Senior Web Developers within my organization. This is a far cry from the Bachelors Degree in Management I originally graduated with.

I started as a self-taught programmer with my first job out of college. I began my career with a small medical software company (2 developers, < 10 employees total) writing low-level communication drivers and APIs (using Delphi, C, & SQL). Being such a small company, alot was demanded from me. I had to design, code, test (with some help), and deploy all of the code I wrote myself to the external customers whom I worked with daily. After 3 years and a greatly expanded set of responsibilities, I was feeling confident. I felt that I knew what I needed to make the next step in my career. With confidence brewing, I moved on to a much larger corporation in the middle of trying to attain Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance.

Needless to say, it was a drastic environmental change for me. I needed to learn to work more as a member of a team rather than being the whole team. I needed to learn new processes and how to formally document my analysis, development plans, and testing plans. The code base was over 100x bigger than anything I had ever worked with deep object inheritance (most of my prior experience had more of a functional form). My manager was new at the role and lacked the experience to recognize how much I struggled...or just didn't have the know how to help me adapt. I worked through it for one year before I moved on again.

In preparation for moving on, I recognized that Delphi was a dying language. I wanted to enter the .NET realm and pursue a Masters Degree in Software Engineering. Luck was in my favor and I actually went back to my former employer to work on a new project in .NET with the opportunity to work from home. I found the lackadaisical environment to be comforting having just left a place with significant turbulence. Not to mention, working from home was a great experience and it provided the flexibility I need to attend grad school.

Over the next 3 years, I worked towards a Masters in Software Engineering and always found myself reading technical books outside of the classroom. I have taken on the challenge of trying to learn best practices and keep up with new technologies while gaining deeper understanding of existing technologies. I had also discovered how informative podcasts can be (.NET Rocks, Hanselminutes, & ALT.NET to name a few). I recognized that reading the blogs of the industry gurus and my peers provided priceless information, examples, and viewpoints. I've become more of a proponent for open-source and have spent significant time looking at open-source code.

Since finishing my Masters, I have moved on to my current employer (which is again a large, highly structured organization). Our development team consists of about 50 employees and contractors. Here I have taken a strong interest in continuous integration, automated builds, and utilizing aspects of agile methodologies in my daily development practices. I am still always reading at least one technical book at a time (often 2 - 3) and follow numerous blogs on a daily basis. I try to be more aware of the things I do not know. I've come to believe that relentless education is the only way to be successful in the software development industry because of it's accellerated rate of growth. For anybody that thinks they know enough to carry them through to retirement, they better plan on retiring soon! Technology is simply changing too fast. If we don't pursue it, we will just be left behind with future prospects fading quickly.

So, back to the original statement. The worst job I've had was likely the best thing possible for my professional career. It was quite the humbling experience. I try to remain humble and am always eager to learn something new. I suggest that, you too, implement a relentless pursuit for continued education in the areas you find most interesting. Never consider yourself to THE expert. Be humble, yet confident. There is always something left to be learned no matter how good everything seems.