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The irony is that my most important learning in software engineering wasn’t really about software engineering at all.
It’s a lesson I learned painstakingly throughout the early years of my career, absorbing it through countless missteps and moments of doubt. Yet it’s only been in recent years that I’ve truly started heeding my own learning and advice.
Here it is: There is no “correct” path.
This learning applies as much to life as it does to software engineering. There is no “perfect” job, only jobs you’ll likely believe are perfect based on your own experiences, goals, and biases. Instead of thinking about what the masses believe success looks like, define it for yourself.
For a long time, I felt I had to work at specific companies to be successful. I thought the logos on my resume would validate my worth. But now my definition of success doesn’t involve the name of a single company unless it’s one I’ve created on my own. Today, what matters to me is simple:
I’m “facing the right direction” i.e. I’m ready to move closer to my goal
I’m making some amount of progress towards that goal
The earlier you can learn that you need to define the things you want out of life instead of letting parents, society, social media, or anything else decide for you, the faster you can make progress towards achieving it.
But defining your own path is only half the battle. You should also always be trying to short-circuit the journey. For a long time I viewed my path very linearly, assuming that from A, to get to C, I’d have to pass through B. I now realize this logic is fundamentally flawed. This thinking causes you to get distracted, “side questing”, in the worst case, actively procrastinating getting to where you want to be. In the best case, it’s simply you doing extra work by walking an inefficient path and placing potentially arbitrary intermediate steps in your way.
Instead, think hard about what you truly want and why. Once you have clarity on that, you can reverse engineer the shortest path to get there. You might just be surprised by how short that path can be.
The combination of these two insights: defining success for yourself and finding the most direct route to it, has been transformative. I spent years climbing ladders only to realize they were leaning against the wrong walls. Now I build my own ladders and choose my own walls. The view is different from up here, but it’s one I never want to trade.
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