I’m pretty new to the software industry. I’ve followed it for years throughout my stint at university, but only recently have I really gotten into the trenches.
The first thing that has really hit hard for me is dealing with the fact that software will never be perfect. Admittedly, as someone who spent some time around music, I should probably know better, but it seems not so much…
It can be a little daunting at first, when you do your first release to someone for testing and they turn around and tell you “this doesn’t work, I can’t log in.” But you smile and nod and scurry off to fix the log-in screen, only to come back the next day and hear “well, the log-in screen works, but your homepage breaks when you do a handstand and recite the pledge of allegiance.” You begin to wonder why anyone would even think of doing this, but you shrug and go off to figure out how to off-key-singing-proof your homepage. You awaken the next day to find a bug-tracker full of bugs in your software. Defeated you roll over and decide that the testers just hate you and don’t know how to use your software the right way.
It can be difficult, especially for people like me who are new into the industry to see a bug-tracker full of bug reports and not feel like each report is a comment on your skills as a developer. After all, you wrote all of it, who else is to blame but you when it all goes wrong?
We all work in an inherently negative field in that we build something, and wait for someone to come back and tell us we fucked up. It’s a nasty cycle when your skills are determined by the amount of times someone tells us we did something wrong.
A thought I’ve had recently, and one I am trying to internalize is that we as developers need to stop defining ourselves by the software we write, and start defining ourselves by the lessons we learn from each project. Each project is a chance for us to grow and learn something new, and a chance for us to make improvements upon our processes and ourselves. And that is something I believe is worth basing yourself upon.
I could be wrong though. After all, I am only new to this, and maybe I am living in a naïve fairy-tale. But what I do know for sure is that defining yourself by the software you write is not a healthy or safe way to live.
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