My first mistake as a dev - F&L #1
Tags: failandlearn, career, motivation, devjournal
Published: 2022-12-23 10:09:56

Over the past decade, I've made thousands of mistakes while working in tech. Each mistake was a stressful situation and a complex challenge, but they have helped me grow and learn in my career. These experiences have prepared me for the challenges ahead and have been instrumental in my professional development.

Although my career is still in its early stages, I've gained a lot of knowledge and I want to share my experiences and insights with others.

When I was 13, a classmate encouraged me to create websites with him and what a great discovery it was! That moment when Aleix encouraged me to create websites together changed the next 7-8 years of my life. I had a new hobby, I could spend hours studying and creating websites for friends, family, or small businesses and many times I even lost track of time. I was so sure that I would never dedicate myself professionally that I decided to study a more interesting career: Telecommunications.

But then, halfway through the career, I made what I consider my first mistake as a technology professional, I decided  to give up coding as a hobby and turning it into a career.

A hobby is almost always fun. It is innocent, a pastime that usually does not have many obligations but has plenty of rewards. A hobby does not have any strings attached and when you turn it into your job, something changes. In my experience, that something goes through a series of phases: initial excitement, melancholy, and normalization.

The initial excitement is probably the period with the most highs and lows that I remember from turning my hobby into my job. Everything is absolutely amazing and you invest a lot of hours into everything but you are happy because 

> "I'm working on something that is my hobby." (damn quote).

On the one hand, the feeling of rush is really amazing, no matter how difficult the task is, and on the other hand, it is terrible that you can spend 13-15 hours studying something new or trying to do something with a technology that you did not know, it is not at all necessary and the experience teaches you that resting often makes that effort more productive.

Who hasn't spent 4 hours trying to solve something, not being able to do it, and the next day solving it in 5 minutes? Of those 4 hours, surely 1-2 were really useful to understand the problem and look for possible solutions, but the following 1-2 hours could have been spent resting or dedicating time to yourself and your loved ones.

In those red zones, we can enter them alone but the people in our professional environment can help provoke them or avoid them. Fortunately, my first mentors and bosses were quite insistent on not working extra hours or on weekends and made it known to us. I fondly remember a Friday when a boss said he was going to turn off our computers.

At that time, I thought it was silly and that they should let us do what we wanted, but I learned a valuable lesson and now that I am responsible for some people, I act similarly. Although on the other hand, I understand, as happened to me, that there are people who prefer to spend more time than usual on their studies to improve. For those people, I would simply say, take care of your rest to take care of your mind.

After a few years of highs and lows, you may start to feel regret or feelings of sadness: Have I dedicated too much time to this? What if I took the wrong direction? Was it worth it? Am I in time to change? Is it worth it?

In my experience, it was at that moment that I had one of my many reality checks. Work is work and although you work on something you like, there are boring moments, hard moments, and moments when you would rather have opened a small bookstore or a small coffee shop. It is at that moment that you can decide, I have come this far and I am going to do something else, but happy about everything you learned.

Or like I did, and many before me, understand that in every profession there are better and worse moments and that it is worth working on something you like more than something you hate, and that any profession is good and respectable.

By then, leaving behind the melancholy and normalizing the profession as what it is, a place where you spend several hours a day, which allows you to contribute value first to yourself as a human being, to a group as society, and who knows if to someone else. It is normal to suffer in the lows and it is correct to get excited in the peak moments, as well as it is normal to have diverse groups of work in which not everyone has reached that moment in the same way as you, combining all of those experiences to create something unique together, in our case: software, what a great invention!

Was it a big mistake to turn my hobby into my profession? There are times when I still think it was and that I would live more peacefully running that bookstore... But after more than 10 years, I start to think that the mistake was idealizing any profession and that only time allow us to sort things in their place.

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