If you are reading this Thank you for reaching out to this post as it’s my first blog. I have seen my fellow peers get into the software industry on the ambition of earning money and money only. Yes money plays a vital role in our life but it has a lot of trade off too. I was lucky enough to work with brilliant minds in my little software journey who loved what they did but most importantly they knew why they did it and that has set them apart from the mediocre developer crowd.

“The beauty of software engineering”

I would consider writing code as super power ? Why ? Because you have an idea in your mind and you can code it within hours, ship it and see the results for youself. Boom this is the superpower every entrepreneur wish they had. But sadly the road to code is long. However converting the business idea into code is just the surface level of software engineering.

O(n^2)

I have seen developers slog more than 9+ hours in a day just to complete business requirements because their business analyst or manager asked to. Why ? nobody has a clear answer. Does this requirement have a major impact on our product ? Nobody has a clear cut answer. We just forgot the magic word Why. Complete the code, move it to testing , push to production, fix the bugs and the vicious cycle begins. An endless time loop that is much more complex than Nolan’s movie. End result loss of time to management and developers, drained out developers, unsatisfied team members who want some form of incentive be it money or appreciation or just less work and unhappy management who wanted an entirely different functionality in the firstplace but did not know how to convey it to the devs.

All this issue starts with the performance by the above said developers. Note: I am not referring to the people who code in vim.They are a real deal. I am referring to the people who jumped into this for money because someone said you will get heavily paid in this industry. Of Course you will be heavily paid if you keep hopping from company to company and do the same old work in different a company but are you a better software developer than yesterday ? A question to ask yourself.

Lets fix this issue for now because our senior asked us to. Lets deploy it with a temporary fix which could have been avoided if the requirements were clearly discussed between the management and tech team considering the time factor. These mistakes do not solely depend on developers. If we trace back the problem starts from the management who wants x thing to be developed yesterday. The managers who commit to it with unrealistic timelines without having an empathy towards developers. This boils down to the developers who are forced to do a mediocre work just to get it done by eod rather than getting it better Note : devs always love to do it better if only you gave them the time. The solution to this is to have empathetic managers and business analyst in the first place who have a background in writing code or even better if they still write code. How could one possibly manage a project if you don’t have the skin in the game ? Having empathy towards developers grows only when you have coded and felt the real issues prevailing in software development because nobody addresses that this “Software Development” is a creative work.

“A clear mind, leads to better judgement, leads to better outcome”-Naval Ravikant

A developer’s mind, much like other artists, needs to be taken care of. Loading up a developer’s mind with irrelevant changes in business ,trial and error can lead to brain fatigue and burn out which many don’t address. They constantly hurt the brain and the issue creeps up in the long term and it has a direct effect on the business. Developers must learn to say No and start to ask why more often because you will be surprised to know that the person who asked you to do it in the first place will not have an answer. If you are a developer who is reading this and you feel that you are in this cycle who got caught in this because of money, get your skin in the game only that can prevent you from being caught up in the tide. Get specialised in your domain and it will help you build your ship and sail through this. If you don’t specialise I warn you this journey will leave your mind and soul empty.