Here is the second entry on my journey becoming a upper-tier IT engineer. Still need these skills because of intellectual curiosity, still want the money for personal family goals reasons. Okay. I’ve been fired from a mission in a bank. The exact cocktail of reasons that led the service manager to this decision is still unknown to me, but I’ve got theories about it.

1. Not fast enough. I’m a perfectionist and probably OCD person. The kind of which needs to hit return key twice between two commands in the terminal. To triple check correct branch naming. To make sure I didn’t commit anything irrelevant, three times. To make sure I have the correct extensions enabled in my IDE, and to check I didn’t misspell it. And so on. It slows me down a lot. But not enough to make me a disabled worker, and I’m bored of people overacting on their disabilities and struggles instead of working on themselves first, so I never wanted to be officially considered a disabled worker. My mental condition(s) are still manageable since I’m aware of them and of the therapies available to reduce or eradicate them.

2. I’m very active intellectually, and it’s not always well seen by coworkers (I guess). Gifted people are totally invisible in the eyes of institutions. Of course when you reach adult age you’re not bullied anymore if you can defend yourself rhetorically, but society couldn’t care less about you, unlike in certain countries like China who value gifted youngsters from school. I got used to either shut up about my deep interests, or talking alone in reality most times, unless I meet curious or a guenuinely gifter other individual. My lunch break is spent talking about history, technology or any other intellectual field, meeting a polite “Mmh, okay” most times. And I notice it, cause I’m not stupid. I feel alone, and, worse than that, I think I could have fueled hostility or jealousy towards me. Not because I’m exceptionnally brillant, but just because average people today are exceptionnally mediocre, don’t read a line of any book and stop learning past age 25 when they graduate. And then complain about the West losing the lead in world knowledge & economy. No obvious solution here, except being patient until I reach a job where I can team up with more brillant people.

3. I lack pragmatism. Enough complaining, let’s face it. I need money, I’m too slow, I overthink. I need a method to XLR8. I need to put my brain aside when it comes to work, complete my tasks fast in some kind of simple and bankable routine, and feed my brain besides that with something. A sheet, my personal computer beside the corporate one (risky), an experimental side project to prepare of Proof Of Concept (POC) for the next dev Meetup I attend. I will never, ever have the perfect development setup if working in a big corporation. And I’ll have just a pretty good one if I work in a trendy startup. I need to deliver and not to over-report, especially if I work in a bureaucratic organization or if I’m alone on one or several projects. In a bureaucracy, managers don’t want results, they want a snappy process. They want a mechanism that responds fast and on expected time. No verbose, no reporting, results, hidden mess, later technical debt. Magic.

How to make my workflow magic here and now, knowing that I’m a low or average developer ? Here is what I’ll try from today :

1. Give up nerd traps. I’ll give up on Vim, Zsh fine-tuning, exotic Linux distributions, and all these things. It’s basically masturbation when it comes to typical web developpement. Like “Hey, look how nerdy I am, how far I can go in customizing my experience in the most insignificant details”. Vim is really needed when you’re a sysadmin or so, but as a mere 2024 dev it turns into a hobby. And I’ve got other hobbies right now.

2. Give up perfection. I don’t care if my team uses the exact branch naming convention I thought of. I don’t care if production and preproduction are not completely consistent, unless I turn lead dev (which I want to do) and have the power to change things. If I want this power, I have to learn DevOps. And when it comes to local, VSCode with 10 extensions or so is enough. Good practices are cherry on top, but realistically speaking, I’ve wasted too much time and skills to be immediately hired by specialized high-end tech companies that make it an absolute requirement for their projects. If I want all that, I go IT hobbyist and implement them into my personal projects. To grow up is to learn to separate it from work, unless you’re a true genius.

3. Be a precise mercenary. Remember what I spend and what I work on everyday. Note everything, not for other but for myself. I must be efficient and proactive at work without giving the impression to my coworkers that they are passive. I must embark them on my working loop without over-reporting to it. That’s a subtle art, I guess. They want intense activity from me with little reporting, in a job that highly requires cooperation. Magic. I’ve been so angry with my former lead passivity, he was almost as passive as if he was the actual user of the website I worked on. But I should find enlightenment. Not caring about him anymore from the second we no longer worked together, because I’m confident enough in my capacity to fulfill someone else’s needs. I take my job too much at heart, and it prevents me to have me-time on higher skilled side projects that would allow me to go way further technically, until the day my catch-up in the IT world is complete and when I can move on to a true high-paid engineering job.

Average is a purgatory, and it’s fine

Ofc I’m lucid. Among the compromises that we make, we find the reasons why a vast part of the web is in ruins. OS no longer maintained, same for language versions or frameworks, easy to find security breaches. I’m lucid about the fact I’m doing a stupid jobs in comparison of my ability, of what I could have done if I was more hard-working 10 years ago, when starting my IT studies. The purgatory looks like a lame team working autistically remotely with each other, open spaces filled with coffee junkies who imagine that they work for real and buzzwords released at daily meetup to feed the managerial semantic monster. But once again, I need this money. And if my next company for harvesting it can be a startup which cares just a little bit about technology, I’ll be satisfied. Because big corporations, and even more banks, are a pain when it comes to managerial parasiting, especially on the field of communication. I’m still ready to work for a big behemoth if it is in a field that passionates me though. Tomorrow I’ll attend an IT job fair, and I will see how it XLR8 my search. More down-to-earth reporting later this week.

In a world where entropy is at work, you have no choice but to fight perfection too. I don’t want to lose everything, so I have to update my mindset with that.