Changing Gears
10 Years of muscle memory down the drain
For the past decade or so my “job” has been to write the cleanest, most readable, working code as fast as I can. That’s great for me. I have built up all kinds of tools and habits around that single supposition. I have Kanban and Pomodoros and whole lyric-less playlists all designed to achieve a state of programming flow. One of the biggest factors is protecting my attention and time. Everything is built around not being interrupted and being able to keep the whole problem that I’m working on in my head.
That isn’t my job anymore.
My new job
While the back end team is still small, only two people out of six in the department, my JOB is the effectiveness of the WHOLE TEAM. That takes on a whole new level when the other back-end engineer is junior.
How that shifts things
First of all, it shifts my relationship to the user. Once the door was opened to the idea that my job is the effectiveness of a whole group of people not just my own personal efficiency I recognize that I can apply that same thought process to my user and my other customers. Visitors to the site? improve their effectiveness. Sales team? improve their effectiveness. C-level executives? improve their effectiveness. Now obviously this is going to look different for the different groups but, the core principle scales well. This is why this blog exists; I hope that by sharing my experiences you become more effective. Even if the increase is small, it is worth it.
The day to day
The first and most obvious difference in your day to day will be how interruptable you become. If, like me, you have become accustomed to long stretches where you do nothing but code you can expect those stretches to become much shorter. Your people will interrupt you and those outside your group will interrupt you more, hopefully sparing your team from those interruptions.
Somewhat less obvious is when you will be interrupted. I suddenly started being much busier first thing in the morning and last thing before people leave. I used to have the first 30 or so minutes of my day be where I would do code reviews while drinking my coffee or tea. Now I can expect to be in a conversation with a teamate within minutes of coming online.