A Software Villain Origin Story

Take this article with a grain of salt, because it’s my first time expressing these feelings in language. I don’t want to try writing something academic, or impressive, I just want to write whatever comes out of my fingers while I’m typing.

I’ve been aspiring towards a software developer role since I showed my mom the very first line of code I wrote, around age 11. For ten years, I learned about software by building it, for enjoyment at first, and for sake of compulsion or obsession thereafter. Chromebooks, RasPi’s, I even wrote a web game on a tablet. Didn’t care. Give me a machine.

Now I’m 21 and I work part-time at Financial Software Corp. as a Software Engineer I. Last decade, I didn’t know that my obsession for writing code was going to be useful in my 20’s. I didn’t have a career in mind, or a plan laid out. Computers appealed to me, and that’s the path I stuck with. The path, I guess, brought me to the world of corporate software.

Something feels “off” about the world of corporate software development. I can picture work so clearly: engineers and business people, chatting about projects and deadlines behind company-branded coffee cups and that cheerful, practiced smile that everyone who’s worked a retail job is all-too familiar with.

The feeling “off” is a bird chirping at 3am, when you don’t realize how late it’s gotten. It’s a spark right behind your brain stem, when the subway train announces a Southern stop but you actually meant to be traveling North. The bells of consciousness haven’t quite rang, but the hammer is cocked, ready to be swung.

When the hammer hits I will change my career.

I don’t think that anything is “off” in a dangerous way. I continue to love technology, and (health permitting) I will continue to derive self-fulfillment from becoming a better technologist, year after year, for the rest of my life. But the path towards becoming a better technologist is not a corporate career path, despite how synonymous they may appear.

The entrepreneurization of tech talent has, in my experience, stripped the joy from learning new skills and experimenting with new technologies that are not “marketable” to companies who are willing to pay for them. Engineers at work consistently want to play with new tech and optimize old, boring codebases because we value technological excellence. Contrast this with product owners, hiring managers, and other business layers who have different priorities because they are driven & rewarded by different pressures than engineers are.

The feeling “off” is a frequent observation that good business is done by balancing the demands of dozens of stakeholders. Much like a software product, a business is a system of moving parts that are subject to development, optimization, refactors, each of which represents a crossroads where trade-offs must be assessed and mistakes can be made.

Continuing as a corporate software engineer means accepting that I am but one of the possible stakeholders in a product, and my priorities and values are not sufficient to drive the direction of an entire project. Before going corporate, I was always the number one making those trade-offs. I was accountable for balancing the “stakeholders” in my personal projects (think: performance, ease-of-development, cool features) and I earned my own respect by making those mistakes and learning from them.

To me, that raw experience of managing complexity encapsulates the TRUE joy of software development, and that’s where I want to drive my career. To pursue a greater connection with the “core” of decision-making around a software product is more important to my “inner entrepreneur” than it is for me to actually code the product. And, just maybe, pursuing that career path at work would free my “inner technologist” to pursue interesting technologies outside of work, without feeling “bad” because the skills I’m building “aren’t marketable” or whatever.

I’m not fully committed to a path of product ownership - my career is still young, and there’s still time to figure this out. The bell hasn’t rung yet… but the hammer is looming.

Thanks for reading. :)