Geekflex

This week marked the one-year anniversary of my first full time job after graduating. I gained some experience and learned a lot about the company, its people, processes and teams. But more than anything I’ve learned a lot about myself. This has hardly been a solitary journey, and in the past year I’ve discussed with many different colleagues, mentors, managers, supervisors and even executives — both inside my company and elsewhere. I’ve participated in community discussions about engaging “Generation Y” in the workplace. All these experiences have helped me to identify and articulate those things that I believe are essential to happiness in my own career.

1. Face-to-Face Collaboration

I want to work with people in person. This could mean brainstorming together, bouncing ideas and solutions off of each other, and helping each other learn. It could include gathering around a whiteboard, or even a pad of paper, or getting two or more people huddled around a computer monitor trying to solve some nasty little bug. Or pair programming. Two heads are better than one and communication is infinitely more efficient if you have two people sitting together side-by-side. Some things that take hours to explain over the phone, instant messaging or e-mail can take mere minutes to explain in person. You can save all this time and extra frustration by just pulling up a chair next to someone else.

2. Friends

I’d love to have coworkers whom I can relate to on a social and cultural level. I want coworkers whom I can be friends with. The advantages of working with friends are endless. Collaboration amongst people who know each other well and get along is so much more meaningful. The small distractions that friends provide at the workplace, such as sharing a clever comic or YouTube video, add some positive energy to the environment. Something so simple as having a friend to eat lunch with can make a world of difference in a day that might otherwise be spent in isolation. These relationships extend beyond the boundaries of the workplace and become real, meaningful friendships. Going to a bar after work for happy hour, catching a movie on Tuesday night or heading to the Just For Laughs festival together are all things that coworkers who are also friends with each other can do. In short, it makes sitting in an office more lively.

3. Challenge Me

My university career was spent learning, developing and honing my technical, social and communication skills. My internships and my first year out of school have given me some practical experience. In order to grow, learn and master these skills I need to challenge them. I would love to be working on tasks that are just beyond the reach of my abilities, forcing me to learn something new or apply my skills in new ways. Naturally, every job will have some tedious aspect to it, but a sufficient challenge can be a reward for sticking through the menial parts and make everything worth it. The trick is finding those occasional projects that make me say “This is why I love this job.”

4. Talk To Me

Just as I seek out technical challenges to practice my technical skills, I need a forum for improving my communication skills. Unlike the stereotypical “geek”, I’m an extrovert. I love to talk, socialize and explain. I welcome open discussions and sometimes I like to play devil’s advocate. I thought that the ability to communicate effectively was secondary to my technical skills but what I’ve learned over the past year is that communication is a skill that needs to be cultivated. I’ve also learned that I need to communicate as much as I need a technical challenge, if not more so. The main reason I come into the office everyday is because it’s less lonely than sitting in my apartment. I only exercise my option to “work from home” if I have an excessive backlog of laundry to do. (In other words, it’s better than showing up to work in my pyjamas because I’m out of clothes).

5. Lifestyle and Location

Like others of my generation, I work to live. Money and wealth are not my primary motivators. Life should be about living. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that I can confidently say “I love my life.” If that’s not happening, then I know I need to do some moving and shaking. When I was working in Ottawa, my job was pretty awesome. I regularly had technical challenges and was working with a team of ridiculously smart people. After a few months, however, I learned that I simply couldn’t live in Ottawa. I found that I was sacrificing my lifestyle for the sake of my job. No job could replace the friends, entertainment and culture that I had enjoyed throughout my time in Montreal. It seems obvious now, but it was a tough lesson. I learned that the city I live in has an immense impact on my happiness and well-being. I need to be able to do the things that I love doing, whether it’s attending the Fantasia Film Festival, Nuit Blanche, the Eureka Science Fair or simply hanging out with my beloved friends. The bottom line is that my job must enable me to live my life to the fullest, or better yet be a part of what makes my life worth living.

It’s taken me a full year, but I feel like I’ve finally been able to state with confidence what I want out of my career and where it fits in with the rest of my life. Now that I know what I’m looking for I’m in a much better position to find it. World, here I come.

It’s something I’ve heard told over and over again. It’s the underlying message of virtually every keynote presentation at CUSEC. It’s something to strive for and believe in. It seems obvious when you think about it, but it’s amazing how often this simple mantra gets ignored or pushed aside or put on hold. In what is likely the most inspirational speech I’ve ever seen, Gary Vaynerchuck states “There is no reason in 2008 for you to be unhappy.”

Why do we need so much encouragement to do what we love? If we love to do it why aren’t we doing it already? Too often we get stuck thinking that it’s just not that easy, but is that really true or is it just a cop-out on our parts? Maybe when I say “not now” I’m really just too scared of what might happen. It’s no surprise then, that those same keynote presentations very often tell us to take incredible risks.

It’s one thing to be risky, but it’s a very short step to being reckless. “Taking risks” doesn’t mean doing something stupid without thinking of the potential consequences, it means doing something with a high probability of failure with a potential for great success. You have to know what that failure can entail and you have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, even though you might not know what success will bring. In her keynote presentation at this year’s CUSEC, Leah Culver talked about dropping everything and moving to San Francisco. “What’s the worst that could happen?” she asked. Her answer was “Well, I go back to Minnesota and live with my parents.”

Before you even get to the point where you’re ready to take risks to do what you love, you have to know what it is you love, don’t you? You have to put your heart and mind into it, focus on it, and when the time is right make your move. And therein lies the challenge. How do you know what you love? Every job is going to have its share of grunt work, whether you’re working for yourself, or a startup, or a mega corporation. It could be dealing with bureaucratic overhead, your clients or your mom. Po Bronson phrased this sentiment very well:

The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?

That’s a lot easier said than done. The very first step lies in figuring out who I am, what I like, what I don’t like, what I can grin and bear and what will eventually lead to breakdown. Only once I’ve got enough of that nailed down can I really start looking at where I belong and what I should be doing with my life and my career.

There’s a problem in our culture and in our language that causes us to infer identify based on our occupation. We say “I am a software developer”, “I am an engineer”, “I am a marketing rep” and “I am a student”. We use these statements to build up our identities. When meeting someone for the first time, they almost inevitably asked what’s called The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: “What do you do?” They almost never ask “Who are you?”. And what happens when someone actually does ask “Who are you?” … Well, you’ll most likely start with your name immediately followed by your occupation.

This is so freaking wrong. But we can’t help it. It’s imbued in our culture. It’s as if you really are only a reflection of your job. And what if your job doesn’t make you happy? What if it’s something you do to pay the bills and to fund the rest of your life? Well then you might not very much like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question.

“If you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.”¹

Throughout my university years I identified with being an engineering student. I embodied that identity in every way I could. I attended every conference and competition available to me. I became involved in my university’s undergraduate Engineering student association. I’ve even won awards for “outstanding contribution to student life”. If you asked me who I was, I would proudly answer “I am a student in software engineering at Concordia University.”

Then, I graduated. Suddenly I was no longer a student. The conferences and competitions were no longer open to me. CUSEC 2009 was my last, big student event that I could participate in. It’s as if the persona and identify that I had embodied with all my spirit was all at once out of context. I suddenly didn’t know who I was anymore. I wasn’t the long-haired, lovably drunk software engineering student anymore, though I was still a long-haired lovable drunk. But that answer didn’t satisfy me at all.

I found myself questioning my identity. How much of who I am was really me, and how much of it was a subconscious attempt to embody the identity and image of a “software engineering student”? Naturally part of the problem is that I had trouble identifying with my new role as a “professional” software developer at a big company. Answering The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question with “I am a software developer” just doesn’t jive with me. I don’t feel that it accurately portrays who I am the way saying I’m a student did. In other words, I work as a software developer, but there is much more to me than that.

I don’t like my answer to The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question. As I mentioned, I feel that there is much more to me than my job, but extending this interpretation reveals that my job doesn’t give me enough room to express my own identity. This is why I’m not satisfied simply saying “I am a software developer”, because that is but one small facet of who I am. There are many more aspects to my personality that are hidden, looking for a venue or an outlet with which to be expressed.

I was incredibly lucky to have found outlets for all aspects of myself in my identity as a student, and now I’m struggling to find new outlets in a different context as a member of the working world. I need to change, and recognizing that was not easy. So as a symbol and a tangible reminder of the fact that I’m no longer a student, I finally got a haircut and shed the curly ponytail that I’d kept since the 8th grade.

Hello, World.