Geekflex

I love programming. It’s a passion of mine that I’ve held onto for as long as I can remember. I have what seems like a natural aptitude for it, and I consider myself extremely lucky for having discovered this passion early on so that I could follow it into a career. After a day’s work I feel fulfilled and satisfied, like I accomplished something worthwhile. Most of the time, I also feel like I’ve learned something; which is the strongest motivator for me.

When I was a student, I would spend all night in front of my computer. I’d be learning programming languages, working on pet projects, and solving programming-contest challenges. I remember pulling an all-nighter several years ago, teaching myself C# and XML-RPC by building a simple application that let me post to my blog. Yet it seems that once I graduated and started working full time, my motivation to spend the same time and energy on pet projects diminished.

The issue is what I’ll call my social quota. When I was a student I was surrounded by other people all day. Whether I was in class, in the engineering student association’s office or at a social event, there were always fellow students to talk to. Coming home after a day rich in social interactions, I would relish the solitude of sitting in front of my computer and programming the night away.

I became dependent on the levels of social interaction that I would reach in a given day of school. To this day I can’t think of a more rewarding experience than meeting new people, talking and socializing. I became a people-person, and I’ve been as-yet unable to reconcile my need to socialize with people and my passion for programming.

Programming is ultimately a solitary activity. There is only one keyboard attached to the computer. Even when you work with a team — and indeed, one of my favourite things about the profession is when we hammer out the solution to a problem as a group — eventually you have to go back to that computer and code the solution that’s floating around in your head. After sitting, alone, in front of a computer for the better part of a day, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer, at home, for the better part of the evening.¹

It’s not just programming, but most solitary activities that I have no interest in doing in my free time. Social contact is like a drug for me and I get very antsy if I go without it for long periods of time. While there is some social contact at work — and believe me this is something that’s crucial to keeping me going throughout the day — my quota is usually nowhere near filled. Once I’ve left the office for the day, I’ll do anything for a night out with friends. I get energized by being in a crowd. Whenever I’m faced with the choice of doing something alone or doing something in a group, I will always choose the group.

All that being said, I’m quite satisfied with both my career up to now and my lifestyle. It’s okay to spend my days programming and problem solving, and then relax with my friends in the evening. I imagine if the situation was reversed, and I were working with people all day, then I would probably shut myself away in the evenings and I’d be blogging about my Alone-Time Quota (or, Why I Don’t Go Out In The Evenings).

Where you choose to live is not something that can be underestimated. No matter how important a job or a career might be, once 5pm rolls around and you go home for the day you still have to live there. I’m not sure to what extent citizens are influenced by a city’s character or vice versa. It might be that the sidewalks roll up at night in some places because people prefer to spend their evenings at home, or maybe people prefer to spend their evenings at home only because there’s nothing else to do.

There’s no doubt that a city’s character and attitude can affect your perception of the place. Paul Graham describes this concept acutely in his essay on Cities and Ambition:

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

His point is that if you know exactly what you want to do, you should go live in the place where that sort of thing is being done. You should surround yourself with people who are doing that sort of thing. For example, if you wanted to pursue music then you should probably go live in Nashville, which is literally off-the-charts compared to other cities’ music scenes. Whether the people are influenced by the city or whether it’s the other way around is irrelevant when you think of the fact the people there are still providing much of the influence. The fact is that in doing what you want will come more easily if the people around you want to be doing the same thing, too. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. To quote again from Paul Graham’s essay:

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

Although the essay emphasizes the work and career aspects of the city you live in, I think we also need to consider the lifestyle and social aspects.

I do believe the the key is to find a balance between an interesting work life as well as fulfilling social life. I’ve been going to extremes on both ends of the spectrum, so it’s no wonder I’m so far unsatisfied. I started my career at IBM’s Ottawa lab working on the garbage collector for the Java Virtual Machine. It was a very, very cool job. I got to work on some pretty exciting things and dive head first into the low-level inner workings of the VM. I was dealing with complex problems that I’d only read about in textbooks and I loved it. Yet I found that the city’s attitudes and subtle messages were running against the grain of my personality. The underlying message in Ottawa that permeates the very fabric of the city is: “Settle down.”

And I was not ready to settle down. I had just graduated, I felt like I had an infinite sea of options ahead of me and I could do anything I want. The last thing I would want to do is “settle.”

My social life went from its peak in university to a dead stop as soon as the moving truck left with my belongings in it. It was like hitting a brick wall while traveling at 200mph, without anti-lock breaks or airbags. There were several factors that contributed to the social vacuum I experienced, but I think that ultimately the root cause was that I moved prematurely. I still had unfinished business to deal with in my hometown, and I was not mentally prepared to say goodbye and move on. I probably would’ve been unhappy no matter where I ended up. Having said that, I’m still not ready to settle — least of all in Ottawa.

When I moved back to Montreal, I jumped from extreme on the work/life spectrum to the other. Although I was asked if I would be interested in keeping my job on the VM team while working remotely out of Montreal, I declined because I didn’t like the idea of being isolated from my teammates. Instead I switched teams to the only software team that operates in Montreal, which is a very different kind of team from the one I had in Ottawa. My social life has indeed improved since I’ve returned, but I am regretting the decision I took to switch teams.

I have not, for even a second, regretted the decision to move back to Montreal. This city’s message is much more in tune with who I am. Montreal’s underlying philosophy is “Enjoy life.” You can feel it in the pulse of the city’s streets. This city is alive and its character is emphasized everywhere you go. Not a day goes by where I don’t think to myself, at least once, “I fucking love this city.”

Despite the city, my social life is beginning to experience its natural decline and tapering off as I get older and more disconnected from the life I had as a university student. This gradual sense of slowing down is exactly what I need now, even though it’s been causing me no small amount of anxiety. It’s important for my personal growth to learn to deal with this very natural part of growing up. This is what my brain knows, anyway. My heart is still not willing to give it up.

The experience of my move to Ottawa is still tugging at the back of my head. I wish I had never gone so that I could experience this gradual decline at a more appropriate pace. Instead of hitting the brick wall at 200mph, it might have been more bearable if I were going 50mph or if I’d have had time to install airbags.

One thing I learned from the experience is that I have to be more careful when choosing a place to live. Many people have told me that Ottawa is unique in quite how boring it really is, and that this is only something you can really know once you live there. I learned that I need to spend enough time in a city to be able to hear its subtle messages before I decide to lay down roots there. I’m hoping this learned caution is a good thing, and if I do decide to move somewhere else I’ll be better prepared.

It’s no secret that I’m looking for the next step in my career, which means a little more than simply saying that I’m searching for a new job. Although IBM is an excellent company to work for¹, their opportunities in Montreal are severely limited. If I wanted to work on an interesting, exciting and challenging project at Big Blue, I would have to move to either Toronto (well, Markham) or Ottawa. More and more I’m beginning to realize that staying in Montreal is becoming a career-limiting move.

I’ve tried the Ottawa thing already, and lasted no more than 7 months before frantically scrambling back to my home city. The job was good and the team was smart and motivated, but the city town was dull. There are several reasons why I was miserable living there, and it wouldn’t be constructive to list them all here. The most important factor was the distance and separation from my close friends. Sociable as I am, I never expected to have such a hard time making friends in Ottawa. Making friends is something that has come naturally to me and posed no challenge throughout my university experience. One of the benefits of university, of course, is that I got to spend nearly all my waking hours surrounded by an ever-changing group of like-minded people around the same age as me. Contrasted with work, where I was significantly younger than most of my co-workers, making it difficult to approach them as anything more than just simply “co-workers”. Most of my evenings would be spent miserably sitting on my couch. The loneliness was unbearable, and the misery of it affected how I felt about my job and my work.²

The clincher was when my group of friends collaborated and built a bar to give as a birthday present to my best friend in the world. Although they waited until I could be in town before surprising him by erecting the bar in his living room, it broke my heart that I couldn’t be there to help with the construction and my only contribution to the effort was a bottle of banana liqueur. It was then that I realized that my friends won’t all be in the same place for much longer. In fact, two close friends have already moved to BC. For the time being, my closest friends are all conveniently gathered in one city and I don’t think there’s any reason for me to live anywhere else. Case in point, when I was feeling down a few weeks ago, a group of friends colluded in secret to surprise me and cheer me up. They stormed my apartment carrying beer and food and a card which they had all signed right under my nose at a party the night before. These are the people that make my life awesome, and if I only have a limited time to take advantage of us all being in the same place then I am damn well going to enjoy it while I can. If I leave now, I will regret it for the rest of my life.

Needless to say, I’m not willing to move back to Ottawa. Although my initial move may have occurred at a premature stage in my life, the experience has embittered me to the concept of leaving Montreal altogether. I’m not saying I’ll never leave, but I’m certainly more resolved to staying for the time being.

The problem is that Montreal is far from the best place to be looking for technology jobs. That’s not to say there aren’t any jobs here — quite the contrary. Programming jobs are a dime a dozen, but I’m not looking just another job. I want to start my career. To that end I know what I’m looking for, and it’s not easy to find. I need something that will enable me to grow as a software developer and as a person, that will challenge me and force me to make decisions, improve my existing skills and learn new ones. Regardless of whether I’m looking within IBM or without, I know I’ll have much better luck finding my professional niche in Toronto³ given that there are simply many more teams and projects to choose from.

I’d like to say I’m comfortable biding my time until I no longer have such strong roots in Montreal — once my friends start drifting away and finding their own careers and lives elsewhere — but I’m not. I’m getting antsy and agitated. I feel like these next few years are critical for establishing the foundations of my long-term career. I’m young, energetic, ambitious and passionate. I have all the drive and determination in the world. These are traits should be put to work investing in my future. If I wait too long there are opportunities that I’m bound to miss, and the longer I wait the older I’ll get and the less time I’ll have. Now is the time to get started.

I feel stuck.

If I stay in Montreal, I will have all the people who are important to me nearby. They will continue to fill my life with love and genuine happiness and there is no measure for how much my life is enriched by having them around. Yet I’ll be sacrificing opportunities to advance in my career, to learn and grow as a professional and contribute significantly to industry. On the other hand if I leave Montreal for a career, I’ll be deserting my friends and the immeasurable joy they bring to me. I used to believe that I could build a bustling social life for myself no matter where I am, but the move to Ottawa last year changed that. I’m now much more hesitant to leave for fear of reliving that loneliness again, and I know that even if the job is amazing I wouldn’t be able to appreciate it if I didn’t have close friends to enhance my life.

I haven’t yet given up on finding the perfect career in Montreal, and I will continue the scour the city with a fervour. But maybe it’s time I start sending my resume elsewhere as well just to see where it leads.

Throughout my university career I had goals. I used to think these were simple, common goals. I wanted to graduate and get a job. I got a job offer before I graduated — a full school year before I graduated, even — which allowed me to enjoy my last year of school to the fullest without the stress of figuring out what I wanted to do and job hunting. I thought I dodged the bullet that traps nearly every other student in their last year: the now what syndrome.

Moving to another city for work certainly accelerated things, but it didn’t take long before I contracted the now what syndrome myself. Graduated from university? Check. Got a job? Check. Now what? I have no goals. I have ambition, drive, and energy — but I don’t feel like I have any outlet for it.

I lost track of my passion. It’s not something I found even while performing a job that I found extremely interesting. It kept my brain stimulated, but not my heart. I had moved away from my friends and my social life came to a grinding halt. I couldn’t find people my age through work, and the city didn’t provide anywhere near the level of cultural entertainment that my hometown did. I had no friends, except when I went home on the weekends, and my weeks were spent in social misery. All that for a job that didn’t love. I enjoyed it, but I felt like I was missing out on the parts of life that made me truly happy: the time I would spend with friends. And so I moved back.

Naturally, being back home didn’t solve all my problems — but I didn’t expect it to. My motivation was to buy myself some more time to find out what it is I really want to do. In the meantime, I have my friends close by, and a day job that keeps me on track with paying back my student loans.

But I still spend most of my time thinking about it: What should I do with my life?

Ever since I was a child I had assumed that computers and programming were my calling. My mother’s reminded me that when I was 2 or 3 years old I received a plastic computer toy as a birthday present which, after opening, caused me to ignore all the other birhtday presents. I was too weak to actually press the buttons so I would grab my father’s finger and point it to the keys I wanted to get pushed. The toy was actually really silly, but my life has been tied to computers ever since. It was one of these Tomy Tutor Play Computers, which I can’t believe I was able to find a picture of.

I love programming. I enjoy doing it. I love solving problems and the feeling I get when I accomplish something. The inherent frustration of trial-and-error and incremental improvements is easily bearable because of my adoration for the craft. I’ve had people tell me that they were jealous of the fact that I’ve known what I wanted to do for essentially my whole life. Maybe I give off that impression when I talk about programming, but it’s not an end — it’s a means to an end. It’s a skill that I love using but one can’t simply program for the sake of programming. It’s a skill that needs to be applied, and I’m still hunting for that application.

Only recently have I begun to realize that my original goals — graduating and finding a job — were oversimplified. I did so much more in my experiences at university that weren’t directly related to either graduating or finding a job. Some things — such as involvement in many student associations — may have even been detrimental to those goals since they took my focus away from schoolwork. Not that I ever cared much for schoolwork. My goals not only weren’t as simple as I thought they were, they were hardly what was driving me.

The aspects of being a student that I loved had precious little to do with class, graduating, or future employment. Maybe those weren’t actually my goals in the first place. I just thought they were. I found fulfillment in all the activities I did that were only tangentially related to my duties as a student. I kept myself immensely busy by attending nearly every conference, participating in nearly every competition, and helping to organize these events for others. I was constantly meeting new people, making new friends, discovering new tools and concepts and learning at a pace that was exponentially quicker than what I would’ve been exposed to in class. I took advantage of being a student to do all the things that a student studying software engineering could possibly do. No wonder I felt empty once I gave up the student identity that had served me so well.

Maybe it’s not the programming that I love after all, but all the things that it has enabled me to do. When I shed my student identity and all the conferences, competitions and activities it opened up to me, programming became … well, it became dull.

The lesson I’ve learned through all of this should’ve been obvious, since it was a major point of Jeff Atwood’s CUSEC 2008 Keynote, and a famous anecdote from Into The Wild: Happiness only real when shared. Programming makes me happy, but only insomuch as I’m able to share it with others.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I think better inside the box. When faced with limitless possibilities and endless choices I get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. I’m pretty good at getting from point A to point B, but I need to know is where point B is. I can figure out where point A is by analysing the current situation, whatever that may be.

When it comes to programming, point B is usually a working program that performs a given feature set. Point A is me with my set of tools. Those tools include programming languages, problem solving experience, Google-fu and whatever I have installed on my computer. These are among the items I have in my box. There are lots of things I can do inside my box, and the better I understand these tools the more I can do with them.

In life, my box contains all the people I’ve encountered, everything I’ve ever learned and all the experiences I’ve ever had. The universe according to me is everything that I can see from within my box. The skills I’ve developed, from professional to social, are also tools in my box. When graduating from university was my point B, it was these tools that I relied on to make it there. I honed and sharpened them and got used to them. My box was geared entirely towards achieving my goal. Once I graduated — my point B reached — I was left with a box of tools, and the feeling that most of them were no longer relevant. I found myself wondering now what?

I’m stuck in a box.

The lesson I’ve been slowly coming to terms with is that the universe doesn’t fit in a box. This box wasn’t always closed. The goals and tools that were there had to come from somewhere. I’m the one that limited my vision and focused too closely on a particularly moment. The box needs to open up again and let new goals find their way in. I can learn new skills and new tools and sharpen them as necessary. I’ll meet new people and let them help shape part of my universe. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it yet.

But I do know that I’m getting out of my box.

See you on the flip side. ;-)