Geekflex

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.

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.

One of the things I miss most about being a student is the regular change of scenery. A typical day of my student life involved being in several different places throughout the day, from classrooms to student common areas to offices. I’d rarely stay in one place for very long. Not only was each class in a different physical location, requiring me to get up and move around a bit — but in each class I’d see a different subset of friends and acquaintances.

When I started my full time job, I quickly became agitated by the monotony of office life. Each day I’d be surrounded by the exact same subset of coworkers. I would sit in my one office, without anywhere else to go. Eventually the end of the day would come and I would go home. Sometimes I would go to the bathroom; a trip made infinitely more exciting by Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader, conveniently placed in every stall. My office building was in total suburbia, so meeting up with friends for lunch was all but impossible. I was in a private inner office, which meant I had no access to natural light and was pretty much just left alone all day every day in the same room, sitting on the same chair, with the same four walls boxing me in.

I’m not exaggerating. This is what office life is. The contrast between a dynamic student lifestyle and a “professional” lifestyle is staggering. It’s not that the stuff I was working on is boring — far from it. It’s just that the environment was about as stimulating and invigorating as white noise. I couldn’t focus on anything and my mind would wander. It doesn’t have to be like this.

I might be an exceptional case, but I’ve always concentrated better when there were more things going on around me. The background noise of a coffee shop would help me focus better. When studying for my final exams, I’d take over a conference room at school with a few friends. The occasional distractions we provided each other was like the seasoning on an otherwise really bland steak. It made for an environment where studying was bearable, and I managed to get much more done than I would have been able to if I’d stayed home alone with a textbook.

The day I was most productive at work was the one day I managed to work remotely from another lab. But working remotely (or working “from home”) isn’t the solution. A “change of scenery” doesn’t mean “working alone.” Collaboration is important, and you need to be able to ask questions of your teammates, and brainstorm with them. Instant messaging and e-mail only work up to a certain extent, but nothing compares with face-to-face interaction. This was the main point of Fred Brooks’ keynote speech from OOPSLA ‘07 (listen to the mp3 if you have 1.5 hours), and there is research and evidence to back it up.

The best thing to do is offer some alternative scenery at the workplace. IBM’s software lab in Markham, Ontario is a stellar example. The top floor of this lab has four different “theme rooms” that employees can use. One room is modeled after a medieval library with antique bookshelves full of ancient-looking books and wing-backed chairs. Another room looks like a fishing cabin with couches and paintings of canoes along the walls. My favourite room was the “Japanese Garden” which had a rock garden and an indoor waterfall between rice-paper walls. To make these rooms accessible, each employee receives a laptop as their primary workstation. If you ever need a change of scenery, just unplug your laptop and go sit near the waterfall. The theme rooms offer a change of scenery and, since you’re not leaving the lab, your teammates are always close by for when you need to collaborate.

My ideal environment would be just like the study space we improvised during exam period: a big room with a small group of coworkers. We don’t all have to be working on the same things, but just having other people there is a motivator. The occasional distractions and small talk would keep the day interesting, and I’d be able to focus better on my work. I know this kind of environment exists, because this is almost exactly what my Extreme Blue internship was like. The trick is going to be finding a similar environment now that I’m no longer a student.

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. ;-)