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.

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.