After I had Autodesenvolvimento published, several important topics were left behind. I didn’t felt they were mature enough to make it to the book and I had a schedule to follow which I imposed to myself. As a developer by heart, if I were to wait it to get perfect, well, I wouldn’t had it published.
Internal Interruptions
Development is a technical creative activity through which the developer wants to express his knowledge. It takes time to put creativity and knowledge to work. It takes time to get to the point when focus and productivity are peak. There are a lot of requirement for the environment: it must have good lighting and temperature. It must be comfortable. It must have some air renewal and finally must be clear of interruptions.
That said, there is another environment that must also attend to this. It is the internal environment inside everyone’s head. The mind must be calm, clear of internal interruptions, fuzzy thoughts and problems.
I’m not saying that a developer must not get excited. That is very good. I’m saying that he must not have his head full of things to solve, problems to deal or situations to think his way out of it. Several recurrent problems scare developers. Let’s try to list a few good examples.
Personal Finances
Keeping a good track of personal finances is key to a healthy and prosperous career. This problem haunts newbies and experienced developers.
Why? People with some lack of balance on their personal finances have a cloudy vision of what they should do at work: they keep thinking on ways to close the hole on their finances. Also, they have a greater tendency to ask for more frequent raises than they deserve. And more money does not bring any more motivation: it is just a pain relief that won’t make them to work harder.
This is a downward spiral. More bills lead to less motivation and focus, less motivation and focus leads to lower performance and to lower results. Frequently, that shall lead to less payment or worse, it could lead no payment at all.
There is the opposite of it which the guy that wants to save every cent he gets. Usually this guy forgets to enjoy life, to invest into himself and to do the things he like. Forcibly this guy keeps almost a monastic life he never wanted.
There are out there several very good and reliable information on how someone should find a good balance on his accounts. I won’t be “yeat another 10 personal finance organization tips” kind of text. The idea should be to convince the developer why it is important to pay attention to this so he can avoid thinking on financial problems instead of technical problems.
Mainly because solving technical problems might bring in more money.
Fear of Being Fired
This one is the biggest headaches of every developer.
For beginners, he knows very little, work hard yet does not comprehend his surroundings. He have more questions than he can answer. The newbie developer finds everything frightening new and have upon himself a pressure to succeed. This leads to total fear of doing something wrong and gets the developer to such an awful state of low productivity that he ends loosing his job.
This fear comes out of nothing, most of the times. The developer thinks that he was hired to have every answer. That is not true. If everything that should have been developed so far had already been developed, well, there wouldn’t be any need for a development activity. It just exists because there are things yet to be developed.
That said, its possible to conclude that if there are things to be made also there are questions to be answered. There are products to be made. There are bugs to be solved. A newbie developer must always think that way and also think that if he was honest in the interview, those who hired him/her should be aware of what he/she does or doesn’t know.
Finally, it also haunts experienced developers. They might start to fear that they are overpaid. this one is easy to clear: if a company have a rule to cut expenses by firing experienced good guys (the guys that have great experience and proficiency), this probably is not a good place to work. If the developer is fired, it might be good for him, to leave such an evil place.
Thinking the Others
Some people are happy at their jobs. They are happy with their pay. They are productive and satisfied. One day, this developer hears that someone (and old classmate, for example) is getting a high payment than he do. He gets really frustrated, looses interest on his job and well, the rest it very well known.
First thing people compare are salaries. There is no need to be a HR expert to figure that the same job on the same level might be of similar payment on every company around. When companies say they pay over the market, it is not more than 10-15%. Besides, maybe he is in a different market with different responsibilities and unfortunately people DO lie about it sometimes. A developer must know that companies out there are not throwing money out a window.
So, it is advised that if a developer is happy with his life, he must forget about the others, the others payment, the others goals. The developer should focus on his own satisfaction. He must measure himself against his goals. Let the others be what the others want. Feeling stupid by comparison is the stupidity itself.
