i’ve been doing a fair bit of mentoring lately. i guess because i’m obviously old and folks think i’ve got some wisdom about anything. To be fair, i am old.
Anyway, recently i got into a discussion with someone who’s been thinking a fair bit about her career. She started off doing data work, then did a bit of UI/Front end stuff, and just didn’t find it super fun or compelling. Honestly, very understandable.
i’ve always hated the semi-utopian thing about “Find a job doing what you love”. i’ll just come out and say that’s incredibly rare. There’s a reason that they can do shows about folks who manage to do that, it’s because they’re unique enough to be interesting. The rest of us? Yeah, we’re not as fortunate.
Don’t get me wrong. i have training for programming and some level of skill at it, but what makes me happy is not making servers go ping, but fixing problems and clearing tasks off of lists. i could do that anywhere and feel just as much sense of accomplishment. What makes me excited is not what i do, but why i do it.
Call me an idealist, but i actually really do want to make things better for people. To that end, i view personal privacy and security currently woefully lacking. It’s out there, but it’s not the path of least resistance and so folks tend to skip over it. Working for mozilla gives me the daily opportunity to fix things to be easier, more secure, and more private. That’s the reason i’m still working there and not, i dunno, CTO of some ad network that resells organs harvested from orphans or something.
What i do is not glamorous. My peers and i keep a bunch of back-end services running. We’re not going to be top of HackerNews. Heck if we get double digit count of stars on github, we’ll wonder what the hell happened. Still, we have around half a billion active connections and deliver messages in less than 100ms, juggle nearly a petabyte of encrypted user data, and write in the latest version of Rust because it’s the most performant and cheapest option for doing all of that.
Still, i’m working for a company that’s philosophically aligned with my interests, so yeah, i’ll deal with the frustrations and stress just fine, thank you.
Of course, there are down sides. i will never be invited on to the stage to talk about what i do. That means that promotions and bonuses are rare events. You’ll never know if i do my job right, but you’ll sure as hell know when i do it wrong.
CDF
