Humility, Respect, Trust
Its been a while since I have posted here and while there are many topics that I wish to visit with this blog coming up especially with some of the things I have been exploring with Angular updates and Typescript I want to step back and talk about something that I feel is core to being a good developer or really a good employee, manager, or person in general.
A while ago I gave a book recommendation for Team Geek (the newer printings are called Debugging Teams) and in this book they talk about the three pillars that should be kind your guide to your every day work ethic and approach. These are Humility, Respect, and Trust. Now during my first reading I kind of glazed over this section thinking oh yeah one more list of three things to keep in mind. Having been a Boy Scout, I thought well file that away many of the other Oaths and sayings I have heard in the past. However given time to work with others and re read this chapter 4 times now, I have grown to really respect these values so I just want to take a few moments to promote these pillars as reminders to other developers.
So Humility, this is one of those easy to say hard to do things. One might think sure I am humble I am open to criticism from my manager or a senior developer, but truly embracing this value is so much more. To paraphrase a famous quote “Life is a classroom and everyone in it a teacher”. This means many things to developers. For one we need to be open to learning from any source no matter how junior and in what form it may be presented. Just because we are well seasoned or think we know how to handle a situation it never hurts to listen to input. You never know maybe it does not help you today, but maybe it will tomorrow.
Respect is honestly the simplest of these to understand and grasp. The “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” applies to your work life interactions too. If you want to advance or succeed at your job you need to be willing to treat your coworkers with a degree of respect in order to get anywhere. This ranges from listening to feedback as mentioned above, to being supportive, and communicating with your coworkers. If you are getting frustrated with something a coworker is doing, before getting upset with them think about what you can do to improve a situation or what you might not be doing that has lead to the situation.
Trust is a hard one, as the book illustrates many developers like to kind of hide in a hole and do their own thing and hide their code away from prying eyes or people that may add bugs to it. However you have to trust in those you work with. As mentioned above new ideas or improvements can come from anywhere so you have to trust your teammates to help you with that. In addition you need to trust your coworkers to do the right thing. You cannot always make all the decisions, even if you are the senior developer of a team at some point that junior dev you work with is going to have to spread his wings and fly so instead of sheltering them trust them to take on gradually bigger projects so that they can learn and grow.
I apologize if this seemed a bit ranty and opinionated compared to my normal posts, I am using this as a bit of a warm up to get back into things and I promise most of what I have in mind will not be like this one. However, with that said I do feel these three pillars are quintessential to success in development or any career field. Also I cannot speak enough to the value of Team Geek/Debugging Teams. It is an amazing read for those in development and a pretty solid one for those not in it as well.