What separates me from the rest of my colleagues

Posted on July 19, 2023  •  5 minutes  • 941 words  • Other languages:  Español

Lately I’ve been finding lots of ducks in my life, so I kinda like them.

Introduction

All Satudays at 2pm, I have an hour meeting with some co-workers and coach Frank.

Some weeks ago, we were given this question: “What separates me from the rest of my colleagues?”.

The following thoughts are made standing from my role as a Backend developer from Devsu, collabing in Pichincha Bank

Here are my answers

1. Nationality

Let’s start with the easiest one. I’m 99% sure that all the other developers who I work with in my day to day are from Ecuador. And they seem to have previously met each other in different ocassions. Myself, I’m an Argentinian.

There are these few moments where I say something that’s too Argentinian and I have to explain what I meant, or they start talking about Ecuatorian day to day stuff and I don’t catch all the conversation.

This is not a really big deal, I think is a cool difference. The other day I said the Argentinian saying “There was never money and fear” and they thought it was cool.

2. Academic achievements

I’m also 99% sure that all my coworkers have a university degree (I don’t have one). I know for a fact that some of them even have a masters degree. I have mixed feelings about this…

• Negative thought: I can’t help but feel inferior compared to them. They already have an advantage over me, they know the inner workings of the codebase. So, they having a degree add up to this feeling.

• Positive thought: I’m proud of myself that, deserved or not, I have the chance to work besides these profesionals in their area. And it seems that they think of me as a colleague of the same level.

3. A fresh point of view

As someone new in the codebase and its architecture, I think I have a naive but fresh point of view of how the codebase works. I don’t think I can take much advantage of this though, cause everything is so well structured, that innovative ideas are not really welcomed here. It’s ok, as I’m learning much about how huge critical systems must work.

Anyways, I was able to teach a few tricks about how to use the Intellij debugger, which was taught to me when I started my path as a programmer back in September 2021. That was neat.

4. Profesional experience

I don’t know much about their previous jobs or so, but I think here I have a big positive thing going on for me. In my current group, there are very defined roles: a tech lead, a QA, a dev, a database admin.

But in all my previous jobs (and my current job with the San Luis goverment, which is not the focus of this article), I played all those roles as the same time, usually cause there was no political/finantial interest of increasing the team. So…

• I was a tech lead, who knows all the inner working of the app.
• I was a front-end dev, making forms, responsive pages, taking design decisions
• I was a back-end dev, writing bussiness logic (my current role here in Pichincha Bank)
• I was an infra guy, deploying .war files in some old tomcat server and wondering why the configs are not being read from .yaml files
• I was an offbrand devops guy discussing how we could improve the code to release path
• I was a database admin, making sure about data consistency

Sadly, the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” is true, and all those skills are not really translatable to the Pichincha Bank architecture. But I hope the opporunity arises.

5. Willingness and determination

I don’t know if this is a green or red flag, but this is a thing that I carry from my univeristy days: I’m totally down of making your system work, no matter how much it takes.

I don’t have kids, nor pets, nor any other responsibility in life, so I’ll dedicate 99% of my breathing energy getting the thing done is enough motivation is found. Though gonna be honest, frustration is a real thing that can stop anyone’s train of thought.

6. Ambition

I’m pretty sure that nobody in the team is thinking of making all their professional life in Pichincha Bank, and I’m also in the same bag. But in the meantime, credit where credit is due, I’m learning A LOT from the codebase and current tech leads.

I want to someday be part or create something that I enjoy developing and mantaining, to the point where when a bug occurs, I wanna be glad of sitting and finding out where my code failed and improve it.

Also the fact that my biological clock ticking a little bit faster than the rest, helps to increase that ambition and daydream of “the perfect software project”. I don’t really know how to focus that ambition yet, but is a good fact that it is there.

Conclusion

So, hi coach Frank, hope your week is going great. Is difficult to write a conclusion to this artice, is a little bitter-sweet cause thare are positives and negatives, as all in life I guess. Also I don’t want to become to existential here (I love to), that’s reserved for me and my friday therapy session.

If I have to give a short TL:DR answer, “What separates me from the rest of my colleagues?” let’s say… skills.

I’m currently working on reducing that gap, and I think I’m slowly getting the job done. But I’m not really feeling the excitement of achieving this. Weird isn’t it? I guess soon it’ll kick in.