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Perfection | |
November 13th, 2018 | |
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Very soon I'll be giving up my role as a manager and moving back | |
into the world of sole contributer. For the past five or six years | |
I've been a VP level director of a team or teams of developers. At | |
one point in time I had 24 direct reports across three offices. | |
These days I just have 3 direct reports at one office. Regardless, | |
my role has been primarily focused on facilitation, management, | |
coaching and strategy, with a heavy dollop of analytics work. It's | |
not that I don't get my hands dirty; I code all the time. It's | |
just that I'm typically jumping in to solve a single problem, or | |
create a framework, or rescue something gone astray. I rarely find | |
myself in the position of building things from scratch. | |
There's freelance, of course. I just completed a landing page for | |
a pharma company that will be launching shortly. It was an excuse | |
for me to learn the newest CSS features out there, CSS-Grid, and | |
to make sure I'm still sharp. Everything went exceptionally well, | |
and I should have a nice little side-money from it soon. | |
With the move out of the country I wanted to refocus on what | |
I enjoy doing and what keeps the stress level low. My dad was | |
a work-a-holic, and I could easily see myself falling into the | |
trap. I'm staring at a career crossroads: do I continue on my | |
present trajectory and take on C-suite positions and eventually | |
start my own company, or do I take a step back and focus on family | |
and friends at the cost of salary. It's not an easy decision. | |
I'm hoping Iceland can be a disconnect from a life of things. | |
I don't want all this stuff I've gathered. I have too many | |
hobbies, too many computers, too many projects. I want to take | |
a walk with the family and spend more time seeing my son smile. | |
While I don't want the stress of bills piling up, we're well past | |
the level of comfortable living. I don't need more if we're just | |
going to spend it. | |
So with the move to Iceland I'm giving up my VP title and my | |
managerial duties. I'm taking a step back into a senior developer | |
or lead architect role (whatever we decide to call it). I'll be | |
building things again and taking a pay cut to align. This feels | |
good and right, at least for now. | |
And it gives me the opportunity to think about what I enjoy about | |
coding. I'm a perfectionist in the work I do professionally. When | |
given a task I dig deep and try to solve it in ways that | |
anticipate things the designers never dreamed of. I anticipate the | |
ways testers will try to break things. I focus intensely on | |
pixel-perfect design execution without any compromise of speed or | |
accessibility. I want every piece of throw-away advertising trash | |
I build to be a perfect specimen. | |
Today I built a digital sales aid for pharmaceutical reps | |
detailing a drug that treats ALS. It's a tool that shows off payer | |
data and coverage information relevant to the doctor being | |
detailed. The original plan was for a national-level print piece, | |
but we managed to get the company to send us a feed of their raw | |
data. I worked on some analysis in R and generated specific | |
breakdowns for their list and found an elegant way to side-load | |
it into their presentations. The reps have extremely personalized | |
digital pieces now, which will give the home office interesting | |
analytics on the use of the tools and allow us to further segment | |
their targets by degree of concern about access and coverage, if | |
the client bothers to look at the data we collect anyway. | |
While the content I'm building isn't particularly interesting | |
I found ways to challenge myself, level it up, and focused on | |
perfection. That gives me a great deal of satisfaction. When I can | |
build something (even something dumb) perfectly in the first try, | |
that's a great feeling. I'm looking forward to more of that soon. |