----------------------------------------
Perfection
November 13th, 2018
----------------------------------------
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.