Choose Strong
For Tim.
"Those soldiers who are not willing to be a general are not good soldiers."
--Napoleon
Indifferent to the on-going pandemic, Bill is growing older like everyone else.
These days, he finds himself prefer things the way they are instead of hoping
for change. After all, he's spent the first half of his life learning lessons
and wanted to hold onto what's learned for a while.
Three months ago, the DMV urged him to upgrade his expiring driver's license to
a new Real ID that he could use to board an airplane. He immediately set out to
search on their Website for a way to downgrade, maybe, to a Fake one. In the
end, he had to settle with something inbetween, which was of the exact kind of
DL that he's used for the past 16 years.
At work, he used to hate changes in the code except for his own. Sometimes, he
had a good reason: the major module he contributed has stood the test of time
and given no problems. This gave him the right to be bitter for a while that
the author of the code replaced by this work got promoted to architect and yet
Bill himself had stuck at the position of a senior engineer.
But nowadays, he has come to terms with others' code. He even can appreciate the
buggy. For one thing, aging has seemed to improve his immunity to headaches, and
he no longer feels pressure from work no matter how serious or urgent a problem
looks. He has started to see bugs as the reason for an older and more experienced
programmer to stay engaged with the world.
Among bugs, performance issues are often hard to fix. The software works
correctly, which is expected, but just not fast enough, which is intolerable as
it makes the product look bad compared with competition. Pressure would trickle
down the food chain from Wall Street (read the god of greed and fear) to
customers to vendors and to managers and eventually, the buck stops at a few
programmers.
Recently, Bill was drafted from his little forgotten corner to help put out fire
before the release. He and the team lead both worked on a tough bug.
From the beginning, he made the mistake by digging at the wrong part of the
code and got nowhere. It was more revealing that after he showed what
he had done so far, no one could point out the flaw in his assumptions. At this
level, the corporate heirachy was useless at best and often harmful. Following
managers or higher-ranked engineers, one could end up just as clueless.
Everyone was created equal before the sphaghetti code that defied human
understanding.
Following nobody and rejecting input from others was Bill's forte. He was not
quick enough to question his own premises, though. Instead, a false confidence
took hold of him as he approached his task with aplomb like never before.
Two weeks of intense collective theorizing and scrutinizing passed in a blink
and at the end of a Wed when they checked, the program miraculously sped up!
Everyone was happy and eager to accept that the last change just made by the
team lead gave the boost and to leave the matter behind.
Everyone but Bill. To him, the last change did not click and it felt worse not
knowing the root cause of a fix than that of a bug. Besides, he was keener on
stabbing at others' balloons than his own. Again ignoring the rest, he spent
another day to find out what really happened: it was fixed by accident by an
inexperienced programmer working on a totally different issue and his change
was committed earlier that Wed!
No one cheered the finding. In fact, the truth might have underwhelmed some but
to Bill, it was like a Sherlock Holms story and finally the puzzle was complete.
Moreover, this time he had fun by focusing on the task and never letting ego get
in the way, which felt even more winning than solving problems outright.
And indeed soft skills are very important and Bill was only able to grow these skills after he stopped fearing. It was like that scene at the end of The Matrix where Neo saw the Agents as they were, a bunch of computer code.
Also, "passed in a blink" is definitely a better expression than "Time does fly!":))
"Everyone was created equal before the spaghetti code that defied human understanding."-- While this is a visible hard skill test, soft skills are mostly utilized in an invisible, unfair or even dirty way.