On Careers...

I was on LinkedIn recently and it struck me how neat everyone's working life seems to be online.

Here, then here, then this, and... that. Does everyone but me bestride the working world like a great Vulcan collossus, logically determining that because of X environmentally determined characteristic & Y genetically codified desire, Z is the late stage capitalism role that they should, will, and were always going to, have?

Let us consult the great bastions of order in the world who keep us from talking like Humpty Dumpty too often.

Career

noun

"the job or series of jobs that you do during your working life, especially if you continue to get better jobs and earn more money"

More accurate in my experience is:

verb

"to move fast and in a way that is out of control"

I can already here the very, very professional among you frowning. You know what? I wish I could frown in good faith too. Your career has been a carefully planned series of positions & experiences that just so happen to slot oh-so-neatly into a 60 secondelevator pitch of definitely not post-rationalised moves that have led you to be the perfect candidate for this job/position/funding. I applaud you. I only really learned to start being strategic about my life moves after I left university, which in itself was probably a blunder.

Don't get me wrong. I will absolutely provide the tidied whys & wherefores of why I made which move when for purposes of an interview or seeming like I have at least some of my s**t together at a dinner party. That's one of the pleasant advantages of reflecting on life: understanding yourself - what motivates you, what you like & what you don't, when the grass is actually greener & when its just that fake stuff you get from B&M.

Previously, I: was going to study medicine (until I decided I really wans't & escaped to Japan for a year to try & find Haruki Murakami's jazz club only to find he'd moved on but that's another story), sold the good gym life here; managed this London coffee shop (sorry, "artisan bakery"); and taught secondary school English here in Liverpool with the educational charity TeachFirst.

I was always playing around with code, reading about technology & business, and always had vague idea that I'd do something related eventually. It wasn't untill I was 24 that I'd actually realise that there were paths to build for a living if you hadn't done computer science or maths at university. Once I realised that, it was a case of saying goodbye to my students & enduring Northern rail for 4 months between Liverpool & Manchester to get my skills to a marketable level.

Since then, I've learned a lot through doing, reading, asking questions of amazing peers & lead engineers who were incredibly generous with their time & knowledge - and still are. More recently, I've found myself in a place professionally where I can fulfil that pleasurable teaching prediliction by helping others learn - about Domain Driven Design, eventsourcing, event driven architectures, & distributed systems. More often that not, that teaching is half jumping into learning something & sharing it as I go (currently, devops & observability).

Come to think of it, that was what I tried to bring to my teaching & probably my general approach to life. Be confident enough, to learn, well & fast, but be humble enough to share what you learn & know that you will never know it all and that there's always someone who sees something you haven't or actually does bestride the topic like a great. Vulcan. collossus. Befriend them.