Furthermore: February 2006 - Self Analysis (part 1)

(fair to say I've moved on a bit from this, but I haven't edited it)

It was my 35th birthday on Friday 3 February. I’ve been taking stock of my life for a while now, and my birthday makes me want to try to draw together a few of the ideas that have been in my head.

I’m going to do this in 3 parts. This part is about where I am now, and how I got here. The next will be about what I’ve been reading, and my responses to that. The third will be some sort of thought experiment about where I go from here.

This is a bit more personal than I usually blog, but I want to see how much of this I can make public. Partly to make it more real for myself, and partly in the vague hope that it will be useful to other people.

The main thing I’d say is that I’m really happy at the moment. Although they’re almost too obvious to think about, it’s worth remembering the basic things that I take for granted:

* I’m healthy
* I have a place to live
* I have enough to eat
* I have what possessions I need
* I live in a (moreorless) free country

More specifically personal reasons:

* I have a lovely wife, and two beautiful daughters
* I have an interesting job, which is reasonably well paid
* I have a life outside work
* I have a pleasant environment to live in

I’m not trying to boast here, I’m just saying I have all the necessary conditions to be happy. A lot of people don’t have those things. A lot do and are still not happy for a variety of good and not-so-good reasons.

I’d say in the last year or so that a couple of things have happened that have made me evaluate what I’m doing. Firstly, back in October 03 I was made redundant from a job based in the City. I got another job in Cambridge, which I didn’t enjoy, and so I had to leave that pretty quickly and start another new job. Around the same time as that, my dad had a serious stroke, and I was pretty worried about him.

So, I think the combination of the redundancy, the bad job experience, and my dad’s health meant I just didn’t really settle in at my new job, and I ended up having a few problems there because they still weren’t sure about me. I think that gave me a bit of a shock and fortunately I responded positively to that.

I started working harder, but fortunately I also discovered Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done book around that time. Once I’d grokked his system I was able to get control of a nagging sense I’d had for a long time that I had a large number of things I wanted to keep track of, but no way of doing it that would ensure I actually got reminded of what I wanted when I needed it. I won’t go into why GTD works here - there are loads of sites on that. For me though, it has gradually sunk into the framework of my life, and made me much more focussed and efficient at getting done what I want to get done, and also reduced the amount of mental clutter I deal with.

So, having got to this state, and having succeeded at work (I’m now managing a small group, which I’ve wanted to do for a while), I’ve reached a plateau - I feel relaxed, productive, open to new things - it’s a great feeling. At the same time, it’s given me a space in which a new question has opened in my mind: what do I want to do with the rest of my life?

This is maybe the first time I’ve consciously asked myself that question. It seems strange to me to say that in a sense I’ve been on autopilot since I was a child, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

Now I don’t really want to psycho-analyse myself, but I think a little history will help make it clear how I got to be where I am today. As a child I was a classic brainy, shy kid. I found it difficult to make friends (although I always had some) and I was teased and bullied quite a bit. I was good at maths and science, and I got a ZX Spectrum at an early age and learned to program it.

So I enjoyed those things, and found human contact difficult and often unpleasant, although I also craved affection. So I emerged from the education system with a good degree in mathematics from Cambridge University, and very little self-confidence that I could do anything other than hard thinking.

I initially thought of carrying on into further study. I tried that, and it didn’t work out for me. I did Part III maths (not a good choice of course, I think) and just found it an incredible struggle. In retrospect I think I was actually depressed during that year, and when it was over I had no desire to continue with academic study, at least in mathematics.

So what then? Get a job of course. I didn’t question the idea that I should. That’s just what you did when you finished studying. I thought software development sounded like the nearest thing to what I knew already. It required technical knowledge, abstract thinking, and little interaction with the “grubby” side of actual business.

So having got into that, I slowly followed a technical career path: CASE tools, analysis and design, C++ and object orientation, Java. I had an idea that I should try to keep myself marketable by learning skills that were generic, such as OO, C++ etc, but it never occurred to me to look outside the box marked
“software development”. Not until I was at Mercator, and even then, not until quite late on was I thinking that I had skills that weren’t just writing code and specs.

My wife tells me that ever since I’ve discussed moving out of development and into management with her, I’ve talked about it in terms of managing my career - ie, I believe that as a guy in his mid-30s, I’m now surrounded by people who are younger, cheaper and in many cases better at programming. That’s certainly true where I work now, where the standard is really quite high. I think that to still have a career in 10 years time, I’ve got to be more focussed on the business side of what I’m doing.

So there’s a lot of things there that I “have” to do: I have a wife and a family, so I need a certain level of income to stop us being thrown out of our house. I want to stay in Cambridge, so I have only so many companies I can go to. To get the kind of salary I have now, I need to be either a developer or manager. As a developer I think my career options are limited, and will get more so as we get more outsourced development going on in India or Eastern Europe. So I “have” to become a manager. But what do I want to do? Apparently I never talk about that, and I think it’s because I’m scared that the answer won’t be “become a software development manager” and then how will I reconcile my life with what I want to do?

So in Part 2 I’ll link to a few of the things I’ve been reading lately that have stuck with me, and try to say a bit about how I responded to them.