2018-04-22
When I attended the ACCU 2013 conference, I learnt all about the Raspberry Pi in the pre-conference day as I wanted to help my nephew learn more about programming rather than just using a computer. The state education system on computing is a disaster for him and his surrounding years. The Pi has made inroads for school years much younger than him, so I need to help fill in the gaps for him.
It’s as bad now as when I was at school 34 years go, at 14 I had to attend an adult evening class at the local technical college in order to take my ‘O’ level Computer Studies. Back then it was because there were no teachers qualified or able to teach Computing in schools. The same is still true today.
The 2013 Conference had a big Pi focus too, with the first key note from Eben Upton, the founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and a lot of focus on educating children with the devices around the globe.
Unexpectedly, a few years later at work we did a proof of concept for the Tachyon Agent that I’m working on currently to run on a Raspberry Pi, figuring out how to get our codebase compiling and running on this little beauty and what it could do for us. I hadn’t expected that knowledge to come in useful at work.
Immediately after the conference I was also thrown into upgrading our NightWatchman code base from Visual Studio 2008 to 2013, some deprecations were causing it to fail and there were new ways to do things, mostly lambdas and bindings.
So the notion of Conference to me was a good thing.
But I didn’t go back for 5 years. It was way too scary.
More recently, this past year has been difficult on a personal level.
After 35 years working with computers from hobby, through university, intern, quickly becoming senior engineer, team leader, mentor, head of development, reporting the board, switching companies, redundancies, resignations, I found myself back at senior engineer level, more over my opinions and experience had been overruled in the job I had at the time.
I had joined the company as a C++/SQL Server database guru, but within a few weeks they had decided I had no say in what they were going to do and ignored me. I stayed for five years as I don’t like quitting, the job had good sides to it. By that time they were just starting to experience the things I predicted they would if they went the route the were choosing at the outset. I received an apology from the person that drove the overriding of my input shortly after I resigned for better things. It was all too late and I have to question the sincerity of that gesture. Maybe they learnt something that day.
I then joined 1E, it was a massive culture shock because of their Agile/TDD approach that I desperately wanted to get into but my previous employer only spoke about but didn’t practise, and I excelled again, quickly earning respect from colleagues, then becoming a team leader.
Unfortunately the project I took over as the lead was canned (after three others had tried and left). I was holding the chalice at the time and it pretty much destroyed my self esteem. I was investigated and probed as to what the issues were. The result of the probing was, well, nothing; nothing happened other than I seemed to pushed to one side. No-one told me that I was not to blame, they just didn’t sack me.
This destroyed me inside, I was not programming at home, leaving everything at work, I’d lost my mojo, only working 9 hours a day instead of the usual 11, feeling despondent, although still achieving my work goals, churning out good quality code, being a goto guy for others and nurturing others where I could, but I desperately needed nurturing myself. Up to now I had been self reliant as one has to be in startup companies, able to do everything and cope.
My mid term review in 2017 was horrible, my manager pulled me up on my communication abilities. I went home and boiled with rage over the weekend. Why was I so crap at everything, why was I such a failure.
But I hadn’t listened to what he was really saying to me.
Monday morning I called meetings with HR and my manager and I raged everything through and exposed myself whole-heartedly, a lot of emotions came out that I was really not expecting. Hey I was on the verge of leaving, I had nothing to lose.
I slowly absorbed that my manager was not faulting any of my technical abilities, my drive to do things and finish my tasks. He was challenging me on my relationships with others, that I always seemed to be behind my monitors blocking out the world with my headphones on, that I seemed to not be at the level and exposure that he hoped he would be at in ten years time in his career.
He is ten years younger than me, but he is wise with it, and I understand he wasn’t being mean to me.
Although I have eyesight challenges that manifest in needing to be so close to my monitors that I appear to be hiding behind them and wearing headphones to listen for the noise of the notifications of people trying to contact me because they are out of my field of vision on the screen (see my earlier blog) , and hence appear to be ignoring them. I also do not like bothering other people with my problems. I don’t know why, because I’m totally happy for someone to interrupt me. I can usually pick up the pieces quite quickly afterwards and I love helping people solve their problems.
I just hate exposing the fact that I do not know something myself. Not in a bad way. For instance during a conversation I will happily say I have no experience or knowledge to give a sensible answer and will go away and research it and come back. I don’t bluff or cover up that I don’t know.
What I’m referring to is having a specific problem to solve (or even a series of them if it is a big task on unknown territory) and hitting dead end after dead end, I get too wrapped up in solving the problem, it becomes a personal fight between man and machine, it feels like I’m failing at every turn, only to discover a way through the barrier, only to be hit with another series of failures again. I achieve what I need to do with great elation, which is what keeps me in this job, but I’m disappointed with myself for having taken what feels like so long to achieve it.
But who am I comparing myself to ? I have no idea.
I need to learn to spot this pattern and ask for help much sooner.
I also use conditional passive words rather than positive affirmations. I listen too much to that little voice that filters my vocal output, I over analyse what I want to say to point where I don’t say it.
So my boss was right to challenge me, he was really asking me to grow because he could see something I couldn’t, maybe he used the wrong words at the time, but his heart was in the right place, and I thank him whole heartedly for doing it.
He is the mentor I didn’t know I needed.
I recovered the situation a little and my end of year review was on back track, but I still feel I have a lot to learn about myself in this area.
So I went to Conference as a way of helping myself of exorcise some of these traits.
To expose your true self takes guts, to put yourself out there as the potential focus of ridicule for those superficial enough to want to take advantage.
But there are lots of people out there like me, as I’ve come to learn from one of the C++ communities I have joined after discovering them at ACCU 2018.
www.includecpp.org is a nurturing group for those with some interest in C++ and all other things geeky. it isn’t exclusively C++ focused, to some extent that is our common ground, along with our diversity.
We talk about many things from the heart too, how we feel about what is happening to us or around us, topics arise at random as people experience them and are discussed in a respectful way, by those who happen to be around holding the space at the time. It is a diverse group for anyone to join, their three main criteria are that you …
It turns out that the talks that really echoed with me were those where the speakers had overcome some personal struggle or were still dealing with it. It’s easy to talk about technical facts and figures, you just need the right research and references and all is good.
For me there could be no better values.
I hope I’ll see you there.