Whatever Your Hands Finds to Do ...
Growing up in Nigeria, a place where you are responsible for your own success as there are very few government assistance offered to you. As a kid, the phrase or saying was repeated as many times as possible both at home and at church. The saying “Whatever your hands finds to do, do it well.” is only a portion of a biblical passage from the book of Ecclesiastes 9: 10. The exact passage states:
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength. For there is no work or planning or learning or wisdom in the place of the dead where you are going. - Ecclesiastes 9:10
In our software engineering field, things are moving really fast. Project these changes onto the employment market, there are lots of diverse opportunities. Depending on your motivation or interest, you can find a space or niche to excel in.
If you spend a lot of time on social media or binge through Youtube, there is always an opinion piece on what “You should be doing in «Insert year»” now. There is always a new language. There was a time all I heard of was Go. Everybody started re-writing their system in Go. Today, people are grumbling, Go isn’t that great, learn Rust, Gleam, Zig etc. Change in this space is the only guarantee.
Today, it is Generative AI. You read on threats of AI to software engineering jobs. You read about how technology companies are looking to adopt AI broadly to supplement or better still reduce the number of Software Engineers they hirer. Now, to an extent, some of these are true or could be true but it isn’t the whole truth. A lot of businesses are still looking for Engineers who can still build the most useful system with or without AI. Those businesses aren’t tech based, they just want someone to automate their excel spreadsheet. They want a simple workflow for capturing data and generating a few reports at the of the day.
There is also the perspective of employability and earnings. Lets face it, the day software engineering doesn’t pay what it pays now, there will be a large exodus of software engineers. When you read job boards and the different salaries on offer, there is a diverse set of skills required by various businesses.
When I was learning Scala (though I gave up midway), I met an engineer who worked as a Scala contractor and earned £900/day and paid off his mortgage in four years. I started learning Scala, I would like to make that but man was that hard plus the type of projects Scala developers worked on weren’t as exciting as the ones I worked on in PHP. So I could have become an unhappy well paid Scala Engineer.
There is a risk to looking outside, to always be comparing, to always chase the wave and that could lead to you becoming dissatisfied with the present. You may be looking down at the skill you currently have, unaware of the fact that a business out there is desperately praying to find a person like you. Now whether they can afford your service, is another matter and a conversation you will have with yourself.
I once read the book “How Google Works” by Eric Schmidt as former CEO of Google, a particular section of the book around goals that likened our career growth to the journey of a Ship at sea.
Sometimes a ship may need to dock at an unplanned port pending when favourable winds prevail and when the sea is safe to sail again. As long as you are still heading in the general direction of your goals and aspirations, you are doing okay. You don’t have to be sailing in exactly true north to feel successful. Winds will push you off course and you will need to do some corrections, sometimes in the process of docking in unplanned docks, you gain new experiences that will serve you well when next you resume sailing.
I have been working with Python and gotten passionate about cloud technology and functional programming. A few years back, these interests were never in the picture. I liked PHP and databases but due to the journey of career development, I have switched over to Python with a keen interest in the Cloud. I have also picked up interest in functional programming, studied F# and done a quick tutorial on Elixir. Today, believe it or not, I have picked up a growing spark for Large Language Model (LLM).
I have looked around and tried to observe the tech space and business landscape and believe there are numerous opportunities to use LLM to provide actual value to businesses and also for personal use cases. I guarantee you, in the beginning I wasn’t so thrilled about LLM as I tend to be the one who doesn’t follow the crowd. When there is too much hype around a thing, I tend to stand back and observe until I can see an example use case that makes the most sense. Today, I think I finally see the value but rather than jump on the wagon and approach it like others are doing, I hope to dive deeper into things like - training your model with your own dataset as General LLM won’t always be a good fit for every business.
So, pending when I can become an LLM expert, a Functional Programming Guru, A Cloud Architect, I will enjoy my current skillsets, enjoy doing the things I am good at while seeking opportunities to improve, get better and diversify my life experiences.