I have a bad habit at work of saying “I don’t care” without qualifying it. It comes off as sarcastic or dismissive, when that’s not how I mean it – which means I need to find a new way to express it.
Most of the time, it pops out of my mouth when my manager asks me if I want to work on something and then she gives me a look, and I have to explain myself.
Here’s the explanation: I no longer care what I work on. I’ve built one of pretty much anything I’d ever want to build, and the what just no longer matters. What matters to me is how I work, and who I work with. I alluded to this in the post about ficlets, but the individual projects blur together. The thing I remember is the thrill of building something with people. I remember the people, and how I felt while we were building whatever it was.
I still believe in constant incremental improvement, and only competing with myself. I also now finally understand that just building something that’s technically superior doesn’t guarantee success. Success or failure in the eyes of the market almost never has much to do with the code that implements it. It requires the work of everyone on the team, every discipline, and a ton of luck.
And all of that means I’d much rather focus on making sure that I’m helping everyone else on the team do their best work, and asking them to help me make sure I’m doing mine. That’s literally all that matters to me at this point. Yes, I love big meaty technical problems, but that’s a very small part of the overall solution. The most important part is the borders where disciplines meet and making sure that those borders are seamless, complementary and supportive of the rest of the disciplines involved. That’s way more complicated, and way more rewarding when it works.