Being Valuable, Being a Swiss Knife

A Swiss Knife is a very popular pocket knife, used by several armies -but not only- and generally has a very sharp blade, as well as various tools, such as screwdrivers, a can opener, and many others. These attachments are stowed inside the handle of the knife through a pivot point mechanism. When I was a child, I owned one and was fascinated by its utility. What a great design! To be clear, my wish, as a software engineer is to be a swiss knife and I am very proud to be considered as is by my co-workers or my managers. I will try to explain in this post why it’s important to me and why every developer should take this into consideration.

The Need for a Swiss Knife

A swiss knife is a highly valuable tool that everyone wants to have in its pocket because it helps you to solve any problem. And yes, this is the sad tragedy of the software industry: problems and puzzles are everywhere. Why do I have an exception here? How will you implement this business feature ? What is this crappy code? What will be the architecture of our future web site? Why our application has miserably failed yesterday? Is this new hype tech/language/framework/tool/… interesting for us? .… Of course, we can’t predict our future problems but solving puzzles is the essence of software engineering. At the end of the month, we’re not paid just for coding but for solving problems. The most important thing is here: each time we fix up something, we bring value to someone or something: our customers, our company, our co-workers or even ourself. Bringing value is what makes us valuable, one of the most important recognition in our job. Even better, try to avoid puzzles, but it’s another story.

To Be A Swiss Knife You Need … To Be Focused on Value

Even nowadays, I can see some developers waiting for tasks, committing quick and dirty solutions, being focused only on their scope and not aligned on company’s objectives … of course this isn’t how we should be. Everyone in the company should be focused on the final product, on the customer, on business value, to help customer support & product owners. Read more on devops culture. Many people can say here “Of course, I am” but don’t be too naive: Being focused only on value means that you should sometimes work on boring tasks, old-fashioned techs, deprecated libraries, crappy code, etc. This is the tradeoff.

To Be A Swiss Knife, You Need … To Think As A Software Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical, societal and commercial problems.

We’ve already seen several articles that illustrate this concept but please stop to be focused on your favorite stack. NOW ! After a decade, I’ve seen so many things… For example, ASP.NET WebForms were very cool 10 years ago (and yes, it was really compared to the others available techs at this period), but at some moment, I’ve switched to something else. Because I learned strong foundations, I was able to reuse my skills quite easily in another tech after. Don’t learn to code. Learn to think! The Silver Bullet Syndrome is a good illustration of this problem. It is the belief that “the next big change in tools, resources or procedures will miraculously or magically solve all of an organization’s problems”. Stop to chase the chimera, it won’t really fix it. If it helps you to fix your current problems, you will quickly see new ones. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything is not “42”, but “it depends on the context”. Like for design patterns, there is absolutely no magic solution for everything, you just need to find a good one, by applying YOUR vision in YOUR context. Like a real craftman, you need tools in your daily job but unlike a real craftman, our tools are constantly evolving. Do you know an Industry in the world with so many flavors & communities that allow you to work on tools released less than two weeks? Neither do I. You have to learn to think and practices and not technologies, you should not be narrow minded but open to experience and feedbacks.

To Be A Swiss Knife, You … Don’t Need To Be A Technical Expert

There are several technical experts and evangelists in this world (and we need them) but we’re not all dedicated to this future. By the way, it’s so boring to always do the same thing and to always chase the same daemons. We have the illusion that TOP programmers are the most valuable resource for a company but I don’t think so. You no longer need to be a brilliant programmer to bring success to your company or to achieve success. You just have to solve problems and the good news is that it’s fairly useless to stay hours in front of our screen to reinvent the wheel in each project. On one side, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and dozens of supercomputers in the cloud. On another side, thousands of open source frameworks and libraries can do 90% of the work for you. GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and of course the very wide range of articles, tutorials, feedbacks, posts available on the Internet. The hard part of building software is specification, design, modelling … not how you will write code. Architecture, Monitoring & Diagnostics, TestS, Ownership, Continuous delivery, maintainability, Performance & Scalability, … so many things that should be part of your software.

To Be A Swiss Knife, You Should … Practice

The positive side effect of considering myself as a swiss knife is for learning new stuff and run experimentation. We know that it’s vital for us to learn because our world is moving so fast. When I started to work, it was very different and I know it will be different in 10 years too. Compared to a traditional developers attached to its “confort zone”, I have much more occasions to try & test new things in a real world examples. At the end, if it doesn’t work properly, if I takes too much times, … it doesn’t matter because I am my own product owner. All these tests give me more arguments, experiences, more skills, to become a better problem solver aka a better swiss knife. It’s a way to be pro-active : I have a wide range of things in my pocket to help me in every situation. To conclude, I prefer to know thousands of topics -imperfectly- compared to mastering just only one. I know that I have enough skills and motivations to adapt myself to any problem. A new stack to learn? Ok, let me several days, I’ll do it. The number of skills that you have doesn't really matter, what is important is to be able to adapt to each situation, as a soldier with a swiss knife. I know that if I have to work on an unknown topic, I will spend my hours to learn it in order to be efficient and in order to make the right decisions when it’s needed.

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