I was at the end of my degree and I wanted to start working. That was the whole point: I WANTED MONEY. But overall, I needed to feel useful, I was eager to work on what I studied. But, I had no idea what to do.
Fortunately, I had a colleague who was already working at a company, and they needed a software engineer. I applied and, luckily, I was hired me as an intern.
I didn't know what I was going to do there, and I think they didn't know either. It was a startup and everybody was handling multiple roles at the same time. When someone has to go from "I work alone" to "Now I have to manage an intern who knows nothing", shit happens. I mean it, I knew nothing about how to work at a company. The most frustrating part was that the skills I’d developed during university were no good at all and I had to unlearn them.
I remember one time when my boss asked me if we could do X, and instead of figuring it out, I started doing X. WRONG! We are engineers, he told me, we are not only paid to do X, but also to figure out if we should do X. Is it feasible? X was a request from a client, so, what does it mean to do X? Will we have to do it again? Will we have to maintain X? What does it imply? Does it align with our company goal to do X? Should we say no? And why should we say no?
None of these questions ever came to my mind. I was still in student mode; no one had asked me before if something could or should be done, they only asked me to do stuff: code something that demonstrates inheritance in object-oriented programming, or make this antenna read a signal, or analyze the fucking Wireshark output to see the layer 4 OSI packets (which is super fun, of course). No one ever asked me to think about trade-offs, to plan 3 months ahead, or to say NO to a project.
I made a mistake. Maybe it was expected of an intern and maybe my boss didn't think much about it, but you all can imagine how devastated I was—I still remember it after more than 10 years. The devastation came from his words "we are engineers", basically saying that I was not acting as an engineer. What I really heard was: you are not enough, the skills you have built over 6 years at the university mean nothing, you will be fired if you don't catch up!
I'm very hard on myself. BUT, I did change that; I built a new ability to wait and analyze before doing something. And yet, I keep making the same mistake over the years, to a lesser degree; the lesson is sinking in, but I haven't been able to figure out a final solution. After some years I realized this behavior is not caused by my student attitude, but because I'm a junkie of output.
An output-junkie is someone who only has one goal: finish anything. Every time I start a task, I have the urge to finish it right away, because I want to feel accomplishment constantly. The output-junkie is more like a trait, it's a part of my personality that appears when I least expect it, and has appeared in every stage of my career. It is very useful when a task is defined and well scoped—the output-junkie will do that task in record time—but if there is ambiguity, my whole body will want to go for the first way out, not the best one, the first one. The first one is normally not the best one, by the way; I learned that the hard way.
If I keep making the same mistake as I did in my first year, am I senior or should I go back to intern again?
I don't know the answer. The output-junkie continues to appear, it's going nowhere. The only difference is that I have managed a balance, so sometimes I control it and some other times I let it loose. Maybe that's the whole game.
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