When running the course of my undergrad, I thought I’d lock onto programming and do it for years and years. I knew I had the impulse to lead and direct, but I never imagined myself doing anything more than being a “programmer lead”. Heck, I wasn’t the only one. Most of my friends knew that I’d be slinging code for the better part of five years. I couldn’t imagine a world without intelli-sense or Eclipse, and solving problems without a compiler was simply impossible.

The first lecture of my master’s program was my first policy/engineering class, and my world was rocked. I was probably galvanized by the seething hatred that my peers seemed to have for this brand of security. Dismissing the pariah complex, I had an abnormal draw toward it, and the people that I began to associate with only pushed me further in that direction. When I chose my first full-time position it was pretty clear where I would lean. Now I’ve programmed less than 100 lines of code in the last 3 months, and 95 of those were from personal projects.

Work is filled with partial glimpses into projects large enough to crush a human, and everyone struggles just to make sure their documentation doesn’t accidentally expand their scope commitment into a new circle of requirements-hell. Most of the higher-level minds just try to negotiate the nether-space between clients and managers, hoping that satisfying one of them doesn’t piss the other one off. Quality engineers are overworked, and project managers mumble unintelligibly to themselves while walking the fine line between hyper-tension and deadline slippage. Great ideas are hatched in unreserved conference rooms and laughed off or, if particularly reasonable, are stabbed to death by managers and customers during powerpoint briefings. The only people who get great things done are the ones who play the field better than Kasparov.

And it’s all fascinating.

When I sat in my Software Engineering or management courses it always seemed like an interesting task to rally the troops and build a working software solution. In these courses we learned to identify talent and involve people with whatever skills they had in their arsenal. Successful and failed projects passed by; each one taught a lesson about coping with failure and harnessing success towards future efforts. Everything was a process to accomplish a common goal: teams were given a task, chose an approach and learned how to squeeze all the talent they could into a solid attempt at the solution. All of these trials seemed to be finely tuning muscles to be called on in any team situation and bring out the best solutions. Entering the workforce has quickly shown where I’ve developed strong muscles in some wrong areas, and I find myself aggressively pursuing a figure skating gold with legs trained for speed-skating.

The problem that I face most frequently (more…)