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10 years mark

Gautier DI FOLCO October 02, 2024 [Software engineering] #software engineering #career #retrospective #team

We are the Thursday 2nd of October 2014, it's my first day as a professional software engineer.

I like symbols, because for good or bad reasons they force us to take a step.

Today it's been 10 years I have started to be paid to work on software.

To emphasize a bit more, working on software involves more than producing (or shipping) code and attending to never-ending (which seems to be a competition to determine who is able to stay awake the longest).

The bright side

Along these years, I have worked as software engineer within 5 companies working closely with people from 19 countries.

Software engineering is a team sport, you can't do it alone, so I'd like to thank (in the order I've met them) some of them for the influence they had on my practice (even though it took me more or less time to realize it):

This job also requires you to be involved outside your work-time, I'd also like to thank them:

Note: aside of that, I've met a lot of people which I've loved to talked to, helping me to grow as a person, to name few of them, Hugo, Clément, Jean-Paul, Marc, Florence, Frederic, Karine, Carla, Nina, Nicolas, Franck, Giles, Ousmane, Lubos, Xiao, Benoit, Raphael, Antoine, Rémi, Felix, Florian, Arthur, Nolwenn, Adrien, Iannis, Romain, Franck, Ioannis, Pierre, Émilie, Jeremy.

On the environment side, I went through a very large set of them:

I'm pretty proud of this diversity.

The dark side

Some people

A long time ago, I was really interested in psychology and self-help book (loosely related), and I recall more or less a sentence:

Getting older is inevitable, growing is a choice.

Along these years, I have been:

While I don't think I have been in toxic cultures, none of these perpetrators had been in any trouble after that, as far as I know.

Food for thoughts: I have read some day that culture is defined by the worst behaviors you tolerate.

Tactics

Given all of that, here are few tactics I have found:

Regrets

For a long time now, I'm trying to have more remorse than regrets, for the moment, I stick to it.

In addition, I have recently crossed Jeff Bezos - Regret Minimization Framework, which can be sum-up as follows:

When I'll be 80, what are the thing I'll regret

I have few opportunities (job offers), I regret having turn down:

To be more general, I have few decisions I wish I did differently:

Conclusion

That's it for the first 10 years, they were interesting, only 40 to go.

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