Peter Sorger tweeted a not-so-serious question that is the title of this post, “Does it mean you work on boring stuff too?”
Absolutely… 🙂
Just to qualify that a bit, I work on a variety of things in my current job. Some I really enjoy, some I don’t enjoy so much. These days it’s really hard to be a specialist. To get stuff done you need a lot of different skills. I’m lucky that I have experienced a lot of different things over the last 21+ years, but the down side of that is I get drawn into doing work that is not exactly my “favourite stuff”. It’s dangerous to be useful. 🙂
On the one hand, it would be nice at times to specialise a bit more. On the other hand, I like to understand more of the bigger picture. If I’m honest, I think I would go bonkers if I just worked one thing constantly.
People often write and present about the cool things they do. As a result you can be forgiven for thinking they only do cool stuff. It’s a selection bias. I’ve written about this before. You speak to 20 experts at OpenWorld and start to believe you are stupid, but the reality is most of them couldn’t do your job. They are amazing because they are focused on such a small area. You would kick their ass doing your day job. 🙂
Everyone has to do some mundane work, but even that can be made into fun. How do I automate this? How do I make this so someone else can do it, rather than me? 🙂 Will I still need to do this in the next release of the product?
Anyway, I’ve got to get back to Oracle 12.2 because when I ask my Amazon Echo if I am cool, it tells me, “You’re cooler than cool. You’re the coolest!” and why would it lie? 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Really a great article and I agree to 100 percent.
And of course I’ve asked my german Alexa the same question and her response was similar – hilarious.