for the love of technology… or not?
February 28th, 2008 by shinzu
To my surprise.. I’ve become my old boss.
To explain this statement, let me flash back a couple of years, namely to the time when I graduated from college. Back in 2003, many of us graduated in a pretty crappy time. I remember going through post grad depression because I didn’t have a job for virtually 5 months after getting my computer science degree.
Fortunately for me, some kind souls took it upon them to interview me while I was playing a battle net game of Warcraft 3 (if you are curious, I did lose that match while interviewing). After that interview, and a couple others, I landed my first big job at that firm.
Out of college, I was very starry eyed and ambitious. I joined a bunch of organizations outside of my regular job scope, and went out of my way to do training, mentoring, and everything to move up the corporate ladder.
But then along the way.. something happened. I started to get jaded. At the big firm, I would put in 110% effort but get rewarded like 3%. During that time I started forming big dreams of grandeur and decided to do my own start-up.
The experience of the start-up in reflection really showed how naïve I was about the real business world. I would be awesome at leading technical teams to accomplish tasks, but really didn’t have a sense of how companies made money when we ran out of funding.
After the start-up I decided to join consulting and sort of see how the lifestyle is. It’s definitely a lot more fast paced, and probably has aged me a lot faster than I would have liked.
After all these different ventures I am starting to realize something. Technology is all the same. You might have new spiffy software frameworks, new databases, new soa based architectures.. but if you look beyond the hype its nothing that different.
At its core things can be basically broken down into some type of model-view-controller system, with distributed computing needs. And maybe with some of the ‘ilities’ such as reliability, scalability, and etc.
When coming out of college, I did not know if I could ever program again. My four years at school really burned me out. After starting at my first job, I had rekindled that sense of my joy of technology and all there was to know.
Throughout the past years I have spent a majority of the time learning what really defines technology and developing the fundamentals of understanding what enterprise software architecture really means.
And you know what is weird. I am sort of bored by it now.
Nowadays, technology no longer really excites me. It to me is more of an enabler to do something else.
I think people get bored when things in life are no longer a mystery. Say you are at your first job. You are pretty much learning the ropes of how to act in a team, how to move up the ladder, how to present yourself politically, etc.
At some point of time (hopefully) you will understand those rules, and understand what it takes to move to the top. And you know.. once you learn the rules, sometimes things get boring. Its as if the joy in life was trying to understand what those rules are.
I am now beginning to question if anyone really loves ‘technology’ for technologies sake. Like those fascinated by new frameworks, methodologies, software techniques, etc.
I’ve become my old boss because when she trained me back when I first started, she said “in a couple years you’ll mellow out and see this as a just a job.”
Scary enough.. I’m beginning to see technology as just a job.