Why do we work as hard as we do?
June 8th, 2007 | Posted in Development, Jus' Ramblin' | 5 Comments
Following on from Fellow freelancers, does this look familiar?, I started to think about how hard I do, in fact, work. Not only that, I wanted an answer to why I work as hard as I do.
How hard do I really work?
This is difficult to answer, it depends in what context the question is being asked. If we were talking about it from a financial perspective, then I would need to look at it from a professional context. As a freelancer, or any worker, isn’t it your duty to be on top of existing and emerging technologies, techniques and products? If so, where do we find the time to carry out our research? Evenings. That means that we work during the day for our clients, then work during the evenings for ourselves and our clients. Why do we need to dedicate so much of our time to research? Probably because there is a new language, technique or service out nearly every minute. To be seen as a professional who has his finger on the internet pulse means keeping abreast of all new developments, otherwise myself and others like me will end up drowning in a sea of languages, mashups and web 2.0 madness.
What will happen if we don’t do any research?
Again, another toughie. Lets imagine not having done any research for the last 24 months. What would I have missed? Mapping sites, Ajax, Ruby, Silverlight, Various Ajax frameworks, Various Javascript frameworks. Pretty much where the internet is heading, or where we are lead to believe it will end up heading.
Do we need so many languages? Possibly not, what we do need is the research that’s gone into the creation of said languages as a way of improving. Wordpress gives credit to Drupal and MovingType, so without these would Wordpress be what it is today?
Lets free up our evenings by not learning anything new and keep the internet where it is. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Actually, that would be close to hell, think about it. We would still be coding in ASP using MS Access as a database with front end development using tables. Urgh…
I would rather stick to what I do at the mo’:
- Religiously visit bookmarked sites
- Discover any new and emerging technologies
- Download and install
- Build a hello world page
- Go back to PHP
- Follow some tutorial on how to make Hello World all uppercase and pink
- Go back to PHP
- Wait for the backlash about it not scaling or being a bit slow, or that it is a rip-off of Java
- Continue with PHP
- Goto 1
Google Gears?
Google gears looks really good. Ability to make online, offline. As with Adobe Apollo though, still alpha. There is also MS PopFly and . This is more in the Yahoo Pipes category.
Staying up to speed on all the tech that’s coming out these days is nigh impossible. If you managed to do any reading on every topic that’s out there you’ll find yourself ahead of the rest.
I also have a religious habit of making sure that I read as much as I can, and try to keep up to speed with all of the wonderful things that go on in the world of tech, but even though I’m as geeky as they come, I do struggle. I also try to make a habit of learning a new language every year or so, just to keep my wits about me, and that’s regardless of whether or not I’ll actually use it for a real project or not.
My reasons? I love tech, and I love the kind of work that I do. If am to become a Freelancer (which I’m working towards at the moment) then I am going to need to have quite an arsenal of technical skills behind me in the hope of being able to solve 80% of the problems that potential clients might have.
In a nutshell, for me it boils down to interest and need. I need to do work hard to stay sharp and be ahead of the masses, and I also need it to quench the thirst I have for tech :)
I was always told that being a jack of all trades was bad and would result in people not hiring you since they were never sure what it was you in fact specialised in. As a web developer, you will not survive without knowing, at least, the basics of all areas of development. As a result I work like mad to keep on top all things techy.
I’ve heard that a million times too. But you know what? In my time, I’ve met a fair few ‘experts’ in a certain field they have specialised in, and yet they don’t know as much as I do in that field despite the fact that I haven’t specialised. To me it just sounds like an excuse that the plebs like to use which allows them to avoid doing their homework - which more often than not works against them.
The thing is, people don’t seem to realise that being a partial jack-of-all-trades is what makes you a proper developer. You don’t have to know everything inside-out, but you do have to at least know where to start looking when something goes wrong. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard a ‘developer’ say “Oh that’s a database problem, I don’t ‘do’ databases.” WTF?!