An excerpt from the first few pages of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of essays and lectures by Richard Feynman, which I picked up, finally, this weekend, at the 40%-off-all-used-books-sale at Third Place in Bothell:
To do real high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses once again. You don't know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you're interrupted and you kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together -- your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea -- the main point is, you put the stuff together, it's quite a tower and it's easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration -- that is, solid time to think -- and if you've got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don't have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself -- that I'm irresponsible. I tell everybody, I don't do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, no, I'm irresponsible, I don't give a damn about the students -- of course I give a damn about the students but I know somebody else'll do it -- and I take the view, "Let George do it," a view which you're not supposed to take, okay, because that's not right to do, but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and I'm so selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.
Ten years ago, I sat in a living room with my friends Dave and Vinh, as we contemplated the starting of our own company, having just left the startup we'd started-up barely a few months earlier, mainly over disagreements with the ownership. There, I'd been a developer -- a programmer, the sole one, in charge of building our e-commerce infrastructure. I was 26, it was my first "real" programming job, and while I knew just enough to do the work at hand, I also knew enough to realize how little I really did know about computing and software development. Nevertheless now, in that fateful living room, Dave and Vinh wanted me to take up the reins of management alongside them -- procuring of a team of developers, managing said team, and designing the suite of products they wanted to form the basis of our awesome new company.
I chose not to. Instead, I chose to continue on as a lowly developer -- so they founded that company, and it did quite well for a while, then sort of faltered a few years later, the core group disbanded, and while I think it still exists in some form, it never did become the dot-com success story we all hoped it would. As I recall, they weren't happy with my choice, but I knew it was the right one for me: what business did I have running a technology effort when I knew so little about technology? And what did I really want out of my working life -- to write code, or direct others in the writing of their code? Surely there was more money in the latter, but the former was what got me up in the morning. I remember Dave's response most vividly: "You realize it never ends, right? You realize you'll just end up learning language after language, year after year, forever until you die, right?" And I knew he was probably right -- but I wasn't sure it mattered to me in the way he seemed to think it should.
So shortly thereafter I took a job writing Tcl at a startup in West Los Angeles. Before that, I'd written only Visual Basic and Classic ASP in Windows environments, but now I was working in the UNIX and Linux worlds, writing Tcl and shell scripts and Perl and CGI and working with a beast of a publishing framework called Vignette StoryServer. That lasted a few excellent years -- and from there, I went off and learned some .NET, built a few sites with that, then a little Java and JSP, did some cool stuff there, then some ColdFusion (really -- it's not as ridiculous as it seems), then more Java, then back to .NET (C# this time -- 2.0, then 3.0, then 3.5), over the course of a few different positions and independent-consulting stints, and now, today, at Real, I code almost exclusively in ActionScript using the Flex and AIR frameworks, both of which just released new versions, with more on the way next year. I'm a Flash developer, by God. I'm going to MAX next week. I've learned, easily, a language a year for the past ten years. I spent over $1,000 last year on tech books alone. It hasn't stopped -- it's been relentless. Dave was absolutely right -- it doesn't end.
In-between there, though, I did take one job, briefly, managing a team of developers -- and it sucked. I had a fancy title -- Director of Software Development! Check me out, Mom! -- and a dedicated parking space and everything, and it still sucked: it was all political bullshit, a constant, daily reminder that what I really wanted to be doing was writing code -- scribbling, designing, implementing, compiling, and running. Managing developers, I learned, is exactly like herding cats. It's no fun at all. So I quit.
Now, I just write code. My lowly title remains "software developer." And I freaking love it -- I'm happier than I've ever been. Just this weekend, I built a couple of Flash-based video browsers for Time Warner Oceanic -- not because I had to, but because it sounded like fun. And it was! The joy of building remains tough to beat.
I don't know what all this means for my professional career -- my five-year plan, or my "career trajectory," or whatever you choose call it. God knows I'd probably make way more money in management and administration. But ten years later, I still don't care. Ten years later, for me, coding's still where the fun is -- it's my physics. George can worry about everything else.