Once Upon a Time in Software Development

Some years ago, when I finished my studies. I worked in a small company with some friends and teammates. You know, it’s the common developer road: you studied a lot to pass algorithms class, math, sciences, and your deontology course to have ethics principles. At the end, some company hired you with a lot of promises about: good job, good salary and good opportunities for your career in software. Basically, it was the dream job after 4, 5, or 10 years of studies.

It was late when I finally found the truth, the perfect job is just a routine with issues, bad code, people writing more bad code, and a boss without experience to deal with common problems in software development. Your company is small, but with big troubles to organize people, projects and clients. Slowly, your dream job begins changing into a real job and you need to survive in this real jungle.

Before I discovered the truth, I used to work long hours to fix issues, fight with bad code, long deploy hours, and couldn’t spend my time on important things like learning something new or following my dreams.

The Ugly Truth

I was in an outsourcing software company, of course. This kind of company just worried about money, clients, and resources. It was a business and I was in the middle of this great world of outsourcing.

However, not everyone agrees with this point of view. In contrast, we have the CEO, the man with vision and owner of the company. He knows it's business, because if you have a company you need a product, resources, computers, sales, and so on. Therefore, you don’t have time to do everything perfectly. Maybe this is the other side of the coin, but when you are young, maybe you don’t understand it and just think about the perfect project.

But in summer, I took a big vacation to rethink my life and my work. It was an important time in my life because I learned a lot about jobs, life, and opportunities. I avoided asking myself the question “What will happen if….?” and I started to make little changes in my life.

First of all, I started making changes to my job, I read more about clean code, good practices and the new wave in this year's “Agile Methodologies”. I enrolled in courses and I started to do freelancers jobs, so I applied everything in my code. I met more people interested in this topic.

Then, step by step we could change the mindset in our company and management listened to our ideas and supported us to do a small change in our projects to improve code quality. We started to use continuous integration, code reviews, and good environments.

After all, the problems in my job, my project, my boss, were all because I just followed the company flow. Sometimes you may feel bad in your work. Maybe you have too much stress or you are doing the same every day and hate your routine. But if you wish to change, you should make the change!

Only you have the power to transform your project, your space, and your work. I spent almost 5 years in this company, but I learned a lot at the end. I remember each person, each project. Now, use my experience and my past errors and to change a bad work environment to a balance between good and calm. After all, the perfect job or project is just a dream, but balance is real and you can have it in your job. It is all up to you.

Previously published at