28th
what comes around
A few years ago my situation changed quite radically, to the point that I found myself driving on long family holidays with bored, noisy and argumentative kids in the back of the car. After getting back from that first holiday experience I immediately phoned my Mom and apologised to her for every single car journey we’d been on when we were kids where my brother and I were singing annoying songs, asking if we were there yet and generally being pests in hundreds of other ways.
I now find myself in professional role reversal. Instead of just being a guy who develops software, now I do that plus manage a bunch of other developers. I remember having the usual developer attitude when it came to planned work: “That’s great, but if we did that plus X, Y and Z it would be even better.” I had no thought for project delivery dates, planned roadmaps or any of that stuff, I was technology-led and wanted to do all the cool stuff that I could.
Now, the shoe’s on the other foot and I’m the one in meetings saying “Yeah, well Bob, I’m sure a telepathic user interface and interactive mobile multimedia slideshow would be great, but we want to get it out the door this year, so let’s put it to one side for now”. I still want to do all that stuff, but I’m the one that has to make sure all the bugs fixed, the damn thing builds, gets past QA and out the door on time, otherwise I have to explain why.
I feel like I should call up all my old bosses and apologise to them for all the crazy features we put in anyway, usually when they were away on holiday, even after they took them off the roadmap or project plan. Mind you, I was still right when I did it :-)
