Code & People

I am not a good programmer. Sounds horrible! After 18 years of (very) active IT life, having managed hundreds of servers single-handedly, managed very critical migrations, including a whole datacenter and having created 3 startups working on the 4th.

It is a shame. Or is it?

People that I have had the pleasure to work with will recognize that I don’t like to dig into the code. I can get my hands very dirty in systems, yet I don’t think I have what it takes to be a programmer. Now that takes a little courage to say you are not good at doing something.

It surely took me a lot to understand that I am not a talented programmer. I love working with people, I can be with them, support them, create great individuals, great teams that are capable of creating even greater things but I am not a good programmer.

If you look at my resume I have done quite a bit of a journey from Military installations to tourism to medical sector working on cancer. Done two books, written tens of articles, written in Tom’s hardware reviewing, created startups and worked in large projects. So how can I do this without not being able to program?

At first, I thought it was a great problem. Not being able to write great programs that are able to serve hundreds of heavy requests, reply in milliseconds. Then that Aha moment happened.

People are more complex than the code.

The code is code. It does what exactly you want it to do. If you say copy this file to this directory it will do it at the exact time you programmed it to do. It won’t forget, either delay.

Well, that changes with us people. We are not robots, and we don’t have any intention of being one. We live. Living brings a lot of things with it. We get hungry, we get sick, we need our morning coffee, and we need others. And we sometimes forget to copy files from one directory to another

But that what makes us human

I know most of us to work in it we are kind of geeky. We love geeky merchandise, and we can watch Star Wars a couple of hundred times and we all hate Jar Jar Binks. I see my team talking to their computers all the time. “Come one now”, “You are great”, “Oh! Not again”. This is the very great thing about and very essence of working in IT which I love and hopefully will continue loving for the rest of my career.

So having two careers one in Philology and the other in Computer science I have come to see my literature side always was the one pushing me to understand more about humanity than the code itself. Where I could meet the code with people. That’s where my passion for managing and teams appeared. I could (try) to code, which I could never do better than my talented team, or I could do what I knew the best working on people, creating teams and understanding how we work together.

And that’s my passion. Creating rockstar teams with great individuals which are capable of creating great things.

Happy to come back to work, happy to be a part of the company they are in, happy to see me as their colleague not as their boss.

Going back to my previous ridiculously simple example of copying archives from one directory to another an individual, let’s call him John, can do it without problems, working alone well not so effectively. What happens when he feels down, it is not a good day for him, or his son is sick and he is really preoccupied with it that he forgets to copy the files.

Well, there comes the power of the environment and the team.

Let’s think about two scenarios:

1-) John gets up and finds out his son is sick. He tells his wife to stay with the kid saying that he cannot be off work or else his boss will complain. Leaves home anyways goes to work, no good morning nothing, sits down. Opens up his code editor and stays there thinking how his son is all morning not being able to write any code and getting stressed because he cannot be there. Thinks of getting the rest of the day off but then says “my boss will complain again I am taking a day off and will make things harder for me, better stay here”. And he forgets copying the archives.

2-) John gets up and finds out his son is sick. He tells his wife to go to work and he will take care of the kid. He gives a call to his boss. “Good morning! My son is sick. I will be working from home today if that’s OK”. Boss responds “No problems John. Hope it is not anything serious. Let me know if there is anything I can do”. John hangs up. Puts his son to the bed near and opens up his mail to check if there is anything urgent. Then he sees the emails from his team asking if his son is ok. That he shouldn’t worry that they will take care of the copying the archives.

John will not close his laptop and start watching movies because he is off that day and everything is done by his teammates. He will work all day, meanwhile, his son is recovering to help his team.

Now which scenario do you think is a better one?

I can hear you saying “Now don’t recite me the song happy the real life is not that happy”. It is not but does it really stop us from not creating our environment? The atmosphere where we all want to come back? Where we have friends and people we trust instead of competition?

That’s why my passion is with teams and people. I cannot code but I call create a hell of a team and great happy individuals.

To a better, happier, greater teams!