“It never gets easier, you just go faster.”

Dear New Developer,

Congratulations! Let’s take a moment to celebrate the decision you’ve made to launch or redirect your career. What lies ahead is a lot of hard work, satisfaction, the occasional desire to throw your laptop out a window, and a ton of learning. That’s true of most professions, so you’re also in good company.

As a developer, you will solve a thousand puzzles, and then a thousand more. Your brain will stretch and grow. You will dream about databases or pixels or curly braces. I once had a dream where I was walking down a hallway, but the hallway was my code. It was a good dream. I found a bug.

Greg LeMond, a pro cyclist and three-time Tour de France winner, once said something about cycling that I want to share with you:

“It never gets easier, you just go faster.”

In so many ways, that describes a career in software. The puzzles you struggle with today will be easy in a month or a year. You’ll learn new patterns and best practices. Then you’ll take on new, harder challenges. You’ll struggle with those and learn and grow. Then you’ll start the cycle (pun intended) all over again.

Something I’ll add, though, is that you’ll be able to approach later challenges with more experience and confidence. What we bring to our jobs is an accumulation of skills and experience. This isn’t linear. It sometimes goes smoothly, sometimes it’s faster than we imagine possible. Then there are stretches where it feels like we’re clambering around in the dark.

For instance, I was once asked to write a WAP application (think super early mobile apps before smart phones existed). I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I was mostly left alone on the project. I started by drawing some screens, took a deep breath, and started building. It was really tough going, but so many lessons have stuck with me from that experience. My skills at breaking down challenges and approaching them bit by bit really improved. I became comfortable throwing away code because the first code I wrote was atrocious. Plus, the project was eventually canceled, which was entirely the right business decision. Through that, I learned about evaluating tradeoffs in terms of business value—my time was better spent on higher priority projects.

In my current adventure, nearly 20 years later, I’m once again writing a mobile app and applying all of those lessons. Picking up languages and frameworks that I haven’t used before is far less daunting. Ensuring that I’m working on the most important thing is a constant recalibration, but one that is comfortable now. Working through stumbling blocks one at a time and having patterns for getting through them is second nature.

Just like learning isn’t linear, neither are careers. Your path will be your own. What you are doing today may or may not be what you’re doing in ten years. You might go into any number of other areas in software, or stay the course as a developer. It’s your life and all those choices are equally valid. One of my former colleagues quit to make hand-built microphones; another makes goat cheese in the Catalan Pyrenees. My personal philosophy is that at each opportunity to make a career decision, you should pick the direction that interests you most. Just like you learn faster when you are interested in your subject, you will ship better software (or make better cheese) when you are interested in your job.

There’s much more I’d love to tell you, but this letter is growing long. I’ll add some concise tidbits before I end.

• You belong here. Try not to doubt that.
• Get really good at debugging. It’s a skill and you will need it.
• If you don’t respect your boss, or if they don’t respect you back, go find a new one.
• Learning is part of your job. Make time for it.
• Don’t be afraid to put your code in production.
• Be a good team member. You will accomplish more and learn faster.
• Ask lots of questions. Someone else probably wants to hear the answer.
• And finally, have fun! You’ve got this!

I wish you all the luck in the world!

Sincerely,
Rebecca Campbell

Rebecca Campbell said “hello, world” to software development more than 20 years ago. She started as a developer before moving into team management and then senior leadership, and is currently working on co-founding a startup. She blogs sporadically at nerdygirl.com.