(This post was written back in October. I had it written, but didn’t get it edited before getting fired, so it’s just been sitting on my drive gathering digital dust. It’s still good information, but just keep in mind that the timing is off. Everything I’m talking about happening in the present actually happened almost half a year ago.)
I can’t believe it’s been another week already! I’m afraid that I don’t have the exciting update I was hoping for, which means I’m still stuck on my side project, but I do have something that I hope will be useful to some of you.
I fully expected that transitioning from accounting to development was going to be tough — which it has been — but I’ve been consistently surprised at all of the things about it that I didn’t realize were going to be so tough.
I think that it’s human nature to forget how hard it was when you started something once you’re a decade or more down the road and have achieved a very high degree of mastery in your current field. You tend to think that you’re just really smart, and that’s why things come so easily to you, but in many instances I’ve been under calling all of the beneficial experience that went into getting me to where I currently am as an accountant.
One of the things that I’ve noticed this week is that I’m tending to skim through stuff when I’m working on a programming task even though I really should know better. At first, I thought that I was just tired and overwhelmed given some of the other accounting commitments that I’m still trying to satisfy while simultaneously attempting to get my feet under me as a developer, but as I’ve watched the development manager review code, he scanned through stuff with incredible speed, and I am starting to realize that I read quickly on my development tasks because I’m used to being able to read through stuff very quickly when it relates to accounting.
In accounting, I have sufficient master the subject that it’s generally easy for me to pick out the relevant points of whatever it is that I’m reviewing without having to slow down significantly. With development, that tendency to read through stuff quickly — relying upon a mastery of the subject that I don’t have to make sure I pick out the key points of what I’m reading — will continue to get me in trouble until I finally manage to break myself of that habit.
In fairness, the other thing that I think I have working against me is the high degree of pressure that I’ve been under in this most recent role to turn things around quickly in an effort to keep up with everything that was changing on a monthly and sometimes even weekly basis.
Either way, I have made a renewed commitment to slow down and take the time needed to stop making so many stupid mistakes. For those of you who are making a similar kind of transition — whether it be from accounting, or from a completely unrelated field — tried to keep an eye out for the habits and assumptions that you developed in your previous roles. Yours might not be exactly like mine, but the chances are that sooner or later you come across something that you’re going to have to unlearn in order to achieve your goals as a developer.
That’s it for this week from me, good luck with all of your efforts in the coming one.