On Building Software
Professionals are Often Just Sliver Experts
At a big company, you can’t just be an Engineer.
You’re a Front-End Engineer.
A Principal Front-End Engineer, at that.
Specifically, a Principal Front-End Engineer on Responsive.
Companies will pigeon hole you into a role. Confine you to a sliver of the full breadth of work that it takes to build a product. They make you a sliver expert.
If you have the luxury to spend half the day stroking your chin as you weigh the potential experiential merits of setting the border-radius at 8px vs. 10px for your company’s mobile style guide, or you need all of tomorrow to research the optimal shade of green for your app’s background, you, my friend, have become a sliver expert.
When you only stay in one role, it’s natural to dive deeper into the weeds of that role, well past the point of its usefulness. You delve into certain nuances that pretty much no one else using the product cares about. You may be doing a lot of work, but the outcomes of that work matter very little.
The flipside of this is equally detrimental. When you’ve gone through your career applying for roles, you begin to assume other roles aren’t you.
“I’m a programmer. I don’t design.”
“I’m a designer. I don’t write code.”
“I’m in UX, not UI.”
“I’m on the development team. I don’t know how to market things.”
“Just because I work on my computer, it doesn’t mean I know how to fix your printer, Dad.” (OK, this one is actually true.)
Companies pump up your ego toward the sliver and eschew you from the rest. At a certain point, you start to believe it too. You are made for this but not for that.
When you’re building it all, you don’t have the time (or energy) to dive too deeply into the weeds of that role. And, guess what? That’s a good thing. You don’t waste time on un-important stuff.
If you do it right, you figure out what you need to know, when. You dive deeper when there’s a direct need for your product. Over time, you find yourself working with fewer tools yet still producing more. You take only what is essential.
You become an expert at the art of building.