Subscribe RSS FeedThis is the second post in the series "What Makes a Sharp Developer"
The next article in this series will discuss keeping up with the bleeding edge – Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), Silverlight, .NET 3.5, LINQ, .. and more
This post will focus on: balanced lifestyle, staying away from drugs, and keeping a healthy balance between learning and working. Overall this article discusses how you can become a more valuable resource to your team and to your employers.
Lead a Balanced Lifestyle
Many of us in the development or business field unfortunately tend to overwork ourselves. We work late nights at the office surviving on Java alone (caffeine, that is, not Sun Microsystems JavaR). We take our work home in the evenings, or we might be doing stuff on the weekend that is work related so that we have a head start during the week. I feel this tendency to overwork ourselves is part of our human nature. We have to protect ourselves against this and yearn to keep a balance. Although there is some overlap, I like to divide my time into three categories – Work time, Time for God, and Time for my family (don’t forget Time for Myself). The difficult part is keeping the three in balance and perspective.
If we start doing fifty or sixty hour weeks consistently, our quality of work will definitely go down. It is unfortunate that some companies do not understand this, and push their developers to work longer and harder despite the fact that inevitably their performance will suffer. As well if your family life suffers, that will not be good for you at work. Your wife (or husband) might end up putting extra hot sauce in your sandwich because you didn’t spend time with her for the last six weeks and your stomach isn’t going to like that.
Stay away from the drugs
One of the keys to success is to stay away from drugs. That includes alcohol, nicotine, and…. that includes caffeine, man (Bummer!). Actually caffeine is one of my favourite drugs 
. But keep it in moderation. If you overdo it, or if you become dependent on caffeine to survive, you are going to be at a weakness to those who can survive without their daily injection. Also it hides your tiredness, especially if you start to use it regularly even when you aren’t working, you might not realize just how tired you are. If you notice you are coming home with bad headaches, or are feeling dizzy or other strange things are happening, THOSE ARE NOT A GOOD SIGNS.
A balance between working and learning
This one is a tricky one. It depends a lot on your work environment and how tight your deadlines are. I am suggesting that you make sure that no matter what, each day you learn something new. Do not spend so much time on your task so that you are completing it as fast as possible without taking the time to investigate or find better solutions. Don’t assume that just because you did this four times before, that the fifth time you should do the same thing. It could be possible that you did it a silly way four times and you are just going to make it the fifth now! There have been so many cases where I have been repeating my same noobness (i.e. lack of expertise) by declaring my SQL parameters as an ArrayList for example, whereas I could do it without the additional memory overhead and then conversion into an array by declaring my SQLParameters directly into an array with the exact size I need! Sometimes employees think that they are not doing their company a favour if they "waste" time reading stuff like this.
Infact, I beg to differ!! On the contrary, you will be a MUCH more valuable employee if you insist on taking the time to learn things. An employee who consistently learns is the last one to get fired, whereas the old dog who can’t learn new tricks is going to be the first one to have to sleep outside (so to speak). Please, this is so important. If your boss doesn’t give you time for this, either get a new job, or work late so that you can spend an hour a day on this. As well, this will give you a bit of job security incase you end up being the one who is laid off, because you have been keeping up with the improvements and constantly sharpening your skills, you will be more in touch with the technology than the ones sitting on their old skills.
As a PS, I would also recommend looking at current job postings to see what technologies are in demand, and as well try to see if you can figure out trends (i.e. which direction the market is heading and what technologies are up and coming.)
