Take Pride in Your Work
When I was younger I use to watch my dad do a lot of manual labor. He was a “Jack of all trades” and I grew up watching him fix cars, build structures, run wiring, and put in plumbing. The only thing I never saw him do in the trades was masonry and carpentry because his brother did it. Some of my earliest memories were watching these men work and hearing them say, “One day you’ll make a great manager”, which at the time I did not understand was a joke about managers and my lack of helping. This helped to lead me to be very stand offish to work in general and kept the idea of doing work at arms length and never took pride in the work I felt I had to do. This came to an abrupt end when I left school and entered the workforce.
My first full time job out of college was working in a factory called England’s and this place showed me the value of hard work. These people built hundreds of beds and metal frames for them on an average 55 hour week, which was impressive and important for them to be able to make ends meet. Most made fourteen dollars an hour and could go all day doing manual labor on an assembly line for nine hours straight in whether over 100 degrees or below 0, we worked when the heat froze up for the week. During this I became an assistant manager and I saw what hard work really was, but I was still missing out on the part where the work was important to me. I never put work off, since that does not help you get it done, but I never took real pride in what I did, which led to a hollow feeling in my work.
When I started working in development I came to realize that the pride in your work was something I was missing, beds and banking just were not that exciting. I do not believe you can thrive in this field without taking pride in what you do. When you take pride in what you do you care about the outcome so much more and this leads to the product improving as well as you as a developer. When you care about the outcome it matters to you what does and does not get put in, but most importantly you take an active role in what you are creating. When you take an active role you can say this is mine and I contributed to what we have made. You can be a part of the whole when you present the thing you created. You can take what you have helped create and put a piece of yourself in it, the hard work, the thoughts, and everything else becomes a part of what you produce and in turn helps you improve, becoming a part of you.