A software engineer is a basketball player… — Part 1
What do a basketball player and a software engineer have in common? Or to make it more generic, what do you think that basketball and software engineering have in common? In this article series (it will be 2 or 3 parts, depending on my inspiration), I‘ll try to give my opinion about the nature of our profession (Software Engineer) compared with a Basketball player life.
Ok, the first thing is that I have a strong passion for both of them, but that’s not the case that I am gonna look into this article. If you have met me, I am sure that you know my passion for both! By the way, this is my first article, so I kindly ask you to be lenient but I am more than looking forward to reading your comments and suggestions. So, let me introduce myself!
My name is Petros and I am originally coming from the beautiful Greek island of Chios. At the age of 18, I started my studies in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at TUC.
Fast forward mode enabled: worked for an airline provider company in Greece, having had my own startup, worked in Dubai for an airline company, again…
And now I am here, in the Netherlands. Working as a Software Engineer using mainly Scala and many, let’s say, “fancy” tools.
But let’s go back to our topic. Basketball players (not athletes in general, not football players) and Software Engineers. We both start our careers at the age of ~18 (apart from some whiz kids who are pretty exceptional cases in both professions). When you start your career, you are a kind of junior as you don’t know the rules of the game or the best practices and of course, you don’t have the experience which initially you think isn’t so important.
Normally you are in a small team and not really known to the people but come on, you are so young, you cannot (or at least this is what you think) be a player of Barcelona. At that point, you are trying to understand the fundamentals of your profession, you are trying to see in which position/domain you have to focus and you feel a bit confused about the bunch of new things! That’s a pretty difficult moment but you have to keep going and learning what is needed.
After a couple of years, or a bit more than that, you see your statistics to increase a bit, you give more assists, you score more, you probably jump to a better team, but again you are not a top player in your team. That’s completely logical. At this point, you have to see how the good players of your team behave and act. You have to see their habits, their mindset, to adopt their best practices. At least this is what I did and I confirm that it worked. Sometimes you think that they are doing something wrong, you don’t have the patience to see what they want to achieve but that’s a sign of lacking experience. After some years you will see that in most cases, not always, you were wrong, but don’t worry because you probably had some lessons learned out of this experience.
Fast forward mode enabled… jump 2–3 years.
Now you are around 25. You are probably an important gear of your team, you gained the appreciation of the starters (likely best players), so they can trust you, they can give you the ball, and generally give you more freedom to show your skills and techniques. This is a significant point in your career path. You have to show them that they can count on you, you have to show to your coach (or team leader) that you have great potential. And of course, it’s time to spend more of your personal free time training yourself, learning new things, trying them, and being ready to apply them in your daily routine. That’s great!
The step-up of your career is coming… The best years of your career are in front of you. If everything goes well, you‘ll be a Senior guy soon. And now it’s the right time to take more responsibilities, time to think of some initiatives. Would be awesome if you can help and mentor the new guys of your team, these young people who need some pieces of advice from the experienced. Organizing a workshop would be a nice example of this kind of action, writing some blog posts also, or even sitting next to them and working together.
Everything seems normal so far, but in the next part, we are gonna see what are the common mistakes that software engineers make.
Looking forward to reading your comments :)
