Early in my IT career, when I was a network engineer and beginning to venture into some simple programming, I wrote a lot of little utilities. I LOVED doing utility work. They were focused pieces of isolated functionality that performed a specific job.
It was so satisfying back then to see that come together and work correctly. I was reminded of this recently because I was asked in an interview, “What is your favorite type of work to do?”
Having been asked this before, I’ve always found it difficult to put into words. Traditionally I have answered this question by talking about things such as tools, languages, or maybe even favorite types of team environments.
And those answers, while true, always left me feeling like I had missed something in my answer. Sure it was fine for the interviewer, but for me on my insides, I just felt like I was missing something from a personal perspective.
But now I know a better way to answer that question.
My answer is now, “I love to work on clearly-defined, thin, vertical-slices of functionality that are ideally, full-stack development. Assign a story to me which stands on its own (like good stories should) and let me work on that.”
For me, that hearkens back to my earlier years of programming when I was creating utilities. Until recently, I thought the days of feeling the satisfaction of doing that kind of work was gone. It seemed like that simplicity was becoming swallowed up in today’s buzzwords and a myriad of tech stacks, all of them moving at the speed of caffeine-fueled-JavaScript-innovation.
It’s refreshing to see that, even though a lot has indeed changed about the tools/terms we employ to perform our jobs, you can still find commonality if you look hard enough.