How to get in to developer heaven

Take a direct dependency on faith

You might have heard whispers of it in the hallways.

You were told as a child that those near the end of their careers begin to long for it, catching glimpses of it in their final code reviews. It matches the feeling that you have had your entire career, a hidden conviction never spoken to others but sometimes thought while waiting for the build-deploy to finish. An idea:

There is a Right Way to do things.

There is a Right Way, outside of a particular context, and you are being judged every minute by the First Engineer, who watches your commits. You have heard that at The Company¹ they do things the Right Way², call people engineers and not developers, and that the engineers run everything, and There are No Problems.³

That is right. There is a developer heaven. It is where the best software engineers go when they retire. It is where those of us who are good enough go.

How can you tell if you are good enough? Add up your sins, subtract your good deeds, and hope they are less than The Constant.

Sins

• Was your tech debt created accidentally, then later called intentional, then never solved for and called the-way-it-is?

• Did you pretend to know something when you didn’t, then later look it up? Or perhaps dismiss it because you didn’t know what it was?

• Did you stick strongly to your convictions: tabs vs. spaces, bracket-style, indention, how you write commit messages, your personal way of doing projects, and bully those that did not follow, thus judging them?

• Did you make things more complicated than they needed to be, to determine who was worthy even though you do not set The Constant?

• When given a chance to help another developer or work on your feature, did you instead just do the work yourself and not teach them?

Good Deeds

• Did you bring others into the faith, not through hazing and mild workplace abuse, or through transmitting the joy of this way of life?

• Did you treat those beneath you, like those who have experienced hardship and have to carry the weight of trauma (Product Management), those whose voices were never heard (QA), or the less fortunate (Support), as if they were your equal?

• Did you feel yourself worthy? Do you have one project you built that you can discuss in a job interview without hedging, explaining the tradeoffs in place, or giving excuses for your technical sins?

• Did you offer up The Right Way, in varied times, under different conditions?

• When nobody was looking, did you do the right thing? How well-documented were your personal projects?

It is hard to imagine us all getting into developer heaven, and at the same time hard to imagine that some will not go. We are not meant to know the answers, perhaps a quantum computer knows, all we can do is build, run our tests and hope that when our careers wind down there is more green than red.

1. Are you thinking I’m talking about Google? Then you are of the Google denomination. Each Company has its own disciples who adhere to a specific set of rules regarding The Right Way. Those older or younger might belong to different sects, like JPL, Xerox, Bell Labs, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, or even (shudder) the cult now known as Meta.

2. Most of the time, sometimes.

3. Less problems.