What’s the best part about having a career in IT/Information Technology?

Some days you’ll feel like an architect- you have to design the communication between programs, weigh between multiple technologies and architectures, choose the most appropriate one and make compromises.You need to be able to see the whole picture and the product vision. You dream of yourself as a famous [structure] architect. Gaudi and Gehry salute you.

Some days you feel like a designer. You need to design an algorithm to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s like art. You must wear the shoes of Dali. Go to a hammock and think things through. Daze between brainstorming sessions. Let ideas cook in your mind between restless nights. Like solving a puzzle- except that you try to make it as optimal and elegant as possible. OCD kicks in. Sometimes you have to actually do graphic or user experience design, since we need to connect services and applications with multiple interfaces- and users do appreciate a great experience.

Some days you feel like a detective. There’s a bug. Maybe in your product- maybe in your dependencies. You see yourself as Sherlock Holmes. Grepping through code and function calls. Using tools of the trade to navigate and inspect complex data. To see what nobody else sees. Your finding, like a little secret which you must share. The satisfaction in finding and squashing that bug that nobody else found.

Some days you feel like you work on customer support. Maybe you are the source of truth on a technology or implementation. Even if you don’t usually do support work- you have to meet with other stakeholders. And you’ll end up in a customer call one way or the other…

Some days you feel like a writer. You need to document and communicate as much as possible, since at the end of the day it is a team-effort driven profession. Either your teammates, your users, or future developers need to understand the code, api, product, among other things. You’ll also play the project manager role at some point…

Some days you get frustrated. Software systems work- but are hanging by a very thin thread. Crazy little hopeful us. Electricity bounces, one bit flips, and the whole system crashes down. Not a thing you could do. And products will always have bugs. Dealing with this truth and continuous complexity… knowing of the impossibility of ever seeing an empty backlog…

And last, but definitely not least, you get to learn something new every day.