I remember when I was in high school as a teenager and all I wanted to ‘be’ was a Software Engineer. I was one of those lucky people who always seemed to know what it is they wanted to do, and for me it was always going to be creating software. I got stuck into a plethora of coding projects in my own time while finishing school which, along with doing “Computer Studies” for the last 3 years, gave me a pretty solid grounding to build on when I got to University.
When I finally started my study of Computer Science at Uni I found many of the subjects very easy - particularly the programming ones. In fact, they become boring very quickly due to the fact that it felt like I was just learning new syntax. Syntax is always the easy/boring bit, it’s the understanding of the programming constructs that’s the key… but I digress.
So to keep myself interested, I decided to pick a couple of topics that I’d always been interested in. Yes, they’re very cliched, but the topics I chose were:
- Software Security & Reverse Engineering
- Computer Graphics & Game Programming
An uber-geek was born.
As I progressed through my study I was fortunate enough to land myself a full-time job in a software development company. I started off working in the testing area, and quickly moved into development. The application I worked on was an accounting and practice management system, and I was using C++ and VB on a daily basis. I thought I’d found utopia! I was finally in a paid programming job, what else could there possibly be in life?
Unfortunately it wasn’t utopia. After a fairly short period of time, I found myself becoming disinterested in what I was doing. Accountancy wasn’t interesting, the application wasn’t interesting, the workplace wasn’t interesting, there was no life in the developers around me - it was a completely stagnant place to be.
It wasn’t until that point that I realised that just being a programmer wasn’t enough. I had always thought that I’d be happy writing code of any kind, so long as I was writing code. But I was completely wrong. If you don’t work in a field that you find interesting it becomes extremely hard to remain focussed or even become mildly excited about going to work. If you don’t feel excited or interested in what you do, then you’re bound to end up unhappy. The bane of full-time work is that it takes up so much of your life that it’s very hard not to be affected by it. So if you want to be happy, it’s a good idea to find work that you like!
As I’ve already mentioned I love working with graphics, gaming, security and reverse engineering (no doubt you’ve gathered that from some of the recent posts!). Unfortunately these fields are all very difficult to get involved in professionally and they require a lot of ground work. When I decided to chase one of these two fields professionally, I chose the graphics and gaming option because of the satisfaction of seeing things come alive. I won’t go into all the reasons for me being passionate about this line of work as it’s worthy of it’s own post. Suffice is to say that it was appealing enough for me to alter the course of my career to chase it.
That’s part of the reason I did my stint in the UK. Getting into the games industry here in Australia proved to be a real bitch. It is still quite tight, and unless you have contacts in the industry or some experience from elsewhere, your chances of getting a foot in the door are pretty slim. In the end, the travel, the bad weather, the awful pay cut and the 2 years away from my home land were worth it. I worked in games with some fantastic people and it was an amazing experience.
Life is too short to be working in a field which you don’t enjoy. So if you’re not happy, do something about it!
And finally we come to the point(s) of the post. Do you like what you do? Have you found a job that you find interesting, and is it something that you can get excited about? Do you struggle to get up in the morning and motivate yourself to charge into the day ahead because you’re not that keen to get to work?
For those of you who are geeks, what areas of the computer world do you find interesting? Are you working as an I.T. professional but hate it?