The Initiation Ritual
Since I started to become more serious about programming and getting my first full time programming job I’ve never really felt like part of the “tribe” you could say. I always felt like the outsider trying to be part of the game. Besides not getting programming jokes I felt like I didn’t really experience the profession enough to call myself a programmer.
In a lot of tribes one must pass a sort of initiation ritual. These rituals sometimes involve some type of pain endurance, sharp or on fire, the implementation details vary but the result is the same. After surviving the experience your tribe, your new brothers and sisters, welcome you into the tribe and you can now call yourself a member.
Today I went over to worsethanfailure.com to check out the latest IT disaster stories and one really stuck a chord in me, probably some type of major chord actually. The story involves a young and programmer who “had no commercial software experience and had only limited Web development experience” like me, who took a “C# developer job at a well-funded start-up” like me, and worked with code by “developers didn’t seem to know the difference between Cache, ViewState and Session objects” like me, and wondered what the disproportionate amount of managers did all day, like me. Wow, did I write this and not realize it?
There are some differences between the authors experience and mine. For example instead of a comfy Aeron chair I was sitting a vile creation that was probably better defined as a fancy way to store firewood ( pictured, imagine sitting in that for 8 hours ). Regardless of the differences I still connected with the author and knew that I too shared a similar experience in my programming career.
Judging by the comments in this particular article and other bits and pieces on proggit and hackernews.com it seems working in a less than ideal ( to put it lightly ) situation is just par the course.
After reading this article and getting a more solid idea of what to expect in my future programming career I feel like I’ve passed a sort of programmers initial ritual. Now I can pop into threads and discussions like this and say “me too!“. I can share an experience with other members of my tribe and feel confidant I too got the experience necessary to know that if I run into a similar situation again I can just laugh, whine with my fellow programmers, and endure knowing its just what we have to deal with in this profession.
In short I think I passed my initiation ritual, and even though I didn’t stick around a bad experience for long, I still have the burns and scars ( or backache from that chair ) to prove it.