This is a story of an honest, skilled, and hardworking software engineer who works in a renowned multinational company. The name of that software engineer is Arman. This story explains the reality of some people of the corporate world who spoil the career and important time of Arman type of engineers.
Arman has computer science degree that he received after a lot of hard work and studies. He dreamed of working in a renowned software company. He was always thinking that the corporate world people are the ocean of knowledge and develop scalable, platform-independent software with a great utilization of OOPS concepts. And, Arman joined one well-reputed 'XYZ' multinational company as a software engineer. He was very happy that he would work with the likes of Linus Torvalds, Larry Page, Rossum, etc. He was very happy because he thought that he would get the chance to work with the "James Gosling, Jack Dorsey, Bjarne Stroustrup, etc." type of people. He had been aligned with one project. And, after that, the journey of his dream started to fall apart. It was unbelievable and very painful to him.
He met with different types of people in this project who contributed to breaking his dreams.
Dabbler
The first day, Arman met with one Dabbler who had interviewed him for the project. A dabbler is a person who follows a pursuit without attaining proficiency or professional status. Arman thought that this dabbler would have great skills and technical expertise because he/she was claiming himself/herself as a technical lead. But, this assumption became wrong within five minutes of a meeting. Arman was surprised.
Blinkered
Arman met with one senior software engineer in his team. He had some knowledge of project and he had been aligned to give KT to Arman regarding running the project and working the styles in the project. But Arman found that he was Blinkered. Blinkered is a kind of narrow-minded person having or showing a limited outlook. He never wanted to share his project knowledge because he wanted to create dependency in the project so that he was able to bargain for great opportunities like onsite visits, promotion, etc. associated with the project.
Amateur
The biggest surprise for Arman was the technical lead of his project. That project's lead was an Amateur. Amateur is a kind of professional who engages in an art, paper airplane flying, or athletic activity as a pastime rather than as a professional. It was a surprise for Arman because his annual rating and technical expertise would be evaluated by him/her.
Maven
Arman was very happy to have met this guy who was a Maven. A maven is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. That maven was very hardworking but unfortunately, he was remoting working from Arman so he could not have proper collboration. But, he/she was very good.
The Great Thespian of Code
Arman wrote millions of lines of code and never over-acted. But, after some months he met with one great Thespian of code. Thespian is a person who does too much over-acting. That guy used to write 16 switch case statment with hardcoded 1, 2.... 14 cases and was over-acting like he had written complex code for Scuba diving and also he was doing scuba diving in cubicals (work station) by explaining his achievements in code to everyone.
Assiduous Tester
Assiduous tester was amazing guy in the project. He was awesome for Arman. An assiduous tester is a kind of a person who is constant in application or effort, works diligently at a task, is persevering and attentive. He was very hardworking for the project. He had stabilized the project by finding the bugs in the code of the great thespian and blinkered.
Abusive Manager
Arman was managed by an abusive manager. That manager had zero knowlege of software developement strategy, team management, and skillset. He used to ping each and every resource after every five minutes. He treated software engineers very badly. He encouraged each employee for licking boots. He used to believe that a project was being developed by escalation, follow-up and by being abusive to developers. A good code takes lots of time and is not at all good for revenue. This was his thinking.
Neophyte
Arman met with one honest software engineer who was tortured by the abusive manager. A neophyte is a person who is new to a subject, skill, or belief. He had joined this organization as a fresher but he was unable to develop his skillset because abusive manager was focused on revenue generation, not on the skillset development of neophyte. The abusive manager was telling him to do testing, development in .NET, C#, Java, Oracle, etc. for a short period of time. He was never allowed to work on one particular technology with dedication.
Pedant
There was one senior software engineer who was never doing any implementation. That guy was only believing in the theory part with scattered arguments. A pedant is a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning. He was only talking about the technology and aproaches but never implemented. He was behaving like a teacher.
Thundering Architect
Architect role is to help junior or other software engineers related to complex problem statements and architecutre. But, Arman got the chance to meet with one thundering architect in his project. He was shouting during the explanation of anything. People were not going to ask anyting from him because he shared his knowlege with lots of anger.
Arman was frustrated among all these kind of people and then started reading some good books like Refactoring by Martin Fowler, Analysis patterns by Martin Folwer, Gangs of Four design patterns, Data Structure and algorithm solving skills, etcs. He learned so many things to motivate himself.
Arman's advice to other software engineers
Skills are your hope, way of life, and soul of your professional body. Please don't spoil it among such kind of people. Spend some time reading good books. Practice the code with multiple types of implementation. You will realize the progress even in such kind of environment. Never stop learning even in worst environment too.
"Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me." ~ Carol Burnett