The technology business is facinating. Its moving so fast that its hard to find people with the right skills to deliver a project. You can almost guarantee that you will be simultaneously surrounded with incredibly smart people (brought by the challenge) and incredibly dumb people (seeking refuge) – to complicate things further, some people who are good at some things can be quite poor at other things.
Of course, the universal constant is that everyone, no matter what side of the fence they come from is going to take time out to criticise your work, the challenge for someone who wants to improve their skills is deciding which criticism to listen to and which to ignore.
Many years ago when I was primarily focused on systems administration I was working in a technical support role. When I took the position I was moving from a role where I was pretty much the key technical resource to a role where I was really just one of the network support guys – but that didn’t stop me being full of my own self importance.
At the time I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the underlying network protocols that bound the Internet together and while I could certainly interface directly with an SMTP, POP3 or HTTP server (without the need for a browser) I greatly over estimated by abilities lower down in the stack.
I didn’t get the opportunity to understand just how little I knew until I had the opportunity to work with a brilliant network administrator who had studied networking protocols over the course of his entire career.
One day, while sitting at his desk going over some wierd client behaviour that I was experiencing and protesting that it didn’t make sense – the words “I know how this protocol works” even came out of my mouth. With studied patience he looked up from the print-out and said “you don’t know as much about this protocol as you think you do – go and read the specification again”.
At first I was a little shocked by this statement and being at the age I was my natural inclination was to get all bent out of shape about it but something strange happened, I bit my tongue and went back to my desk (after being told what the problem was).
Looking back now I think that I must have decided that the criticism was coming from a source I could respect and that if I protested I might actually miss out on the opportunity to learn something new. Was my ego bruised? Sure – but the bruising was done in the most gentle way possible – in short, it was constructive and designed to improve my skills.