Watched a really fantastic video from Healthy Software Developer about how unchecked learning can be a dangerous addiction that can actually damage your software development career.
The bit that resonated with me, and had me feeling deeply personally attacked, was the bit about using tech learning as a way to procrastinate. Learning a new technology, or language, or framework, when I should be doing something else that I am responsible for. I felt that.
I sat with my thoughts afterwards. Reflecting on my habits over the last 2 years. And yeah, not only have I been addicted to tech learning, I am doing it out of fear as well as a way to procrastinate.
I recommend watching the video as he touches on many signs and traits of this sort of addiction and has some tips on when to (and not to) learn.
Procrastination and Distraction
My current job is a leadership role where I can act as mentor to other developers, and grow/scale my team into a high performing group. There is a shit load to learn, it’s an entirely new skill set. However instead of learning those skills, I have been learning things like GoLang, PHP Laravel, NextJS and ReactJS, HTMX, Kubernetes, etc. I mean, endless stuff, because it’s 1) comfortable and familiar, and 2) a good distraction from a real challenge that I have in front of me.
I have also been using it as a way to procrastinate from doing other things in my life that are important. For example I had to learn an entirely new deployment strategy and toolkit to deploy my wife’s app because doing it to the old way was old. More destructively, I have been spending my evenings doing busy work instead of spending time with my wife and playing with my dog. I am not taking any time for leisure or relaxation. Work got stressy, so I got distracted.
I spent like 3 weekends doing almost nothing but building a Laravel app “to learn the framework” instead of getting a head start on weeding my garden, working on my adhd studies and practice, and doing chores around the house. I learned some things, but I didn’t need to learn those things.
I had some things come up at work that were very difficult, and instead of reflecting and working on that I bought some books and online courses.
Learning and reading is a familiar place. I often go here when things get difficult.
Fear
I had the rug pulled out from under me in 2022 when the company I was working for closed their doors. It shook me to my core. I was in a panic. And I began my job search. I was doing “DevOps” for the last 5 years, running infrastructure, pipelines, and automation for a cannabis startup. I learned a lot and my skills were fine. Like I know my shit. BUT. All of a sudden I am very vulnerable and I start questioning myself. Every job wants GoLang and K8S, or Rust and GCP. At least that is what the narrative unfolding in my brain is telling me. I start to think that my 20-ish years of development experience, 5+ years of devops experience, are no longer viable. And so I start to over commit to learning paths upon which I think my career depends.
The problem is that I was not growing the skills that really matter when it comes to being a good prospect and good employee. I also was not getting really deep into the stack I was learning, so it was not like I was going to bring anything as a fresh Go developer ya know. I mean, yeah you gotta know how to program, you gotta know how to manage linux systems, docker, and so on. But you also need good communication skills, a different set of problem solving skills, leadership qualities. And if I was going to be more of an individual contributor, it would have been more valuable to dive deeper into what I know than to try to add some surface level knowledge of many other tools to my kit.
I am also untangling years of untreated ADHD that have contributed to much of the fear and distraction. That has added some spiciness to the problem for sure!
Final Thoughts
While reflecting I realized that so much of my time in the last 2 years has been spent in a fear state, frantically trying to learn everything I can at at surface level, that I have neglected the real path of growth in front of me. I was also using it as a way to keep myself distracted so I didn’t have to face the real challenges I have going on in my life.
What I know now, more deeply than I knew this morning. Is that my time is better spent facing the fear head on and being more skillful around what I commit to learning and how I do it.
I am always going to be a student. Moving forward I will be more skillful and mindful of how I approach that.