A while has passed since I published anything new on my personal and professional website (this one, of course, and which I am currently modernizing into a completely different one). The truth is that over the last year and a half I have been incredibly busy. So much so that I have barely had the energy to work on a new book or dedicate time to my personal projects (or side hustles).
As an Engineering Manager for a Swiss multinational with an office in the city where I live, I have once again accumulated wonderful experiences, met intelligent and lovely people, even gotten to know an industry I was completely unfamiliar with (betting and iGaming), reentered the stressful dynamic of launching a very important project, managed difficult situations at times, motivated teams when morale was low and pressure was suffocating, and tried to contribute my positive grain of sand to everything.
But I had to step down from that project, I’m afraid.
Perhaps it is a question of age, of the years we have been accumulating, but there comes a moment when you ask yourself whether what you do every day is aligned with your purpose, your life purpose, I mean. And this is similar to relationships: if you cannot imagine being with your current partner in a few years, then something is wrong and you do not have the courage to acknowledge it.
We already know that life (and true wealth) has to be a balance: your relationships (your partner, family, social life, etc.), your health (exercise, healthy food), your mental hygiene (that inner peace that, deep down, is what we all seek in one way or another), and, of course, the professional activity to which you dedicate yourself, the one that earns you a living.
When you see that the latter drifts further and further away from what interests you most, or when you cannot wait for the weekend to read this or that (on topics unrelated to the company you work for), or simply to disconnect, a distance begins to form between what you do and what you want, and as that distance grows, you feel unbearable pressure and your daily motivation gradually fades away until it disappears.
When that happens, you may no longer have enough motivation to perform your job at 110% (which is the minimum we can demand of ourselves).
As I say, once you reach a certain age and have accumulated around thirty years of professional experience (and many life experiences), you no longer settle for a project that does not inspire you, or that is not for you, even if it pays well or very well. What you want is to give meaning to the project for which you spend more than 40 hours a week working, to feel useful and even indispensable, and to have a positive impact on your sector, your market, and why not, on the world.
At least these are the questions I ask myself in recent years, which is why it is so satisfying for me to see how my books sell every day, because I understand that with them I am helping to improve some professional (and personal) aspect of the life of the person who buys them; nothing is more satisfying than that. Not long ago I calculated (it is difficult to do so, so it is only an estimate) that since I published El Libro Negro del Programador in 2014, my first book, around 40,000 copies of all the books I have published have probably been sold (plus pirate copies, of course).
This means that with that difficult and arduous work of writing, structuring, and publishing a book, thousands of people have benefited.
Over the last year and a half I have experienced again situations and dynamics that I have described ad nauseam in my books: good, normal, and also toxic ones, without having had almost any capacity to avoid them. But above all, I have once again realized that no matter how much management work you do, you cannot stop having contact with the foundation of our profession: programming and writing code in personal projects, using tools, getting to know platforms, designing architectures, polishing procedures and workflows, and so on.
In my opinion, you always have to be sharpening the axe, something I have always done as a manager, team lead, project manager, or department director (call it what you want), with a double effort on my part, and because I recognize that I love my profession, that I feel addicted when the adrenaline rises when you publish a new project, and because programming is to our profession what making any sauce is to the best chef (the culinary metaphor is clear, right? :-)).
Otherwise, you will look back one day and see how the skills you had years ago and worked so hard to acquire have been lost, and who knows, you may have to assume them again for a new professional challenge.
These last few months (from the moment I write this), in addition to resting after several years of too many changes (and even moves :-)), reading a lot, a huge amount, taking better care of myself than ever, finishing the certification of Bitcoin Talents (a program I was admitted to at the end of last year by the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center), resuming projects such as Mantra, building some applications, setting up Bitcoin nodes, and preparing my next publication, and, without rushing, looking for a national or international project where I can have that sense of contribution that is for me the basis of my professional satisfaction.
Reading Amancio Ortega’s biography, it struck me that the book repeatedly said that he spent most of his time… in the factory, not shut away in the office of an ivory tower. For me, that is a perfect example of what I mean with this article.
This is what I mean by sharpening the axe.