What distinguishes a good professional from someone who makes a living doing whatever they’re told? I’ve spent a long time wondering what truly sets apart the people companies would compete to hire from those whose résumés go straight onto an enormous, ever-growing pile. I’m afraid the days when simply stating your degree or profession was enough to make you a candidate are long gone: the workplace paradigm is changing faster than we realize.
Still, we can list an impressive and relevant set of achievements from our past working lives, but we can only be truly professional in what we do day to day.
Programmers, software developers, and anyone else who works on creating new solutions can only thrive in one way. Not through degrees, not through the backing of big-name companies they’ve worked for, or anything like that: we are professionals when we are capable of doing professional-quality work.
This is nothing new, of course. But beyond the complacent, egocentric attitude that makes us think everything we do is the best, we need to recognize one thing: doing professional work requires a daily discipline that not everyone has.
I’ve often found myself having to fix details and bugs in colleagues’ work, which is fine and part of our job. What’s surprising is how often I’ve found things that could clearly have been done much better with exactly the same effort.
If doing something mediocre takes the same effort as doing it excellently, why choose the former? In many cases, it’s simply laziness. In others, holding ourselves to a high standard in everything we do depends on certain conditions in our working environment.
I can’t understand why, when we know how to do something very well, we leave it at a terrible level of quality when it would take us the same effort to do it right. A professional understands this clearly: the only measure by which we can be judged and valued is the quality of the work we do. That’s it.
Résumés come in regularly where I work, and I’m surprised that most people don’t highlight the quality of the work they’ve done. They almost always emphasize their knowledge of this or that technology or the fact that they worked at prestigious Company X. But what a hiring manager (or at least what I would look for myself) would really like to see is something like: “Developed application X, now in production with Y users” or “Module X shared on GitHub and used by Y people,” and so on.
We are professionals not because of what we say, or even where we work, but because of the quality of what we do.
What’s surprising is that this quality is often achieved simply by making good choices, one small step at a time, and building the habit of doing things well—resisting the laziness of finishing any old way without realizing that we’re leaving obstacles that will sooner or later come tumbling down on us. We don’t need to take part in large, subsidized R&D programs to do amazing things (…): the best innovation can happen any day in the work we’re doing right now. If we make excellence the basis of everything we do, new ideas, opportunities for success, and ways to advance our careers will follow. By contrast, doing shoddy work may help us pay a few more bills, but sooner or later it will erode our opportunities.
If I can do better at what I’m working on right now, why not do it? A professional is forged through many years of daily work.