Many junior developers say they want to grow. The word "growth" is everywhere in developer communities. But when you look closely, what they call growth often means they want to join a well-known company with a high salary and good benefits. To put it bluntly, they want to get into Naver, Kakao, Line, Coupang, or Baemin. Because of this, people often choose skills that help them change jobs rather than the skills their current job needs. This gap causes problems more often than you'd think. MSA (microservices architecture) spread during the COVID years, and I suspect it caused trouble for many companies. For the sake of one line about MSA experience on a résumé, I'd guess a lot of companies that had no need for MSA ended up adopting it half-heartedly.
Why do we want to grow? Growth is usually rooted in anxiety. Of course, plenty of people are different. But what if the people who shout about growth had been born into wealth? How many of them would still say they want to grow? They would more likely say things like wanting to create value for the world. Can you imagine Elon Musk, Lee Jae-yong, or Mohammed bin Salman talking about personal growth?
I'm not saying growth is a pretense. I also believe survival comes first. Writing this piece is my own way of surviving, too. What I want to take issue with is this: the things we do in the name of growth drift away from their original purpose, which is survival.
What we do in the name of growth is most likely to be doing something consistently. For developers, that might be filling in the green squares on GitHub or writing TILs. For YouTubers, uploading one video a week. For bloggers, one post a day. There's also the "miracle morning." Growth and consistency tend to go together, because growth comes from anxiety, and consistency erases anxiety. Compulsions work the same way: people repeat certain behaviors to wipe away anxiety, and I think it's a similar thing.
Of course, consistency matters. But there is something that matters even more for survival and rarely gets discussed. It is the ability to turn things into the right projects.
For example, if the real motive behind your growth was to move to a better company, then you would need to build a job-change project. That's not the same as steadily posting to your blog the kind of knowledge ChatGPT could probably answer, just to quiet your anxiety. You would compile a list of companies you want to join, check whether they currently have openings for the work you want to do, find out what the atmosphere is like, learn what kind of coding tests they use, and perhaps even ask someone who works there for a coffee chat. But these things give you a headache, because you have to draw up and carry out a complicated plan. So it's easy to fall into the feeling of building something up through consistency instead.
You survive only by understanding your own strengths and tastes and steadily carrying out a project that suits them. There's no point in steadily doing what others tell you to do: one video a week, one commit a day, a miracle morning, and so on. If you keep it up for a really long time, you might earn an image as a hard worker. But I think that is a position you can't win without extraordinary willpower.
We have to overcome the habit of dodging survival anxiety with meaningless consistency. We have to understand ourselves well, plan a project that fits, and carry it out steadily.