Many junior developers say they want to grow. Developer communities in particular are overflowing with the word "growth." But when you look closely, what they call growth often just means they want to get into a well-known company with a high salary and good benefits. Bluntly put, they want to join Naver, Kakao, Line, Coupang, or Baemin. So they often choose skills that help them change jobs rather than the skills their current job needs. That gap causes plenty of problems. MSA (microservices architecture) spread during the COVID era, and I'd guess it caused trouble for a lot of companies. For the sake of one line about MSA experience on a résumé, I suspect MSA was clumsily introduced at many companies that had no need for it.
Why do we want growth? Growth usually stems from anxiety. Of course, plenty of people are the exception. But what if the people who shout about growth had been born with a silver spoon? How many of them would still say they want to grow? They would more likely say things like they want 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, too, think survival comes first. Even writing this piece is something I do for my own kind of survival. What I want to take issue with is this: the actions taken in the name of growth drift away from their original purpose, which is survival.
Actions taken in the name of growth are most likely to be about doing something consistently. For developers, that might be filling in the GitHub contribution graph or writing TILs (Today I Learned notes); for YouTubers, uploading one video a week; for bloggers, one post a day. Miracle mornings, too. Growth and consistency tend to go hand in hand. That's because growth comes from anxiety, and consistency erases anxiety. Compulsions also involve repeating certain actions to erase anxiety, and I think it's a similar thing.
Of course, consistency matters. But there is something more important for survival that rarely gets discussed. That 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, you should create a job-change project. Not keep posting knowledge to a blog that ChatGPT could probably answer, just to calm your anxiety. You would compile a list of companies you want to join, check whether there are currently openings for the work you want to do, find out what the atmosphere is like, work out the types 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 knowing your own strengths and tastes well and consistently carrying out a project that suits them. There is no point in consistently doing what others tell you to, like one video a week, one commit a day, or a miracle morning. Sure, if you keep it up for a really long time, you might earn a reputation as a hard worker. But I think that's a position you can't reach without extraordinary willpower.
You have to overcome the habit of dodging survival anxiety with meaningless consistency. You have to understand yourself, plan a project that suits you, and carry it out consistently.