A lot of junior developers say they want to grow. The word "growth" is everywhere in developer communities. But when you look closely, what they mean by growth is often just that they want to land at a well-known company with a high salary and good benefits. To put it bluntly, they want to get into one of the big-name tech firms. Because of this, people often choose skills that look good for job-hopping over the skills their current job actually requires. That gap causes no end of problems. Microservices spread during the pandemic, and I suspect it caused headaches at a lot of companies. For the sake of one line on a résumé saying "MSA experience," microservices were probably half-baked into plenty of companies that didn't need them.
Why do we want to grow in the first place? Growth usually stems from anxiety. Of course, that isn't true for everyone. But imagine the people preaching growth had been born rich. How many of them would still say they want to grow? They'd more likely say something like they want to create value in the world. Can you picture Elon Musk, Lee Jae-yong, or bin Salman talking about personal growth?
I'm not saying growth is a pretense. I too think survival comes first. Writing posts like this is my own way of surviving. What I want to take issue with is the way actions taken in the name of growth end up drifting away from their original purpose, which is survival.
Actions taken in the name of growth usually take the form of doing something consistently. For a developer, that's filling in the GitHub contribution graph or writing TILs; for a YouTuber, uploading one video a week; for a blogger, one post a day. Miracle mornings, too. The keywords "growth" and "consistency" tend to travel together. That's because growth comes out of anxiety, and consistency erases anxiety. Obsessive-compulsive behavior also involves repeating a specific action to erase anxiety — I think it's much the same thing.
Consistency is important, of course. But there's something even more important for survival that rarely gets discussed. It's the ability to frame the right project.
For example, if the real motive behind your "growth" was moving to a good company, then you should build a job-search project — not consistently post knowledge to a blog that ChatGPT could have answered for you, just to quiet your anxiety. You'd compile a list of companies you want to work for, check whether there are current openings for the work you want to do, get a read on the culture, figure out what kind of coding tests they use, and maybe even ask someone on the inside for a coffee chat. But that sort of thing is a headache. You have to draw up a complicated plan and follow through on it. So it's easy to fall back into the feeling of stacking something up through sheer consistency.
You survive only by knowing your own strengths and inclinations well and consistently working on a project that fits them. Doing what everyone tells you to do — one video a week, one commit a day, miracle mornings — consistently gets you nowhere. Sure, if you keep it up for a really long time, you might secure 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 urge to dodge the anxiety of survival with meaningless consistency. Know yourself well, design a project that fits, and stick with it.