2 Regrets of a 55 Years Old Retired Software Engineer
He worked for a Fortune 500 company and wished somebody had told him this earlier
I have started thinking about my long-term plan and what I want to do in my life. Soon, I will share those with you. But as part of the plan, I decided to make a plan to talk with different kinds of programmers. My main goal is to learn as much as possible from them.
I also decided to write fundamental and unique content for my followers and readers on Medium so that they can also get benefitted from my initiative.
This week I talked with a 55 years old retired software developer who started his career when he was 35. The plan was he would give me 30 minutes, but when we finished our conversation, it was more than 1.5 hours!! I enjoyed our session.
He said he might feel uncomfortable if anyone he knows reads this article. So, I am not disclosing his name. But for the sake of this article, let’s call him “Mr. Barry”.
One of my questions was if he had any regrets about his long job life as a software developer! He gave an excellent long answer. I am summarising it to the main two points. And here are those:
Pressure!!
This is the most important lesson(for me).
He told me he had two friends, John and Romi(of course, fake names), working in the same company. The company was making “SaaS” software. The product was new, and all the employees had to take some extra pressure because they wanted to launch it before Christmas, and the time was insufficient.
So, they had to do some overtime. Now, the main part. Romi used to take more pressure than John. Romi used to do overtime if necessary. But John never did extra work.
Now, when the management needed to do extra work, they asked Romi to do so. Because they knew John would never respond to this type of request, and they couldn’t rely on John.
These incidents happened to him too. He couldn’t say no to them. So, he told me:
The more pressure you take, the more pressure you will get