Making Hard Decisions In Software Engineering
Or, “Learning to say no: A more personal tale of YOLO, FOMO, or whatever the youngsters call it these days”
It may seem a simplistic and naive thing to say, it’s okay to just say no, but it’s extremely common for aspiring software engineers to say yes to pretty much anything¹ requested of them in the workplace².
A life in the grand game is very much about the choices you make.
Starting Out and Getting On
You’re a young engineer, starting out in the world, blinking at the harshness of a light mode desktop colour scheme (before you realised that progressive engineers all work in dark mode), and you have your eye on a few technologies that either you’re interested in levelling up or you’d prefer to avoid like the plague.
You may even be a somewhat older engineer, as I am myself, with that blended personality consisting equally of ‘I really don’t want to offend anyone as I’m quite gentle inside’, ‘I am trying to hide my utter disfunction from the world’, and ‘I really don’t have time for all this crap’ mentality that’s so common in us elder progressives.
We all have things we want to do and things we don’t want to do.
