...be a better con artist

This is my second year after my undergrad in professional software development. In my software development career I have worked with lot of people. My realization is every software programmer is a good con artist. At least you have to be a good con artist to be successful in this industry. You must have the approach that you can do anything. The truth is everyone can do everything in this industry.

In this industry nothing is unachievable. There are always thousands of ways to carried out something and most of the cases millions of prudent man prior I solve these and they are eagerly waiting for me. Just I have to find them nothing else. No big deal no big challenge unless any kind of research is involved. Unless you are not in any pioneer organization like Google you will never find any challenge in this industry. We are just facing pseudo research.

From my experience I saw everybody can solve a problem but the way they approach to a problem is different and it makes a big difference among them. How you deal with the problem is important not how you solve. Your solution will be an obvious consequence of your approach and so the total required time. In most of the case nobody is worried how the problem is solved rather they are worried about either it is solved or not.

I like to share my very first day experience at my office. I was there for part time job. I went there and my boss asked me, hey guy do you know XML file? Truly, I never heard the word “XML” before that day but I heard the word “File”. But I thought it could be a file type that I don’t know. Well, I replied, I don’t have that much experience about XML file but may be I can solve your problem. He told me that here is the XML file for configuring an ip address and port to connect to a server. So guys, I guess you can imagine it was a pretty small XML file. :-) I just opened that file as file stream and search for the word <ipaddress> and </ipaddress> and the same for port. After that I was asked to parse a big XML file. At that time I was not aware of standard XML parsers, So, I build one for myself. That is the start of my career.

This is how I approach a problem. I am not gonna say this is right or this is wrong but this approach works very well for me. I am still working as a software engineer and I guess I am doing well. My boss is very happy with my works and the clients as well. So, be a better con artist and you will be a better software engineer.