I spent fifteen years before I wrote production code. Telecom rollouts. Office moves. The kind of project where the timeline is on a wall and the wall has people in front of it, arguing.
What I learned that helps
The thing that took me fifteen years to internalize: the deciding is the work. Code is the easy part. Code is also the part everyone wants to start with, because it’s legible. You can see code happening.
“The code is the easy part. The deciding is the work.”
You can’t see deciding happening. So we skip it, and it haunts us in week six.
How PM ruined my code, in the best possible way
I write less code now than I did when I was new. I delete more. I push back. I ask, on day one, “what does this look like when it’s working?” — and I don’t accept “modern, clean” as an answer.
That’s the PM training. It doesn’t go away. I’m glad.
