Your Career Changes You

It wasn't uncommon to hear someone say "what are you going to do when you grow up?" when I was a teen and I rarely had an answer to that question. I've always been a person that goes with the flow which was still true when choosing a career path. I didn't know what I wanted to do but technology definitely was something I was interested in and seemed the most logical path for me to take at the time.

A few years after High School, I had a software programming college degree at hand and was about to embark on this adventure. While it's been a fantastic career path, I had no idea at the time that the career that I was choosing would also be defining who I would become.

When I was a teen, I was a social butterfly and this is a characteristic of me that changed, for the worse, due to my career. Spending most of my work days in front of a computer, I slowly became more and more comfortable alone with my thoughts than being around other people. 

It's a career path that very few understand, outside of the field, which means that it can't be easily discussed with other people. My parents, for example, often ask me how my day went and on the days where I do feel like sharing I need to dumb it down in order for them to understand. It's not like I can just tell my parents that I spent my day reviewing design/functional/requirement documentation, or spent my day automating a system, as they have no idea what these entail.

The funny thing about the Information Technology industry is that it's so vast that even if you work in it for years it doesn't necessarily mean that you could have a discussion with someone else because their experience with I.T. may be totally different than yours. This means that even people working in the same field sometime can't share their experience with each other. There's a person on our team with the sole responsibility to oversee the network side of things, which is a side of I.T. that I don't fully understand, and when we chat about what he does I'm completely lost.

The person I would become in my career isn't something that was at the forefront of my thoughts when I decided on this career and looking back it's something that should have definitely been included in the decision.