James Hobson
What do you do in your free time?
I go to McFit Mondays, Wed and Fridays, mostly weights, I dont enjoy aerobic.
If you could work one day in the shoes of someone else who would it be?
I try to experience as much as I can in the organizations I work with, each role brings a different perspective and learning opportunities. The key experiences which have made me a better developer were from working in support and testing. Having been worken up in the middle of the night with an angry customer on the phone and being faced by a log full of "this shouldnt happen" and "an error occured" without any useful info helped me to understand the importance of useful logging. The value of putting myself in anothers place and trying to understand what I would wish that I had done differently when building a solution has been worth more than years of experience cutting code. If I could tell a new developer one thing, it would be "learn to think like a tester and write code as if its you that has to fix it in the middle of the night based on the log file alone"
What do you think about the term 'Work-Life-Balance'?
People often seem to interpret work life balance as working less, but I think it goes much deeper than that. True work life balance starts with work and life each in balance. Work should be well defined and enjoyable and we feel able to contribute and to be fullfilling. Once our lives and our work are themselves in balance, we can meaningfully talk about having those two in balance with each other. They say some people work to live and some live to work, in my ideal world neither would be true, people would work becaue they want to and would be suitably rewarded for their efforts.
Work sucks when...
Work is wonderful when I am challenged and have a clear vision of what I want to achieve. Work sucks when I do not.
How important are formal degrees or qualifications in a time when technologies are constantly changing and evolving?
Formal education can be excellent but it is not the only way to learn, often people who chose alternative routes are the most motivated and interesting to work with. That said the knowledge gained in a degree is hard to learn outside of that context and many people, including me, will never cover all the detail a computer science degree would have brought. My view is that education at its best teaches people to learn. I studied chemistry a couple of decades ago and though it was an important step in my life the importance of what I learned was not Markov substitution or the theoretical processes involved in capillary electrophoresis but rather about myself, how to learn, how to stay motivated on long confusing projects where I often felt alone and confused.
How do you support your employees with their career goals?
The most important step to reaching goals is to focus on steps which are achievable in a reasonable timeframe. Where I have failed people in the past has mostly been around developing vague goals with long time horizons.
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