I am a computer programmer, a software engineer if you will, but I've had a different job of late. As the story goes, I graduated in '99, was in the industry full time for a few years, and was laid off. Then, after a while of contract work, I was job hunting and my car broke down. I'm a AAA member, and when I jokingly asked the tow truck driver if they were hiring, he said yes. I applied, and for the last four years, I've been driving a tow truck.
It's been fun, and I've gotten a lot of exercise, but I do want to fully return to the computer industry. One of the hardest parts, however, is selling myself, and explaining these last few years. To be honest, it's not mutually exclusive; I have been programming all this time. But at the same time, this is definitely the path less traveled by. For the most part, the computer industry is one of specialization, where there's more call for people with a specific set of knowledge than for people who are generalists.
This is a shame, because I believe that those who focus on one tiny subset of the field are at a disadvantage. I remember, years ago, a time back at my first job. It was a great company — small, with a lot of open communication — and I was rather fresh out of college. Their primary product ran on Windows NT exclusively, and was the brainchild of the CTO. Believe me when I say the CTO was a brilliant man, who knew both Windows and the product inside and out.
So believe my surprise when, during a group brainstorming for a new product that would be cross-platform, he admitted to having no knowledge of how Unix did file permissions, the read/write/execute bits that can be changed with chmod. Me, a new hire, knew something the CTO didn't!
To his credit, he knew that he did not know, as opposed to some lesser man who would try to fake it. And the other engineers also didn't know, either. This was during the time of MacOS 8 and MacOS 9, long before Linux and MacOS X had made their big mark in the landscape, so the non-windows OSes were still very much in the margin. But for the rest of my employment there, I was the man to go to for Mac questions. Everything from which iMac to purchase for QA to test browsing with, to maintenance and repair. To this day, I still remain surprised that I knew something that the rest of the company didn't.
Deep but narrow knowledge is still the order of the day in many circles, and I am coming more and more appreciative of a wide base. I sometimes joke that I can tell which AAA members I assist are java programmers, because they don't know much about the hardware of their car. Mean, but sadly not too far from the truth. Part of the emphasis of the blog has been to show relationships, ties between the two worlds, and that something as far outside of computing as cars can still be relevant and useful for discovering insights or gaining a different perspective.
And it's why I do list my towing experience in my resume. Not only is it to stand out for uniqueness' sake, but also because it is valuable. Where have I been, in the computing world for the last few years? Nowhere. But at the same time, very few fast-track employees will have gained the crisis management, problem solving, or people management skills that I have while pulling a Mercedes Benz out of a fence or rescuing a kid locked in a car. And I've come to appreciate good design beyond matching brackets and understand the non-technical user, meeting with them in a context that few will.
And in five years' time, when all of our hot buzzword-compliant technologies have been replaced by entirely new hot buzzword-compliant technologies, these skills will still remain as potent and useful as they are now and have been during the age of the man-month. And that will make all the difference.
