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Advice I Would Have Rejected Ten Years Ago

Summary

In this episode, host Jonathan Cuttrell reflects on how his perspective has changed over the past decade by sharing three key pieces of advice he would have rejected ten years ago.

The first piece of advice challenges the common developer anxiety about losing optionality. Cuttrell argues that committing deeply to learning one specific area—like focusing on a single programming language for six months—actually leads to greater happiness and transferable expertise. He counters the perception that successful developers know everything, noting that most have focused deeply in specific areas rather than maintaining broad, shallow knowledge.

The second piece of advice encourages listeners to view every job as temporary, even while committing fully to doing excellent work in their current role. This mindset shift acknowledges the reality that most people will change jobs multiple times throughout their careers and that companies themselves may fold. By recognizing the temporary nature of employment, developers can focus on building habits and accomplishments that will serve them throughout their entire career journey.

The final piece of advice addresses our inability to predict our own future accurately. Cuttrell emphasizes that we’re poor predictors of what we’ll want, how we’ll behave, and what problems we’ll want to solve in the future. He recommends keeping the future in mind while taking things day by day, without tying our happiness to specific imagined futures that may never materialize.

Throughout the episode, Cuttrell frames these insights as part of a larger exercise in humility and self-awareness, encouraging listeners to recognize that change is inevitable throughout life and that reflecting on past changes can provide valuable perspective for future growth.

Recommendations

Tools

  • Stackbit — A tool that lets developers build and deploy Jamstack sites with static site generators and headless CMS in just a few clicks, with support for custom themes and various CMS options.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to personal change and growth — Jonathan introduces the episode’s theme: how people change throughout their lives, often more than they expect. He explains that he’ll be sharing advice he would have rejected ten years ago as a way to demonstrate personal growth and encourage listeners to reflect on their own changes.
  • 00:02:45 — First advice: Commit deeply instead of learning broadly — Jonathan presents his first piece of advice: developers should commit to deep learning in narrow areas rather than trying to learn everything broadly. He explains that deep knowledge in one area often transfers to other areas, and recommends focusing on one programming language for six months to build expertise that compounds over time.
  • 00:06:43 — Sponsor break and introduction to remaining advice — After a sponsor message for Stackbit, Jonathan transitions to discussing two more pieces of advice. He frames this as a way to ‘post-mortem’ the past decade of his career, encouraging listeners to consider what major mistakes they’ve made and how they might give advice to their younger selves.
  • 00:09:34 — Second advice: View every job as temporary — Jonathan advises listeners to view every job as temporary, noting that most people have six or seven jobs in their careers. He explains that this mindset encourages better work habits—like building good documentation and paying attention to career impact—because you recognize that your next job will be awarded based on your current performance.
  • 00:12:44 — Third advice: You cannot predict your own future — The final piece of advice addresses our inability to accurately predict our future wants, behaviors, and problems. Jonathan notes that we’re just as bad at predicting things related to ourselves as we are at predicting random events. He recommends keeping the future in mind while taking things day by day, without tying happiness to specific imagined futures.
  • 00:14:55 — Conclusion and encouragement for reflection — Jonathan concludes by encouraging listeners, especially those early in their careers, to engage in this kind of reflective exercise. He emphasizes that recognizing personal change provides better understanding of one’s life journey and reminds us that ‘everything is temporary.‘

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2019-09-03T09:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:15:53

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] something difficult to accept is the fact that you will probably change and you’re probably going to

[00:00:13] change much more than you think you will there’s some good evidence that says that change happens

[00:00:21] not only when you’re young but throughout your life whether you’re 18 or 58 you can expect to

[00:00:28] change a pretty significant amount in the next decade or so and so it’s useful and perhaps

[00:00:36] provides a bit of humility to take time to remember remember the way that you were

[00:00:44] and how you’ve changed in today’s episode i’m going through that exercise publicly

[00:00:53] by giving you advice that i probably would have rejected

[00:00:57] 10 years ago

[00:00:58] my name is jonathan cuttrell and you’re listening to developer t my goal in this show is to help

[00:01:04] driven developers like you find clarity perspective and purpose in your career

[00:01:09] and the truth is i’m probably going to have new advice in 10 years from now that i would probably

[00:01:18] reject today if we imagine that we are done changing then we’re probably going to cut

[00:01:26] ourselves off from growth

[00:01:28] but that change is going to occur and we have to prepare for it so one of the ways that you can

[00:01:34] prepare for it is to start accepting that it’s likely that it’s going to happen and to remind

[00:01:42] yourself that this has happened in the past that allows you to feel safer feel safer when you

[00:01:51] recognize that you’re changing that you have some new information that is prompting you

[00:01:58] to that change

[00:01:59] these changes happen because of a variety of things but most often because we learn

[00:02:06] new things about ourselves we form new beliefs based on our experiences and so there are times

[00:02:14] where we might feel like we’d like to travel back to our younger selves and provide some advice and

[00:02:20] that’s kind of what we’re doing in today’s episode i’m mentally taking myself back to 10 years ago

[00:02:26] and trying to give myself a bit of advice

[00:02:28] that i can take forward into my career and while i might not be able to benefit from this perhaps

[00:02:35] the younger developers who are listening to this or really anybody who’s listening to this may be

[00:02:40] able to take this advice so we’re going to start with a piece of advice about learning but it’s not

[00:02:45] just about learning it’s also about making decisions making decisions about what you’re

[00:02:51] locking yourself into as humans we have a little bit of an aversion to choosing something that

[00:02:58] destroys our optionality in other words locking ourselves into a given choice this

[00:03:06] makes us have anxiety when we think about losing our options but the truth is research and

[00:03:14] experiences will show you that you’re happier once you’ve made a locked-in decision now some of this

[00:03:22] is because of our post rationality in other words once you make that decision you convince

[00:03:28] yourself that it was a good decision but beyond that for developers specifically when you’re

[00:03:35] learning a lot of the deep knowledge that you have in a narrow area is likely to be transferable

[00:03:43] in other words if you learn very deeply about performance in one language it’s probable that

[00:03:52] the information that you learn about performance in that language will transfer at a deep level

[00:03:57] to a different level and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this episode

[00:03:58] another language and so your intuition may tell you that you need to learn a broad set of things

[00:04:07] and necessarily when you start learning that broad set of things you’re likely to only go

[00:04:13] to a shallow depth my advice to you is to narrow the things that you’re considering learning many

[00:04:22] times on this podcast i’ve recommended learning one language for six months

[00:04:28] just focusing on one language for at least six months this may sound like a short amount of time

[00:04:34] but when you spend that focused energy especially very early on in learning that one area you’ll

[00:04:43] realize that you can take a pretty good step into the depth of that thing even in six short months

[00:04:52] so this is something i recommend because i experienced this feeling this need of trying

[00:04:58] to learn everything trying to get some familiarity with everything and this feeling comes from

[00:05:06] the sense the incorrect sense that everyone else is learning everything and we get this

[00:05:14] maybe because we expose ourselves to social media maybe hacker news or something like that and we

[00:05:20] see all of these different technologies and we have the perception that all other great developers

[00:05:26] that we respect and admire they use different technologies and we have the perception that they

[00:05:28] already know all of these tools. They already know all of this information. They’re experts

[00:05:33] in algorithms. They’re experts in data structures. They’re experts in 10 different languages,

[00:05:39] and they’ve architected scaled systems, all of them. But the truth is, very few of them

[00:05:46] have done something across the board, and almost all of the ones that have careers

[00:05:53] have focused in some area for a significant period of those careers. So that’s my first

[00:06:00] piece of advice. Care less about your optionality, and instead be willing to commit. The power of

[00:06:09] commitment will be felt in your kind of personal contentment. You’ll appreciate the fact that

[00:06:17] you’ve committed, and no longer do you have to kind of keep your head on a swivel, but you’ll

[00:06:21] also realize that there’s a lot of other things that you can do to keep your head on a swivel.

[00:06:23] If you can commit to a narrower range of things, there’s a compounding effect when you start

[00:06:32] building true deep expertise, and that expertise is most often transferable. We’re going to take

[00:06:39] a quick sponsor break, and then we’re going to come back and talk about two more pieces of advice

[00:06:43] that I probably would have rejected 10 years ago. Today’s episode is sponsored by Stackbit.

[00:06:52] Static Sites is a company that’s been doing a lot of work in the past, and they’ve been

[00:06:53] and the Jamstack are growing fast. Front-end developers pretty much already get it. It’s fast,

[00:06:58] it’s secure, and as a developer, you still have full control over the markup and the design.

[00:07:03] But convincing clients to go static is a little bit harder to do. How will they update their

[00:07:10] content? This is kind of the main question that comes up in these conversations. Where’s the CMS,

[00:07:16] right? Mainstream adoption of the Jamstack in a commercial context

[00:07:21] relies largely on the fact that the Jamstack is a product of the Jamstack.

[00:07:23] on solving this particular issue of content management, and this is where our friends

[00:07:28] from Stackbit come in. Stackbit lets you build and deploy a Jamstack site, a full Jamstack site,

[00:07:33] with a static site generator and a headless CMS in just a few clicks. You can already choose from

[00:07:38] a dozen pre-built themes for Hugo, Jekyll, and Gatsby, and connect to pretty much all of the

[00:07:44] headless CMSs that you’re used to using, like Forestry or Netlify or Contentful. On top of that,

[00:07:50] Stackbit just released custom themes.

[00:07:53] You can import your own themes built on any static site generator, including the ones that

[00:07:58] we’ve already mentioned, but also from ViewPress, Gridsome, and others. Just add a stackbit.yaml file

[00:08:05] and define your content models, and your theme is ready to connect to any headless CMS. Stackbit

[00:08:11] allows you to test the strengths and weaknesses of the popular headless CMSs quickly and explore

[00:08:16] which one is the right fit for your client or your project. Last of all, the source code for

[00:08:21] sites you provision through Stackbit is stackbit.com.

[00:08:23] So we’re talking about advice that I probably would have rejected a decade ago, and you should

[00:08:45] have your own list of these things that you’ve learned in a decade. Imagine yourself giving the

[00:08:52] advice that you’ve learned in a decade, and you should have your own list of these things that

[00:08:53] you’ve learned in a decade. Imagine yourself giving the advice to that younger version of

[00:08:55] yourself. And the way that you can think about this is, what are some of the major mistakes that

[00:09:00] you made, and how would you go about hopefully rectifying those mistakes if you could replay

[00:09:07] history? Now, of course, this isn’t a fail-proof way. All of this advice comes with a grain of

[00:09:13] salt, as does everything that we say on this show. But this is a way to post-mortem the past 10 years,

[00:09:21] a long-term version of yourself, a post-mortem over the last decade. There’s a lot you can learn in

[00:09:29] that. So we’re going to run through the next two pieces of advice that I probably would have

[00:09:34] rejected 10 years ago. The first piece of advice is to view every job you have for the rest of your

[00:09:42] life as temporary. And this is actually more in line with reality. Not only are people very likely

[00:09:51] to have many jobs, I think the average is somewhere around six or seven jobs in their

[00:09:55] careers. It may have changed since I looked at it last, but not only are we very likely to change

[00:10:01] jobs, very few people have long-running careers in a certain workplace, but we also eventually all

[00:10:08] leave the job one way or another, right? We are temporary as humans. We aren’t here forever,

[00:10:16] and everything around us is changing. There are so many things,

[00:10:21] about your job, that you can’t even control. For example, it’s possible that the company

[00:10:26] that you work for will fold. So this has deep ramifications into your behaviors and the way

[00:10:34] that you operate with the people around you, the way that you collaborate, and all of the ways that

[00:10:41] you kind of set yourself up in your career, right? Treat every job as temporary. Now,

[00:10:46] this kind of clashes with our previous piece of advice of committing,

[00:10:51] right? And being willing to kind of let go of optionality. And our point here isn’t to say

[00:10:58] that you’re always keeping your eye out for the next job. The advice is still kind of cohesive

[00:11:07] with staying in the moment and working to the best of your ability in the job that you currently

[00:11:14] have. But there’s a big difference in viewing your job as temporary and still committing to

[00:11:21] doing great work at that job, versus viewing your job as the last job that you’ll ever have.

[00:11:28] When you view your job as the last job that you’ll ever have, then a lot of the things that

[00:11:33] otherwise might be possible, very quickly become impossible. A lot of good habits that you may

[00:11:41] develop, like for example, taking time to build good documentation, paying attention to the impact

[00:11:50] that your work has on your career, and so on. And so, if you’re doing great work at that job,

[00:11:51] the people that are using your software, or paying attention to the kinds of interactions

[00:11:57] that you have with your teammates, all of these things are necessary to building a long career

[00:12:03] that’s full of change. And so, if you imagine that your next job is going to be awarded based

[00:12:12] on the behaviors in your current job, or based on the accomplishments in your current job,

[00:12:19] you’re much more likely,

[00:12:21] and this is kind of the paradox here, you’re much more likely to do a good job, right? You are paying

[00:12:27] more attention to the work you’re doing today, because it has ramifications on your future.

[00:12:34] You’re taking nothing for granted, in a lot of ways, when you see your jobs as temporary.

[00:12:39] The final piece of advice is kind of along the same lines, and really comes out of the

[00:12:44] second piece of advice we just gave about seeing your jobs as temporary, and that is that you are

[00:12:51] not a good predictor of your own future. And this is not only true based on the things that you

[00:12:59] think you will do, but also the things you think you will want, the way you think you’ll behave,

[00:13:07] the kinds of problems that you’ll want to solve, or the kinds of personal issues that you’ll have.

[00:13:15] A lot of the things that we expect to happen probably won’t, and a lot of the things that we

[00:13:21] don’t expect to happen might. Of course, when we say it this way, it sounds obvious. It’s hard

[00:13:27] to predict the future. But a lot of the things that we think we’re good at predicting, we’re

[00:13:34] just as bad at predicting those as we are at predicting random things that have nothing to

[00:13:39] do with us. We like to think that the things that we want today, or the things that we envision for

[00:13:45] the next five years today, are likely to come true, or likely to stay the same.

[00:13:51] And they aren’t. And so when we imagine the future, and when we try to put our minds

[00:14:00] into that future, we very often create these worlds that are never going to exist.

[00:14:09] And very often, we also forget these imaginations. We forget the world that we thought

[00:14:15] might exist as we move into the future.

[00:14:21] Interestingly enough, it feels like a lot of our imagination about the future ends up getting

[00:14:26] wasted. It’s not that we shouldn’t try to think about the future. In fact, I highly recommend that

[00:14:33] everything you do be done with the future in mind. But rather, that we don’t tie our happiness

[00:14:40] to some specific picture of the future that we’ve kind of imagined for ourselves. Instead,

[00:14:48] we keep the future in mind,

[00:14:51] but we take everything day by day.

[00:14:55] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea. I hope this was helpful

[00:14:59] to those of you who are early in your careers especially, but also people who are kind of facing

[00:15:06] these changes and looking back and trying to remember or trying to remind yourself that you

[00:15:13] have changed. I highly encourage this kind of activity, this kind of exercise, because I think

[00:15:19] it gives you a much better understanding of what’s going on in your life. And I hope that you

[00:15:20] have a moment to remind yourself that everything is temporary. Thank you so much for listening.

[00:15:26] Today’s episode wouldn’t be possible without our awesome sponsor, Stackbit. Head over to

[00:15:30] stackbit.com slash developer tea and check out the magic today. Thank you so much for listening to

[00:15:36] today’s episode. It also wouldn’t be possible without spec.fm. Today’s producer was Sarah

[00:15:42] Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. Until next time, enjoy your tea.

[00:15:50] Thank you.

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