Is Being “Self-Taught” Good Enough?

I’m working in web development for a bit.

I wanted to see if I could do it because I taught myself all the web languages I know. People are surprised that I wanted to code all day, but it’s like a test:

Am I good enough?

Would I spend my days throwing my keyboard out the window? HR might eventually tell me, “Now, use Siri to recite your code.”

Does being a self-taught developer, musician, engineer–anything–work? Or are you always subpar to everyone who pursued a formal education in the subject?

I’ll spend the next few months discovering this.

There are like twenty guys for every girl in a software company. Last week in the kitchen, one guy tried to sell me protein powder—so I’ve probably met the resident drug dealer.

Not very much talking happens with my team and I’m not expected to attend many meetings at all.

I feel like I need to check in with someone before and after the workday, but I never know when I’d be disturbing people in their offices. I keep my office door closed because my neighbours probably don’t appreciate The Chainsmokers like I do.

It turns out that the ability to talk and collaborate on my work is something that I crave, and I want to know that my work is important enough to involve other people.

Many fulltime musicians tell me how easy it is to get unmotivated or lost when spending all their time with the same few people.

My first Friday, at 5:30pm, I wanted to ask my team whether they needed me to finish a task before leaving for the week; I’d already stayed past 5. I walked down the hallway and noticed the offices were empty.

My team was gone. They weren’t joking about work-life balance. 

Walking back to my office was a peculiar feeling and it wasn’t so much the work-life balance that bothered me; I’d never been left behind by my team.

Do I just leave? What if I didn’t deliver as much as I was expected to?

I’m used to staying late, meeting deadlines, doing whatever needs to be done.

When I practiced piano for the Performance exam, I played until 11pm. Work has always been life, because if it wasn’t worth my life, then was it worth working for at all?

So I’m trying to come to terms with work-life balance. How does a person put their ambition on hold for 12 hour breaks? (Netflix is an exception.)

I’m taking tasks off the board like the other developers working on the product.

The team says I work fast, and fast is good for now. I want someone to say that my code is clean or smart, but it’s hard to differentiate my work from another developer’s.

I’d need a hard problem to solve, and I haven’t gotten any hard problems in my second week.

This must be like anyone who’s tried to release a music album. Or start a music studio to teach. What differentiates them from the other musicians?

In one Freakonomics episode, economists explain that mattress stores tend to cluster together in one area within a city, because each product (the mattress) is very similar to the next, so customers aren’t loyal to one brand nor the other. When stores cluster together, they share customer bases and labour pools, which drive up profit.

I feel like one of these mattresses. I’ll be a better developer in the long run, but right now, I’m not feeling very important.

And that’s all we want from our work, right? To feel like we’re working on something important. Something substantial enough to dedicate two thirds of our days to it.

So maybe, it’s not about how good we are, but how important our tasks feel. How meaningful the work is.

This goes for music, too: whether we are practicing a piece of music or teaching others.

In the mean time, I’ll focus on working fast so the team will think I’m capable, and give me an interesting problem to solve, when it comes up.

Who else is self-taught?