Your Job Is Not Your Identity

A colleague early in his career told me recently that he felt behind. He’s very capable, but looking at the notes on this site, he said he couldn’t imagine getting to that point. I recognised the feeling immediately, because I had it too. So this is what I’d tell him, and what I wish someone had told me sooner.

Feeling behind is a comparison problem

When you feel behind, you’re usually comparing your start with someone else’s middle. You see where someone has got to, not the years of small steps, wrong turns and side projects that got them there. Everything on this site is the result of a lot of those steps, most of which looked like nothing at the time.

The more useful comparison is with yourself a year ago. What do you understand now that you didn’t then?

A role is the job you’re focused on, not who you are

For years my title said front end. But front end was never my whole personality; it was the job I was focused on. Around it I kept following whatever interested me: game-development vlogs, a bit of Rust, Kotlin and other languages through Advent of Code puzzles, and reading whatever was relevant to the next problem at work.

None of that felt like a career plan. But it’s exactly how I moved from front end into backend and platform work: not as one big leap, but as a gradual drift towards the things I kept choosing to learn. By the time I took on backend work properly, I’d already been circling it for years. I’ve written up the deliberate version of that path in From UI Lead to Backend Lead: A Learning Path.

So treat a career as a framework for personal growth. Choose roles, and projects within roles, for what they’ll teach you. Explore around your job on purpose, and give that exploring a direction when you can (a short list of things to try, like the radar habit in Staying Current: Awareness vs the Trigger to Act).

What actually helped me

Mentors and friends who said I was on track. Some of it was practical: a reading list that applied directly to my work (Books That Shaped How I Build). But a surprising amount of it was simply being told that I was on the right track and doing well. Early on you have no idea whether you are. Hearing it from someone you respect is enormously motivating, and it costs them almost nothing to say.

Being encouraged to go to conferences. Not mainly for the talks. It was the atmosphere: thousands of people who are motivated, want to learn and want to share, and lots of them happy to talk about how they got where they are. The biggest thing I took away was how many different paths there are. Almost nobody had followed a straight line.

My own motivation. I’ve always liked a challenge and I’m driven by my own goals. But motivation without direction is tiring; mentors and conferences were what pointed it somewhere.

The worst advice I’ve had

At one of those conferences, at around 25, I asked an engineer from a large chip maker how I could move into embedded engineering. The answer was that it was too late for me, or that I’d have to start again from the ground up.

I don’t believe that, and I didn’t really then. At 25, almost anything is possible, and it rarely stops being possible later. You might need to fill gaps, and you’ll probably start a bit lower than you’d like, but you never start from nothing. The skills you build in any role carry across: how to debug, how to learn a new system quickly, how to work with people, how to ship. Those are most of the job, everywhere.

What I’d pass on

• Compare yourself with last year’s you, not with someone else’s highlight reel.
• Your role is what you’re focused on now, not your identity. Explore around it.
• Choose work for what it teaches you, and give your curiosity a direction.
• Go where motivated people gather, and ask them how they got there.
• Be wary of anyone who says it’s too late. Skills transfer more than people think.
• Be the person who tells someone they’re on track. It made a difference to me, and it’s the part of leading I enjoy most now.