antipattern

You are either into writing programs (aka coding) or not. There is something totally amazing about creating something from nothing, and doing it with just your brain, and some time on your hands.

When you get hooked on coding, it will totally take over and change your life in ways you never suspect. If you get hooked when you are very young, it could result in you having spent thousands of hours in front of a screen even before entering the job market. And in that case, you have a massive advantage in comparison to other software engineers. You simply are better at it than most of your peers. There is nothing strange about it, it is just simply what happens when you practice a lot.

The coding prodigy however faces problems that other coders often don't even reach. They are on a track to something else, and they are not even aware of it.

Geek evolution is related to the dopamine hit you get when you've completed a project. In the beginning it is quite simple stuff, like just getting the computer to do something. Then it matures to finishing up bigger projects. Every time you complete a project, you just feel good, sometimes really great.

But unfortunately the dopamine high after a project quickly fades.

Now you are on to creating bigger and more complicated projects. At some point the projects come so big, you need a team to complete them. So now you have to deal with computers and people.

Most coders don't even get to this phase – they somehow can't make the jump to dealing with people.

If you have both coding and people in your career, you're title is probably director or software architect, or something like that. The cool thing is that now you can build even bigger projects.

What happens next? I don't want to spoil the ending, but it is a very slippery slope from here onward.

At some point, even with a team of people helping, and you churning out cool projects, the dopamine hits become less intense and far in between.

You start wondering if there is something wrong with the projects themselves. Maybe they are just too boring, you decide.

So you jump to a different company that does some cooler stuff. Or course you can perform this jump many times, chasing that high.

The next major hurdle that you might face is that you can't find projects that interest you any more.

Woe if you got this far! Now what?

At this point, you really have no choice but to invent your own projects to work on. This is the first phase of being a technical entrepreneur.

The technical entrepreneur, coming from a coding background, literally invents new things to chase that high. The perspective is that of a coder looking for something cool to do, and that is the reason why his/her startup exists.

However, most of what you do ends in pretty much failure at this stage of geek evolution. It is quite depressing. There is no easy shortcut any more to your dopamine high.

Next step is that you realize that you have to get into the minds of other people, to see what makes them tick, so you can understand what they want. In this way your projects achieve a purpose, and can be even more successful.

Now you've turned into a psychologist of some sort, I am afraid. What you do every day is going further and further way from what you love, the coding that you started with. You are now trying to figure out how to get people addicted to the stuff you churn out.

Product managers call this engagement, and it is probably the worst thing that has happened to software. Not a day goes by where you don't see a news article about the effects of this addiction, so I won't spend much time on it.

Now suddenly you are dealing with your own dopamine addiction, and that of others – essentially stealing away their time, getting them addicted to your products.

And you are typically stealing attention from people that have more time than money, since those two things seem to be inversely related most of the time (who has both time and money, you should ask?).

Of course, when stealing time from a person who does not have much money, you have to think of other creative ways to monetize your products.

This is causes a lot of further cycles of addiction on addiction.

There are others that would be very happy to advertise to your highly engaged users, of course to help satisfy their shopping addiction.

There is the venture capitalist who, in trying to satisfy his own addiction to money and returns, is willing to finance your multiple levels of addiction. Of course, the vulture capitalist is really driven by the stock market, which is driven by your own addiction to investment returns. It is a full cycle.

It is all inter-related.

And it is all about addiction.

Your pleasure in creating something from nothing now made you part of a world of people all addicted to something. Most of it not good for them.

And now, you coder, have reached the final stage of your evolution.

Philosopher.