Growing talent
I was sitting on a bench, enjoying some fresh air and easing my mind after a day of work. This kid was playing with his football when the inevitable happened; he kicked it into a tree and it got stuck in the branches. He wasn’t tall enough to jump and grab it so he stood there for a moment contemplating his options. I watched, entertained as he climbed the tree. A few bad steps here and there, hanging from a branch with only one hand, looking for another one to grab, a little bit higher.
This situation felt weirdly familiar to me. At first I though it was because I too had climbed trees a bunch of times to recover lost footballs when I was a kid. But as I paid closer attention it hit me. At first, I wanted to get up, jump and get the ball for him. It was right within my reach, no biggie. But before I did, he started climbing and I sat there, thinking that he was more than capable of doing it by himself, even if he struggled a bit more than me.
It was so comforting seeing the kid smiling from ear to ear as he finally freed the football. He jumped down from the tree and got back to play. That’s what I was waiting for, that feeling of satisfaction when you see somebody success. That’s why I stopped and let him do it, because it was clear that he could, and it would be more fun for him to have a little adventure and rescue the ball than having a grown up help him out and rob him of that moment of self-satisfaction.
That’s when I realised how much I liked seeing hard working people succeed. Throughout the years I’ve taken upon myself to teach other people. To help them avoid the mistakes I made and reach the milestones I did as I grew as a developer. Some of them were my friends before we started working together, others became my friends while learning together. This isn’t exclusive to my day-to-day work, I also shared many side-projects and silly experiments with friends just for the sake of learning and collaborating.
In my past job, I had the opportunity to create a team from scratch. Our company didn’t have a big budget so we had to compromise. There’s great software developers out there, and most of them are already working on awesome projects, facing fun challenges and getting taken care of better than we would be able to afford. I took this as an opportunity and set our mission: we’d create our great developers. We’d make the whole team grow as one, pushing the company forward and executing project after project better and better each time.
We had some team members come and go, but the core team stayed strong. For five years we learned and we grew as a team. Our projects got bigger, better and more exciting. In those years, I helped my friends get started as software developers. Sometimes stepping in and laying down guidelines, others standing back, leaving them room to research by themselves.
The most important thing we managed to acquire is a healthy, active, positive attitude. As a result of our constant reading, tinkering and experimenting, we moved up and down the technology stack, planted our feet on mobile development, kept our abilities sharp and our minds open.
When the company we worked for was bought we decided to go separate ways, finding new influencers and mentors, new teams to grow and spread our vision on. It’s been only a few months and I’m already happy to see my former teammates doing great, keeping themselves active in side projects, getting involved in the community and staying true to their attitude.
As for me, I’m starting a new team, bootstrapping a promising startup. I can’t wait to enlist new developers. I can’t wait to watch them grow and make our company a collective success. Let’s grow talent, together!