Last night as I lied in bed waiting for the NyQuil to work it's magic (magic that, I might add, has left me a wee bit hungover), I watched a little news with my lovely wife. One of the stories covered was about this dude Baitullah Mehsud, a "Taliban warlord" who claimed responsibility for the recent attack in Lahore and even threatened the White House itself. Ordinarily, I would promptly disregard such a story after briefly labeling this fellow a kook, but then the newscaster mentioned that he was 35 years old, and this got me thinking.
I'm 34 now. I'm an acting lead developer for a large software company. I'm not even a real lead developer. Technically, I'm just a senior programmer with ambitions to become a lead developer.
Along comes this Cat Stevens looking dude who's only a year older than me, and he's a damned warlord. Sure he's a fanatical, murderous douche, but still. I mean, I like to think of myself as ambitious, but I just don't see any kind of one year plan where I can go from wannabe lead developer to warlord. So now I'm thinking that clearly this guy has a lot more drive than I do. Admittedly, he's got an accelerated career path partially due to his superiors occasionally being hunted down by the international military. Nevertheless, it's quite an accomplishment at such a young age.
So now I'm feeling all bad about myself over this. Perhaps it's simply due to poor title choice. I mean, there isn't a single career path I can take from here that sounds even one iota as hardcore as "warlord". The best I can hope for is "system architect" which is hardly intimidating. So yeah, there's a definite case of title envy here. I mean, what guy wouldn't want to have a business card that says "Bob Smith: Programmer, System Architect, International Warlord"?
Dude, you would totally beat out the other contractors for that website gig.
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