Last year we hired two developers, because we were ramping up to convert the old student portal into something modern and we needed the help. One of them I’ll call Andy.
Andy was green. I don’t mean junior. I mean he did not yet know that a software engineer with the source code sitting right there in front of him can simply go and find out how the thing works.
So we screen shared. A lot.
“Here’s the project. Here’s the form you’re working on. Let’s go to the code, here are the fields, here’s the controller. See that call going out to the back end? That’s a SOAP service, so let’s open that project and trace it through. It ends at a stored procedure. Now open SSMS, find it, open it in edit mode, and read what it actually does. What parameters does it take? What comes back? What does it change on the way?”
Four or five months of that before I could hand him a bug and walk away.
(I had never had to teach that particular lesson before. I suppose I assumed it came in the box.)
The business knowledge took longer, and that’s fair. The domain at a university is enormous and nobody absorbs it quickly.
Then we started using AI for development, and the whole project changed speed. We had to move fast. It made moving fast possible.
Andy took to it like nothing I have seen. He was plainly spending his own evenings on it, watching videos, working out how to get the most out of the tools. And it wasn’t only that he fixed things quicker. He started spinning up little dashboards so the team could see the status of things nobody had ever bothered to track. Side projects, technically. They made all of us better!
He became a real asset.
We launched the portal. It had plenty of problems, because we had pushed so hard to get there, and we cleaned them up faster than would have been previously possible.
And then Andy gave his notice.
I sent him a personal note. Told him I’d like to keep in touch, gave him my personal info, and asked where he was headed. He never really answered. He had *”a project”* he was working on. That was all I ever got.
I have a guess. He got good enough with these tools that he saw what half the internet is shouting about: that you can build the thing yourself now, stand up a SaaS, quit asking anyone for a job. Maybe one day I’ll find out and get to cheer him on.
I keep turning this one over.
When I started, the path was simple. Stay somewhere. Grow in your craft. Get good, and maybe move on and get better somewhere else. I’ve been at the same company almost eighteen years now. Twice I’ve wanted to leave, and both times the looking went the same way… recruiters see eighteen years and stop reading. Two to three years, five at the outside, then move along so the resume looks fresh.
*(Nobody says the quiet part. They don’t have to. A man who stayed is a man who can’t learn.)*
So the market reads my loyalty as a defect. And a guy who couldn’t code his way out of a box eighteen months ago has apparently bought himself out of the whole arrangement with one year and a good set of tools.
I’ll be honest, that first part is the only piece of this I am bitter about. Not Andy.
I taught him to read the source. He has already gone further with it than I would have imagined possible just five years ago.
And I hope he does well. I hope he builds something that feeds his family, and that it carries him on to bigger work than anything we ever had for him here.
Godspeed, Andy!