Lately I feel like I'm entering into a mid-life crisis. But this one is neither biological nor emotional. Coloring my hair and buying a red sports car won't make me feel any better (ok, well maybe it will). No, this crisis is a technology one. You see, much like when my metabolism slowed to crawl after I passed 30 so has my ability to keep up with technology. For the first 10yrs of my career I was a programmer and an application architect working with a wide array of technologies like C++, Java, Unix, Windows, Oracle, SQL Server, WebSphere, WebLogic, IIS, etc., etc. I had a voracious appetite for technology. However, over time, I moved into broader leadership roles and before I knew it my technology life was passing before my eyes. Here at Fellowship Technologies I have a wide range of teams that report to me, from Data Center Operations to Customer Services to Professional Services and Product Development. Time and other factors preclude me from exercising my tech skills as heavily as I did in the past. When I recently celebrated my 3rd anniversary at Fellowship Tech I realized that I may have indeed become... dare I say it?... a "Generalist".
I believe I'm still an effective leader. My background in SaaS technologies and architectures allows me to challenge the team's ideas and help to ensure we've arrived at the best possible solutions. Solutions that serve our current customers well and scales effectively and efficiently in the future. But thankfully both for my team, and for our customers, I am no longer making the daily, low level, technology decisions, I leave those to our experts.
Here are a few of the warning signs of a Mid-Life Technology Crisis (perhaps you to are exhibiting a few of these):
10. You find yourself writing down terms and acronyms used by the team during a meeting and then secretly Googling them later to figure out what they mean
9. You use a formerly relevant TLA (Three Letter Acronym) such as "DTD" and your team begins to refer to you as "Grandpa"
8. You have to get assistance to setup a blog reader because it now suddenly seems as difficult as it is for your Dad to set the time on a VCR
7. Your iPod is filled with PodCasts of the McLaughlin Group and episodes of The Office
6. You get a new laptop and after your install Microsoft Office you realize that you really don't need to install anything else to do your job effectively
5. You begin to lower your screen resolution rather than raise it so you can read the text without squinting
4. When the team was speaking about Scrum and Agile you pipe in with a comment about Rugby
3. You prefer to be in bed eating a toaster pizza watching The Colbert Report rather than staying up till 2am watching Microsoft's Channel 9 vlogs
2. You have to get your teen age son to help "fix" your computer
1. Pulling an "all-nighter" now means you didn't have to get up out of bed to go to the bathroom
I'm clearly exhibiting all 10 of these behaviors so I'm now focusing on other skills like leadership, team building, vision casting, metrics, best practices, etc. I will miss being in the thick of technology things but I'm finding that these new areas are just as challenging and fun.
Curtis S