Stick With Your Day Job

This past weekend I spent an evening by a campfire trying to whittle a whale. I watched a thorough YouTube tutorial first. It didn’t help much.

At some point I put the knife down, leaned back, and looked at what I had. I smiled, because I could hear my dad teasing me to stick with my day job. Even in spirit, he’s still right.

Leaning back is what made me laugh. Bent over the wood, I was only looking at the next cut. Once I sat back, I could see the whole piece, and I could see that whittling was never going to be my thing.

Work goes the same way. Most weeks I’m close to the next cut: the next ticket, the next approval, the next meeting. Weeks go by without me looking at the whole thing. That campfire was the first time in a while I sat back far enough to see it.

I’ve always wished I could build with my hands. I can’t, but I found another way. Early on I realized I could trade clumsy hands for my head, and I went all in on digital work. Spreadsheets and processes first, then sites and tools. The part I liked most was handing something to someone and seeing it make their day a little easier. That hasn’t changed.

AI made the building fast. What used to take days of tutorials, search results, and slow trial and error with basic code now goes from idea to working prototype in a day. I love that. It also makes it easy to mistake the prototype for the product. A working demo tells you the idea can be done. It doesn’t tell you whether it holds up when people depend on it.

I don’t stop at the prototype anyway. I keep tinkering, find the next problem, try the next idea. These days the prototype is where the work starts.

That curiosity is carrying me through AI coursework right now. I want to understand what’s happening under the hood, and some of it has been a real struggle. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

It’s also changed how I see the developers I work with. In my day job I own the product program for a B2B platform. I write requirements, approve stories, and sign off in testing. I see the work at the start and at the end. The coursework is showing me the middle: making something reliable, secure, and able to scale for the people who use it every day. That takes thought, skill, and patience, and most of it is invisible from where I sit.

When you’re in the work every day, it’s easy to lose track of why you liked it in the first place. Sitting back from a lopsided whale gave me some of that back, with a little help from above.

Point taken, Dad. I’ll stick with the day job.