Professional parallels
People often comment that the leap from coding to carpentry seems giant. Not so: the two professions are more closely related than is initially obvious. In the IT industry, it’s tempting to think that we’re riding on the leading edge of existence: that every day we’re breaking new ground, advancing ever forward, and taking or species to new and uncharted heights. Again, not so. While the materials and language may be new and sparkly, we’re merely recycling our aptitude for much older skills.
I work closely with a decorator, and it interests me that we have almost perfectly complementary skills. While he is highly skilled at painting, preparation, plastering and puttying, he freely admits to being disasterously bad at anything to do with wood. Similarly, I can’t paint for toffee and my plastering skills are a joke. The moment I crack open a can of paint, you know disaster is only minutes away. Fortunately we know our own and each other’s limitations, meaning we can usually avoid major tool-throwing, expletive-inducing catastrophies. It also means that if we’re tacking something new, and either he or I are finding it frustratingly difficult or boring, the chances are that the other will probably take to it much more easily.
Be it painting a door-frame or hanging a door within it, be it designing a good site or keeping the server on which it resides alive for as long as possible, I think the areas in which we all excel stem from the kind of people we are. Carpentry, as with all skills, is a state of mind.
The secret to working with timber is knowing everything before you start. A good carpenter doesn’t like surprises—they’re the kind of people who plan far, far ahead and won’t start on a project before they’ve got a very clear idea not only of the final result, but of every single stage of the process. Every joint, every fixing, every cut is a carefully considered action, and a good carpenter will complete the job several times in his head before even starting for real.
In practical terms, a greater degree of flexibility is required. Sometimes things just don’t turn out the way we expect. Timber and tools can fail, requirements can change, and there’s always a number of unknown quantities that may require there to be changes made to the job. But the good carpenter knows this and works it into his design. Never does a sudden shift in the goal-posts render already completed work useless—simply because he’s considered this possiblity in advance. A good example is the fact that I am yet to find a house that has perfectly straight walls. Blockwork and studwork meander in and out across their surface, and never meet at right-angles. Ever. Chaos theory prohibits it. It’s a statistical improbability. But the carpenter trying to build shelves upon this wall is way ahead of you—he knows that nothing is as it seems or as a tape measure or spirit level would have you believe—and won’t commit to anything unless he knows it’s going to work in real life, not just on paper.
It is this methodical ability that makes for beautiful woodwork. It’s exactly the same skill that makes for beautiful code. People who like just getting on with it and finding solutions for problems once they’ve arisen, like my decorating friend, will not enjoy computer programming. He’d probably make an excellent fire-fighter, but a hopeless surgeon. He could destroy me at Scrabble, but I could annihilate him at chess. In the IT industry, he’d be perfect for first-line support. Given the know-how, he’d be the ideal bloke to ring when you’ve rebooted but the problem won’t go away. I’m awful at that, because I just want to re-engineer everything so that this problem will never occur again.
Server administrators, incidentally, have a completely different set of skills which, I think, would lend themselves very well to farming or gardening. They’re the kind of people who excel at keeping things going. Network engineers would probably enjoy plumbing more than they realise: the parallels between these two professions are remarkable.
Oh, and if your clients have said some funny things, you should hear some of ours.