Back in my junior days, several times I felt like I finally mastered PHP - that a moment came when I just knew it all. Only to always be caught by surprise a few days later, when I discovered that some new feature was coming to enrich the language. Or when I learned about a design pattern I hadn’t known. Or when a functionality I crafted in a project with care needs to be rewritten because we didn’t get the requirements just right before.

I was frustrated. And frustrated some more. How can I ever learn all this when it’s constantly changing? How can I feel happy about developing an app which will need to change tomorrow? How can I rely on anything constant in this ever changing landscape?

I must say with some pride that I came to this thought myself: “You need to embrace change - that’s the only thing that you can rely on”. Had I searched about this topic at least a bit, I would’ve been presented with tons of quotes on the topic of “Change is the only constant”. But I came up with this myself, albeit much later than if someone just told me 😊.

This feeling of satisfaction, of having “cracked the code”, strenghtened years later after watching an amazing Symfony World presentation “You’re not in IT business - you’re in the learning business”. We can never hope to learn everything about our profession - nor should we.

What’s surprising to me is how few job listings reflect this paradigm so far - from some hundreds I’ve ever glimpsed through, less than a dozen mentioned not requiring knowledge of specific tech, but emphasizing the ability and desire to learn anything and anytime. (I may write a post about how flawed programming interviews are some other time, I see many more problems there than the job requirements.)

Change is painful. I think some core mechanisms in our brains don’t want us to pursue it - it feels so uncomfortable! But once I learned to really embrace it, my professional life (and personal, for that matter) got to a next level. I started challenging everything, all the time - what if there is a better way?

However much I do think of this as my superpower, it’s very difficult at times to live with it. For example when I see my extremely talented teammates resist change, because “they have their ways of working”. I mean - sure, you’re very productive with your current WoW and a change might slow you down for a bit - but where’s the guarantee that you got it right on the first try? What if there’s a realm of possibilities which could make you much better still? And then the inevitable, sad question: What difference is between us that the possiblity of change excites me but does not excite you?

There’s a topic of “change management” - strategies how to get buy-in from other people. To me, this is just a matter of solid arguments. Sure, to a degree it feels uncomfortable that I should be considering changing something. But as I learned time and time again, it’s very possible that what awaits me is yet another step to be a bit better. Being better brings about joy. To me, this makes it worth it. For me, change is exciting.