I think you may be leaning too far in the other direction.
I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag.
I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team.
I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.
> I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. ... People call me when they can't figure something out. ... Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering ...
This describes a sizable portion of my career. It's lucrative, it's gratifying, and it's fun. It's as close as I'm going to get to being a "kick-ass mercenary".
Seeing new environments, new applications, and new problems never gets old. The stories that come from the work are priceless, too.
> I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills.
When I conduct interviews this is the main skill I screen for. I think it can be taught, but somebody who already has it and is missing some particular technical experience is vastly more valuable.
I've found past a certain point career-wise, troubleshooting really can't be taught. It's sort of a a mindset/attitude to me. I you are 5+ years into your career and haven't gotten there, you probably just don't care. It's the attitude of a developer who is indifferent to the craft and just wants to cobble together found code as quickly as possible to move onto the next thing.
A good troubleshooter can enable higher output across a team because they are like grease in the machine. Particularly indifferent troubleshooters become a net drag because instead of being able to help others they are always interrupting others for help.
I think it has to do with interests. Some people have an inmate interest in how stuff works, and specifically how it breaks.
I think you can teach someone to troubleshoot in a procedural and methodical manner, but they will always lack the creative "spark" that comes from being actually interested. Procedural troubleshooters are useful, but they won't exceed the bounds of the model they've been taught to work under.
I don’t believe that’s true. It’s an attitude, not some kind of innate skill like reflexes. You can learn to believe in yourself, plus it’s teachable in my experience.
That would be more of a psychological hack. I've never seen this happen. My experience is people behave a certain way (care about what they do up to a roughly defined level) and 10 years later they behave the same. Self esteem tends to change or fluctuate and can be thought, but personally i believe that is not enough for a non-troubleshooting mindset to turn around. Unless you could convince me otherwise?
I hired a contractor who thought she had bombed the interview because she didn’t solve the problem I gave her immediately and struggled with it. But when she got stuck it was because she was not seeing that the code she wrote didn’t match the code she described planning to write.
But she didn’t panic, she cracked open the debugger and went section by section through the code until she finally spotted her typo. Which is exactly the sort of person who won’t crumble every time something doesn’t work exactly the way the documentation says it does. We hired six people, and only renewed two, of which she was one. So as far as I’m concerned, I succeeded in my interview.
> I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs.
If only your experience was universal in that regard! I once had that role in an early-career job -- but I was looked down upon by peers and management because I was doing mostly maintenance work. The "good" developers, in their minds, were the ones shipping the most new features -- the irony being that those features would then blow up out in the field, at which time they landed on my desk to turn them into production-worthy code.
That's just poor management, IMO. The good ones will have your number in their cell phone to call when the stuff they shipped breaks (or even better, allow you to take the time you need to not ship broken code to begin with). Plus it doesn't take much time in the industry to realize that shipping a broken product is a far worse look than shipping slower, and that the faster you can fix a broken product the less money you'll bleed.
I’ve been wondering lately how much of this is being good at troubleshooting, and how much of it is being good at picking up a problem someone else gave you, poking at it, and then putting it down again.
Not everyone is cut out to do that. Asking them to look at a puzzle derails their entire day, almost every time instead of just when it’s hard. So even when it’s their puzzle they resist picking it up because it’s a guaranteed bad day.
The word retainer has an appealing mercenary quality to it. The dream is that your knowledge of an esoteric system set up in the 1980s gets you warehoused in a data closet at a mid-sized organization, where you can spend the rest of your days browsing Hacker News and watching pirated films.
I'm a troubleshooter. I fix problems. I keep my head straight in a crisis. Every job I've had across 3 decades, regardless of my actual title or formal responsibilities, I'm the firefighter. People call me when they can't figure something out. People call me when something big breaks and needs to be fixed urgently. Even if I'm not an expert in the broken thing, they call me in. They call me because the experts are often floundering and not making any progress because they can't troubleshoot their way out of a wet paper bag.
I do not feel this has held me back professionally. I have been loved by management and peers in all of these jobs. When I nearly left a prior employer because much of the work wasn't aligned with what I wanted to do, management created a new role with better aligned work and higher pay to convince me to stay. In my current role, I'm very happy with my salary, working environment, management, and team.
I wish troubleshooting skills were as common as typing and document formatting skills. I wouldn't need to help out nearly as many people because they could handle their own crises.