What does it mean to do well at work? As far as I can tell, it means that you do the work reliably and do it quickly (or rather: efficiently) and do it in a appropriately qualitative way. For programmers that means delivering features, preferably within the given estimate (allowing for some margin of error and the ocasional outlier).
So: Reliability, efficiency and quality is what can be used to judge a programmer. If would need to judge myself, I think I have the quality part nailed down. I am not afraid to tackle structural problems in a legacy system, do refactorings and take the time to remove technical debt. However it’s the other two parts that I’m lacking.
The reliability part - meaning that I deliver consistently - is not as problematic than the efficiency part. This translates to me being able to deliver the same high quality in the same inefficient manner.
The efficiency part is where my main problem lies: In order to deliver on time I will need to learn to cut corners and leave messy code as it is and even add my own mess on top of the rest at times.
This doesn’t seem to enable delivering greatness. After having read Slow Productivity recently, that has a completely different philosophy about work - “do fewer things”, “work at a natural pace”, “obsess over quality” are its main points - this job stands at odds with this philosophy (that I am whole heartedly agree with).
I now think that this is not the correct framing. It’s reasonable to assume that I will work for the rest of my career in situations that demand - more or less - efficiency. “Delivering greatness”, in part, is about making it happen under economic constraints. Entrepreneur or salaried worker: This means that I need to be a good investment to be allowed to work on whatever I deem “high quality greatness"™.
I’ll have to learn to actually make hard decisions, because I will need to make more trade-offs. I will need to get an intuition for when I can cut corners, what corners can be cut, the different ways in which corners can be cut, how to argue about corners and trade-offs and so much more.
If you’re just looking at it from a “best practice, always” standpoint, these things seem not necessary to consider, but I’m now convinced that it’s actually efficiency + quality more than quality on its own that could bring me to the next level in my career.