About: I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer. I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century. These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I'm not talking about the best advice you've been given for your career, or something you wish you'd paid attention to when you were starting out. It doesn't have to be a direct compliment.
Something just plain nice1, something that made you feel good.
cover photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash ↩
Once my client said to me => "Noman, You did extremely good job... We don't need any changes"
Voice of a freelancer 😜
You're now officially the most skilled developer in the team...
In other words: congratulations! You're the CTO from now on.
When my friend thought that I wasn't a junior because of my knowledge on Javascript and other languages and structures.
Was really stressed that our current sprint is delayed.
But our bosses told us that they see and appreciate our efforts towards meeting that goal. 😊 And we should maintain that soft skill.
"I didn't know how much I needed this" (I did)
This is what a coworker said a week after a new system release that basically took out 30% of their daily routine boring repetitive task. He said that as a professional and as a person. You could feel the office coming a little less stressed every day.
When I was told that they liked me and wanted me to continue working for them.
Another one was that I was going to be missed when I went on vacation... well, when you're always shipping stable as much as possible... :)
These were big compliments to me. I worked very hard and I felt that I deserved it. I have had too many cases of self doubt matched with perhaps not the right matches.
“Give it to Eric, he’ll get it done”
Felt like instant success. I know I’m good and now others recognize that too
The reason why I'm a programmer is because when I started playing around with it and installed a PHP forum for our local village network, someone said "you'll go very far, keep it up".
Is it weird that the first thing that popped into my head was the sentence:
"Go home, get some sleep. Whatever it is, it can wait till tomorrow." 🤷♂️
I've gotten technical praise and that's always nice especially to quell imposter syndrome but the feedback that's made me feel the best is when people have told me that I have a great attitude at work. It's so easy to be cranky in our field, but I think having a positive attitude can really influence the people around you in a more dramatic way than any code you write.
The boss of my boss came into our office to see what we were doing. He told my boss that the new speed up in one of our internal tools allowed us to now react in realtime to certain events. The speedup was implemented by me. My boss then said something along the lines of "It was not me who had the idea. It was an idea from Winston and he also implement it". The implementation was not very complex. It was nice because he attributed it to me. He could have said nothing, but he wanted his boss to know that it was me.
silence
No support calls, no questions about how it works. To the point where I have to check to make sure it is still running and people are still using it.
This picture is from the NBC series Parks and Recreation. Fair use. It is also a great show, by the way.