Professionalism at work

Let’s say there are two persons.

1. A person who is working with complaint about his work but keep trying to expanding his skills from other source(not at his work).
2. A person who is trying to find a better way and improve his skills and knowledge from projects at work even though he is in tough environment.

Which one do you prefer?
Of course there’s no answer because it depends on own perspective.
As for me, I was a person like first. And now I’m trying to be a second person.

I used to complain about my boss, environment and e.t.c… (As a matter of fact, I still have complaints though…)
And I kept trying to learn things which are used in other companies commonly.
Because I thought it would help me when I move to another company.

But now I’ve changed my thinking.
I had a chances to talk to other developers few weeks ago and that made me change my thinking.
I should’ve tried harder than I did and made better results at work.
Then it would make people think I’m a good developer and I’m trying to be a better developer.
And if I were a interviewer, I will pick someone who try to make good result at his work.

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I remembered when I was a new recruit last summer.
All of sudden, my boss let me build Redis servers even though I had no idea about infrastructure like network at that time.
But I tried to know how to build Redis servers and find other better way to build it.
As luck would have it, there were many good source to learn and I was able to build it even though there were some issues.
Thanks to it, I was able to learn not only about Redis but also about infrastructure and now I can think about network when I develope. (Not that exactly though;;)

And other reason why projects at work are important is, I can’t experience lots of traffics and complex needs from customers from my own project.
So projects at work are the good to grow as a developer.
Even though you’re doing wrong, someday you will know better way and your skills will grow sooner or later.

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What I try to say is, to be a professional then don’t lose your professionalism at your work even if you’re in tough environtment like stubborn boss or dirty legacy codes.

Ships are safe when they are in a port but that is not what ships do.
Keep struggling and finding a way to show the world what you got.