The other side of patience

Patience might be the essential skill for a joyful career in software engineering.

Paradoxically, "moving fast and breaking things", "agile", and other successful philosophies in tech have speed as an ingredient of success. When building most software, small increments, maximising efficiencies, spending less time on what doesn't matter now, and learning fast are the way to go.

But many people transpose these concepts to how they think about their careers. Unlike building software, meaningful career progress requires long cycles — sometimes what looks like wasteful repetition:

• As a new software engineer you learn every day, yet career progression feels slow. It takes years to build mental models that let you solve most problems. A five-year ride to senior engineer is generally considered an outlier pace.
• Most folks who reach senior engineer or engineering manager don't have external pressure to get promoted. Progression means breadth and depth — leading new projects, supporting other people's careers, learning new skills. These cycles are measured in years.
• For staff+ engineers or managers of managers, onboarding takes six months, and attributable impact takes conservatively a year. Progress means seeing impact compound, supporting others' growth, and moving to a new role to do more of roughly the same in a different scope. Again, the time unit is years.

True career progress depends on time, and time is indifferent to ambition.

While time is a constant, how you feel about work isn't. Work will inevitably be stressful. A new manager who you don't find a good fit with, a soured stakeholder relationship, a project you don't believe in and can't influence, feeling unrewarded — or things outside work that bleed in.

Hence why patience is invaluable.

My understanding of patience was always geared towards endurance: remaining calm in the face of adversity, being resilient, accepting what's outside my control.

This isn't far from the dictionary definition.

But I've learned that patience in practice can't be a passive waiting game. Nor should it be solely about compartmentalisation — "leaving it to the side" or "letting it soak in".

Patience should be the art of experiencing time fully. Appreciating the lessons within stressful moments — and savouring every other moment. Finding joy in what remains. Living in the present, with what you control, finding contentment regardless of the pace at which events unfold.

Patience, in practice, is less about enduring the challenge and more about experiencing everything else.