Fear can easily elicit one of two basic responses in people. It can either cause you to shut down, or it can motivate you to step up to a challenge and meet it head on.
I've had many thoughts rumbling around my head lately, but when I sat down to write this, fear was the last one on my mind. As I started to turn this situation around, my first thought was going to be to write about certain circumstances that are causing a slightly different reaction in my mind; anger. However, it eventually occurred to me that fear was actually the basic motivator at work here.
I came to Sun the first week of 2004. Sun was to be the first big company I had ever worked for. Fear? You bet. Was I up for the challenge? It was a bit intimidating to think that this might be my biggest professional challenge. In retrospect, I believe it in fact was.
At this same time in early 2004, there was another person that came to start work at Sun. This guy was fresh out of college. It seemed obvious to me that he was somewhat intimidated coming to work here. Shoot, having never been in an engineering position before, I'm sure I would have been petrified. His first role here wasn't technically an engineering role, but after several months, it did evolve into one. In fact, at that time I was working on the Leadville stack primarily fixing FibreChannel bugs. This guy ended up working in the same group. I was tasked with being his mentor. Although Leadville was still fairly new to me, I was familiar with FibreChannel.
Being a mentor to a new engineer who was not familiar with kernel drivers, Solaris, or FibreChannel was a formidable task, but an enjoyable one. In fact, we quickly became good friends. We've both since moved on to different roles. I've left Sun and returned in a totally different capacity and he is now working in another part of the kernel. We remained good friends throughout all of this. I haven't had to do anything remotely akin to mentoring this guy for quite some time. In fact, I was extremely impressed with how quickly he was able to pick up debugging skills in the kernel as well as understanding a protocol as complicated as FibreChannel. In the past three and a half years, he has become in my opinion an extremely capable engineer.
All good things come to an end
As can happen at any company, talented employees can easily expand well beyond compensation that seemed adequate one day, but is wholly inadequate the next. Unfortunately, companies seem to have a great deal of inertia when it comes to things like compensation. When this friend of mine told me he was considering leaving Sun, I was admittedly angry. Why couldn't Sun just make things right? Did they realize what they were on the verge of losing? Well, it's not like this is the first time this sort of thing has ever happened. This is also certainly not a problem unique to Sun. It seems it's always a dance between employers and employees. Companies will invariably pay as little as they can in an effort to keep costs down, but it's always a gamble that they will lose valuable employees. I could be angry about this, but I think it'd be misplaced.
Fear 2
This time, I suppose the fear is not mine, but my friend's. He's leaving Sun to realize a hefty gain at a company that is going to provide a great deal of challenge to a junior engineer. That would definitely cause me some degree of fear, but I have no doubt he will rise to the challenge and continue to excel and grow as an engineer. In some respects, I envy him this opportunity. Things always have a way of coming around, anyway, so I have no doubt we will work together again at some point in the future. In fact, if there is ever an opportunity for him to return to Sun, it would be foolish for Sun to pass it up.
Until then, we all rock on in an effort to meet fear head on and prevail.
