Build Personal Moats

Well I was pretty good at XSL-T and XML related technologies, so that was at one point a good thing to be in to, at the time I leveraged that into doing standardization work on the Danish OIOXML project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML where I wrote the schemas for the first versions of the Danish efaktura project (efaktura is format for invoices based on UBL that was required by law for all governmental invoicing) and did a bit of other standardization work.

Now at this point if I wasn't such an artistic punk type I would have gone off to private industry and worked in banking etc. as the Danish OIOXML / Efaktura specialist doing consulting work for a few years at a few hundred dollars an hour, instead I got enticed by a friend to go work at a company that I hated for the next couple years because we were going to build a media management product we had tried to do a few years before but this time to do it right!

After which there wasn't such a big oioxml efaktura thing anymore but I did still have XSL-T so I did that for several years at Thomson Reuters and then when downsized from there nobody used XSL-T anymore but I had during these years developed my backup search technologies and frontend skills.

The last 5 years I've been mainly frontend with some 3-4 months every few years doing search stuff.

If it can be done by a process, then document it and do it by process. It is not hero work. But don't underestimate hero work. Your local fire department does the kind of work that most people who subscribe to mundane management philosophies denigrate.

At about age 30, as a new junior employee at one of the worlds biggest companies, I got involved with hero work for more than a decade without originally planning to do that. You can't find too many people who are willing to crouch inside a quickly nailed together Farday cage for weeks and write software that detects unwanted EMI, find cache corruptions caused by unwanted isotopes in solder or write custom microcode for weird signal processing architectures. There is absolutely no information hoarding, because every real challenge occurs exactly once and needs to be solved the first time before it can be reduced to a repeatable process.

In between those assignments, I had a really tough time living through the attitudes of some of the anti-hero culture warriors. Eventually some of those mangers got together, tried to eliminate the culture all together and reform the former fire-fighters.

Who wants to work in an environment like that? Not anyone like me for sure. I found myself fired at age 40. The spoils of a decade of such work are good enough that I don't really need to work ever again. But I can't stop doing it - it changes you. Started a consulting company to help many others deal with problems that process oriented people can't solve. If you are young and so inclined, I highly recommend hero work as a career. It is rewarding mentally and financially.