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Fending Off Stagnation

This isn’t another post about how I’m not living up to my plans (I actually did some certification work last night … imagine that), but a longer-term look into the future than just what I am working on right now.

There was a post being tossed around on Twitter recently titled Why your previous developer was terrible, and I recommend that you take a look. It speaks mostly of how a new developer can come into a situation and seem like they have all of the answers because they need to deal only with the current knowns, not with the inherit unknowns of starting a new project.

However, it think it is also a tale of stagnation in some sense. It is easy to get bogged down in the past and present and leave the future to, just that, the future. Solutions you HAVE made in the past tend to stick around longer than they should because … they are a decision we don’t have to make today (and who around us is needing to make fewer decisions).

The prevailing thought from many people is that you shouldn’t stick around the same place for too long so that things don’t stagnate. I can understand that, but I happen to think that there are downsides to the opposite as well … moving around constantly or a constantly shifting group of workers as well. Knowledge is lost. Decisions are having to continually be made over, and over, and over … it can be maddening on the other side as well.

So the question becomes: how can a person fend off stagnation at the place they are at?

That’s the question I want to talk about. Usually they’ll just toss out “move to somewhere else”, but that’s not what I want an answer to. I want to talk about how to fend it off when you are dedicated to staying where you are.

Let’s talk about that.