Journal tags: charlotte

Over the eleven-year (and counting) lifespan of Clearleft, people have come and gone—great people like Nat, Andy, Paul and many more. It’s always a bittersweet feeling. On the one hand, I know I’ll miss having them around, but on the other hand, I totally get why they’d want to try their hand at something different.

It was Charlotte’s last day at Clearleft last Friday. Her husband Tom is being relocated to work in Sydney, which is quite the exciting opportunity for both of them. Charlotte’s already set up with a job at Atlassian—they’re very lucky to have her.

So once again there’s the excitement of seeing someone set out on a new adventure. But this one feels particularly bittersweet to me. Charlotte wasn’t just a co-worker. For a while there, I was her teacher …or coach …or mentor …I’m not really sure what to call it. I wrote about the first year of learning and how it wasn’t just a learning experience for Charlotte, it was very much a learning experience for me.

For the last year though, there’s been less and less of that direct transfer of skills and knowledge. Charlotte is definitely not a “junior” developer any more (whatever that means), which is really good but it’s left a bit of a gap for me when it comes to finding fulfilment.

Just last week I was checking in with Charlotte at the end of a long day she had spent tirelessly working on the new Clearleft site. Mostly I was making sure that she was going to go home and not stay late (something that had happened the week before which I wanted to nip in the bud—that’s not how we do things ‘round here). She was working on a particularly gnarly cross-browser issue and I ended up sitting with her, trying to help work through it. At the end, I remember thinking “I’ve missed this.”

It hasn’t been all about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Charlotte really pushed herself to become a public speaker. I did everything I could to support that—offering advice, giving feedback and encouragement—but in the end, it was all down to her.

I can’t describe the immense swell of pride I felt when Charlotte spoke on stage. Watching her deliver her talk at Dot York was one my highlights of the year.

Thinking about it, this is probably the perfect time for Charlotte to leave the Clearleft nest. After all, I’m not sure there’s anything more I can teach her. But this feels like a particularly sad parting, maybe because she’s going all the way to Australia and not, y’know, starting a new job in London.

In our final one-to-one, my stiff upper lip may have had a slight wobble as I told Charlotte what I thought was her greatest strength. It wasn’t her work ethic (which is incredibly strong), and it wasn’t her CSS skills (‘though she is now an absolute wizard). No, her greatest strength, in my opinion, is her kindness.

I saw her kindness in how she behaved with her colleagues, her peers, and of course in all the fantastic work she’s done at Codebar Brighton.

I’m going to miss her.

An anniversary occurred last week that I don’t want to let pass by unremarked. On November 24th of last year, I made this note:

Welcoming @LotteJackson on her first day at @Clearleft.

Charlotte’s start at Clearleft didn’t just mark a new chapter for her—it also marked a big change for me. I’ve spent the last year being Charlotte’s mentor. I had no idea what I was doing.

Lyza wrote a post about mentorship a while back that really resonated with me:

I had no idea what I was doing. But I was going to do it anyway.

Hiring Charlotte coincided with me going through one of those periods when I ask myself, “Just what is it that I do anyway?” (actually, that’s pretty much a permanent state of being but sometimes it weighs heavier than others).

Let me back up a bit and explain how Charlotte ended up at Clearleft in the first place.

Clearleft has always been a small agency, deliberately so. Over the course of ten years, we might hire one, maybe two people a year. Because of that small size, anyone joining the company had to be able to hit the ground running. To put it into jobspeak, we could only hire “senior” level people—we just didn’t have the resources to devote to training up anyone less experienced.

That worked pretty well for a while but as the numbers at Clearleft began to creep into the upper teens, it became clear that it wasn’t a sustainable hiring policy—most of the “senior” people are already quite happily employed. So we began to consider the possibility of taking on somebody in a “junior” role. But we knew we could only do that if it were somebody else’s role to train them. Like I said, this was ‘round about the time I was questioning exactly what my role was anyway, so I felt ready to give it a shot.

Hiring Charlotte was an experiment for Clearleft—could we hire someone in a “junior” position, and then devote enough time and resources to bring them up to a “senior” level? (those quotes are air quotes—I find the practice of labelling people or positions “junior” or “senior” to be laughably reductionist; you might as well try to divide the entire web into “apps” and “sites”).

Well, it might only be one data point, but this experiment was a resounding success. Charlotte is a fantastic front-end developer.

Now I wish I could take credit for that, but I can’t. I’ve done my best to support, encourage, and teach Charlotte but none of that would matter if it weren’t for Charlotte’s spirit: she’s eager to learn, eager to improve, and crucially, eager to understand.

Christian wrote something a while back that stuck in my mind. He talked about the Full Stack Overflow Developer:

Full Stack Overflow developers work almost entirely by copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow instead of understanding what they are doing. Instead of researching a topic, they go there first to ask a question hoping people will just give them the result.

When we were hiring for the junior developer role that Charlotte ended up filling, I knew exactly what I didn’t want and Christian described it perfectly.

Conversely, I wasn’t looking for someone with plenty of knowledge—after all, knowledge was one of the things that I could perhaps pass on (stop sniggering). As Philip Walton puts it:

The longer I work on the web, the more I realize that what separates the good people from the really good people isn’t what they know; it’s how they think. Obviously knowledge is important—critical in some cases—but in a field that changes so quickly, how you go about acquiring that knowledge is always going to be more important (at least in the long term) than what you know at any given time. And perhaps most important of all: how you use that knowledge to solve everyday problems.

What I was looking for was a willingness—nay, an eagerness—to learn. That’s what I got with Charlotte. She isn’t content to copy and paste a solution; she wants to know why something works.

So a lot of my work for the past year has been providing a framework for Charlotte to learn within. It’s been less of me teaching her, and more of me pointing her in the right direction to teach herself.

There has been some traditional instruction along the way: code reviews, pair programming, and all of that stuff, but often the best way for Charlotte to learn is for me to get out of the way. Still, I’m always on hand to try to answer any questions or point her in the direction of a solution. I think sometimes Charlotte might regret asking me things, like a simple question about the box model.

I’ve really enjoyed those moments of teaching. I haven’t always been good at it. Sometimes, especially at the beginning, I’d lose patience. When that happened, I’d basically be an asshole. Then I’d realise I was being an asshole, apologise, and try not to do it again. Over time, I think I got better. I hope that those bursts of assholery are gone for good.

Now that Charlotte has graduated into a fully-fledged front-end developer, it’s time for me to ask myself once again, “Just what is it that I do anyway?”

But at least now I have some more understanding about what I like to do. I like to share. I like to teach.

I can very much relate to Chen Hui Jing’s feelings:

I suppose for some developers, the job is a just a means to earn a paycheck. But I truly hope that most of us are in it because this is what we love to do. And that we can raise awareness amongst developers who are earlier in their journey than ourselves on the importance of best practices. Together, we can all contribute to building a better web.

I’m writing this to mark a rewarding year of teaching and learning. Now I need to figure out how to take the best parts of that journey and apply it to the ongoing front-end development work at Clearleft with Mark, Graham, and now, Charlotte.

I have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m going to do it anyway.