Title courtesy of Chris Chapman

Some twittering this morning surrounding yesterday's ALT.Net summit got me to thinking about a broader principle that needs to be applied here.  There is no growth within your comfort zone.  If you always do that which is familiar, you reach a point of utter stagnation.  Some call it a rut.  Some call it doldrums.  Call it what you will, but it's stagnation, made heavier by inertia.  I talked about this before and I'll say it again:  Sometimes you have to shock your system to make real progress.

A lot of lashback for alt.net right now is coming from a position of fear.  A position of not wishing to come out of one's comfort zone.  This is the antithesis of what we should be about.  We should be out there pushing the envelope and making ourselves, our peers, our companies, our products, and our world better.  Chad touched on this in his post about professional responsibility.  I left a comment that I thought I would share to a greater audience.  It's a quote that Scott Bellware twittered one day a couple of weeks ago:

"Society runs on software.  Programming is a social responsibility".

If you believe that we would not be as far advanced as we are without software, if you believe that the geeks truly have inherited the earth, then you have a moral imperative to push yourself out of your comfort zone, advance your skills, and play your part in advancing society.

Yeah, I realize that sounds pretty high and mighty and ivory-towerish to the guy busting his hump in the trenches writing an internal IT app.  But if your application provides value in some way to your company, to society, then you have a duty to step up your game and do it beyond right.  And you have a duty to share your knowledge and understanding with your peers, and when necessary push them out of their comfort zone.  Mother bird pushes the chicks out of the nest and they either fly or fall, but in nature either outcome is better than a bird sitting in the nest its whole life being mouth-fed regurgitated worms.  The same is true of you.

Let's dispel Mort/Elvis/Einstein right now and see the common truth:  all of us, at all levels, need to move outside our comfort zone and improve.  The only two types of programmers that exist are the ones who are pushed out of the nest and the ones who are mouth-fed worms their whole careers.  Even if you have to jump from the nest, please don't be that guy that never tries something new and never grows.

This is the most honest statement about software developers (and people in general) that I can make:  If you aren't willing to learn, you are obsolete and utterly useless.

New and unknown things trigger our fight or flight response just the same as if a bear came crashing through the woods at us.  What will differentiate you from the next guy is whether you choose to adapt, improve, and grow with new challenges or put your head in the sand.

Here's the danger of putting your head in the sand:  if you continue code the way you always have coded, never growing, you will be replaced.  You will either be outsourced, or, more humiliating, replaced by Volta or something similar.  In our profession our real value is not the code we write but the problems we solve with it and our ability to adapt and improvise.  If you can't improvise you will eventually be replaced by the software that someone who can improvise has written that will automate what little you previously did.  And I will have no pity for you.  You could have taken some time now to read some blogs, or some books, or go to meetings, or a geek dinner, or join a mailing list, or do SOMETHING outside of your comfort zone that would have helped you grow.

Now is the time to take some action.  Get out of your comfort zone.  You'll thank me later.

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