Adolfo Ochagavía

On being paid to learn

Regular readers of my blog1 know I have been planning to write on my recent contract contributing to Quinn, the popular Rust implementation of the QUIC protocol. I originally intended to write a deep-dive into the QUIC features I implemented, but the blog post took a life of its own and ended up as a short essay on being paid to learn. Enjoy!

Taking on the project

When Stormshield2 reached out to me with a proposal to work on Quinn, I felt honoured that they were considering me for the task, yet also slightly anxious because I had never implemented such a low-level network protocol before (e.g. I had implemented the MySQL wire protocol, which sits on top of TCP, but not TCP itself).

Since it was clear that lots of learning would be required to contribute to the library, I made sure to mention it during our conversations: I would need time to ask all kinds of questions to the project’s maintainers, wade through RFCs and dive into other QUIC implementations in search of enlightment. My client seemed to understand that learning was a big part of the project, and we both decided to move forward.

The situation reminded me of a comment I came across on HN a while back: “If someone wants to put me in a position based on my current skills where I end up becoming an expert and they pay for that time, then it will happen”3. Take that quote with a grain of salt, though, because I completed the project within two months, which is absolutely not enough time to become a QUIC expert!

Finding the confidence

Given the circumstances of the project, you could say I was hired to solve a problem I didn’t actually know how to solve. I jokingly mentioned to a friend that this project could prove to be my undoing. Where did I find the confidence to say yes, then?

The most direct answer is that, by now, I am convinced that learning is one of my well-developed skills. As a teenager, I had to teach myself about computers and programming, because there was no one else around who could; as a Computer Science student, it felt natural to complement the formal teaching with side projects and open source contributions, which were a treasure trove of knowledge; as a professional programmer, I have always preferred projects that require some thinking to arrive at a solution. Citing another HN gem, I’d say I’m “curious and not intimidated to get stuck into stuff I have zero knowledge of”4.

With that in mind, it sounds like music in my ears when someone wants to hire me to solve a problem I don’t know how to solve!

Transparency

When you go down the path of “being paid to learn”, an attitude that seems crucial to me is that of transparency. By that I mean honest and clear communication about my skillset, and about the expected output of my work. The opposite attitude would be to pretend to know everything, and going to great lengths to prevent others from discovering gaps in your knowledge. That seems like an unbearable burden to me!

A very inspiring example of “transparent curiosity” is Julia Evans, whose blog is full of gems, like Learning DNS in 10 years. Also interesting is Dan Abramov’s blog post with the provocative title of Things I don’t know as of 2018. Or, for a shorter display of ignorance, you can check out my first PR ever in which someone taught me about git commit --amend.

Looking back and forward

I have been very lucky in my career to work with people who taught me that learning is an integral part of my job as a programmer. Right after university, at Infi, I was encouraged to take about 6 hours a week for non-billable learning activities, which I gladly did. As a contractor, I love it when projects require learning, and I’m looking forward to more! In fact… I’m now back with Prefix.dev, this time porting a dependency resolution engine from Python to Rust, and improving it in the process. I hope to tell you more about it in a future article, so stay tuned!

Bonus track: what parts of QUIC did I actually implement?

Here they are, in case you are interested:

Discuss on HN.

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  1. Are you by any chance following my blog? Reach out to let me know! I’d love to hear from people who genuinely enjoy the articles ;) ↩︎

  2. My work was generously sponsored by Stormshield, who regularly give back to the open-source community (you just have to search for “sponsored by Stormshield” and you will find their trail). Props to them! ↩︎

  3. See here the full comment by techdragon. ↩︎

  4. See here the full comment by kypro ↩︎