Success.
It's a word that conjures up a different image for each person. Some people hear it and immediately think of fast cars, living in the lap of luxury or, perhaps more bluntly, being rich. To others, it's being high up in the corporate hierarchy. It's having your name plastered everywhere and shouted from the rooftops. And to some people, it's being able to sail through on a comfortable wage with a mediocre job, being able to exist comfortably and have plenty of time for personal pursuits without ever having to worry about the corporate rat-race at all.
Now, to me none of those sound like bad ambitions. Sure, they're a little misguided, one champions luxury, wealth and hedonism; another pride and ambition (both of which are healthy in moderate measure). The third appeals to a lack of ambition and, perhaps more contentiously, laziness. However, for me success is a far simpler thing than that, though measuring it is arguably more subjective and a little trickier as it's not a quantifiable metric. Success to me is two things:
Work Output
To me, this is defined as "ensuring that the work I deliver is consistently to a high standard, I am proud of it, it is within deadlines set and I am going above and beyond to ensure that what I deliver meets specified criteria".
Coworker Impact
To me, this is defined as "making sure coworkers feel happy, comfortable and welcome around me. My coworkers should find me approachable, friendly, engaging and be willing to ask me questions and see me as someone who is not overconfident but knowledgeable. They should also feel comfortable raising concerns or issues they have with me, to me. I should never be standoffish or rude and should ensure that, no matter how tough things get, my coworkers are always treated respectfully and attentively."
Reasoning
Now, why do I feel that way? Well, initially I wanted to be a teacher at university. I thought it would be nice to go into a university, college or even secondary school and teach computer science. I even spent every Monday for a few months at the local school observing the modern computer science curriculum. Though I eventually decided I didn't want to immediately go into teaching I still retained that love of both learning and teaching. I adore teaching and helping others is a big part of who I am, therefore it is only natural that my biggest metric of success is how willing my coworkers are to approach me, not just for help but for conversation in general.
I've made sure that people in my current role know I'm here to help. I've run several tech huddles on various different topics. I've talked about Git, Regex, Emmet and a dynamic translations app I made for client-friendly landing page translations. I think it's so important that we all help each other and try to upskill one another as much as we can. If we bring each other up then we all benefit, plus it's heartwarming to know I've helped people!
Regarding my second success measure, I believe my drive for work output and ensuring my work is as good as I can deliver most likely stems from my love of development coupled with my pride I have for my work. One of the biggest lessons I've learned since joining the working world is that sometimes compromises have to be made between quality and speed. A rushed job is never the way, but faffing over the padding on an image in an email for 12 hours is going to lead to an angry client and a lot of questions being raised. I think it's important people take pride in their work. After all, as the old saying goes, "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing well".
I think my proudest project to date is most likely a complex email preference centre build I made in Pardot (a Marketing Automation Platform) for Legal & General Investment Management. It required translating into 3 additional languages and needed to work across 3 Pardot instances. Connecting everything together, testing it, writing a dynamic translation app to take an Excel sheet filled in by the client and turn it into a 4-layers-deep JSON object for translation and preference gating purposes was immense. Being flexible and handling last-minute client requests as well as dealing with immense stress and pressure is something I'm very proud of myself for.