No such thing as good

I had just finished Makers Academy coding bootcamp and had been struggling to get a job. I was talking to another student about how the order people were hired from my class didn’t seem to reflect the skills they’d shown in the course.

Their response has stuck with me, even now nearly seven years later “There’s no such thing as good.

I’m unsure of exactly what they meant in the moment but what I’ve taken it to mean is that this notion of being “good” is completely relative. You can only be “good” in a specific context.

So for me I felt like I was “good” in the context of Makers Academy. I worked hard, I was a generous pair, I pitched solid ideas for projects, I helped deliver good products in a pretty sustainable way.

However the jobs I was applying for weren’t looking for someone who was good at Makers Academy. These employers all had very specific ideas of what good looked like in their context. I had no control over that.

And this is true for all things. People will say “best developer I worked with” or “they’re not great” and these could mean a million things. It could be they wrote beautiful PRs. Or they were great a pairing. Or they could disappear for a weekend and come back with an amazing feature. Or they could motivate a team to deliver.

People can only be “good” in a context. And when applying for jobs you really don’t understand that context.

What companies can do is be sure the context of “what good looks like here” is clear to employees.