Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #22 A Good Neighbour worths a Thousand Silver Coins(千金买邻)

Good to be around high-quality people.

This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.

Story

Lu Sengzhen held a very high position in the imperial court of Liang Dynasty (approx. 500 A.D). Later he returned to his hometown as the prefecture governor. He did everything possible to keep a clean government and took good care of the local people. Therefore, he was highly respected by all, even after he retired.

One day, a family moved into the next house of the Lu’s. Lu immediately paid a courtesy visit to the new neighbour. During the conversation, they mentioned the house price and the neighbour said that he paid 1,100 silver coins for the house.

“What?!” Lu was very surprised. He didn’t expect that the house next to his was so costly.

Seeing this, the neighbour explained: “Oh, no, the house only cost one hundred. The extra one thousand is the value of having you as a neighbour.”

Meaning

A good neighbour is more precious than a house's worth; Good to be around high-quality people.

Examples in Software Development

As a software professional and the family’s sole income earner, like many, my first priority was to get a high-paid job and keep it. Now I look back, it was not good in terms of personal (and therefore career) growth.

Luckily for me, I started my programming career at a research centre (later, the W3C office in Australia) at the University of Queensland. I had 3.5 years of time working with some very smart people. Under their influence, I

• developed a habit of reading Computer Books.
  After lunch, a few colleagues and I often walk to the bookshop to find bargains. Also, as a research staff, I have similar access to the Uni Library as a lecturer. The two books “Code Complete” and “eXtreme Programming Explained”, which had a big impact on me, were borrowed from the library.

After leaving the academic environment, I found most of my colleagues don’t read books at all. How could they grow? Googling (or Stack Overflow) can only provide answers to a specific problem. To effectively learn a process and mindset, reading books is the best.

• Open-minded to technologies
  While my main job was developing a metadata search engine in Java, under my colleagues’ influence, I learned to use Perl, C++ and various development tools such as Vim and Emacs.

During my test automation consultation, one of the most frustrating thing is that the engineers don’t want to learn Ruby or new technologies. They knew raw Selenium + RSpec were good after witnessed my high productivity, and agreed that I was offering a well-informed suggestion (I authored Selenium recipes books in all five languages), they insisted using the language that they were comfortable with.

After my son was born, I instantly felt a tight budget. In the year 2000, an experienced Java programmer was in high demand. So, I resigned and worked as a contractor. The next 5 years were uneventful, software development became null and uninteresting to me, as we were following hyped frameworks and processes, such as EJB and Rational Process, which turned out to be wrong.