Similarities Between Football and Technology

If you can be a good football player, you can be a great software engineer.

Flashback to 2014, I was a top competitor for my football team at Brooklyn Technical High School. I played both sides of the ball at center on the offensive line, and defensive end on the defensive line. In the middle of our game against Canarsie High School, my thumb got injured. The young warrior in me thought, “ain’t no way I’m gonna let this ruin my game,” because up until that point I was playing very well. So to finish the game, I got my finger taped up and we ended up winning. It was only after, when I went to the hospital, that I found out my thumb had gotten dislocated and fractured. They recommended I put a cast on and sit out for the rest of the season; I was devastated. I spent the rest of the season in practice and on the sidelines as a pseudo coach and water boy. This gave me plenty of time to think about what was next.

I still thought it would be possible to get a football scholarship with my junior and senior season so I spent a bunch of time speaking with college coaches. On the upside, I was able to get a few partial scholarships at D2 and D3 colleges so I could play football. On the downside, it meant I would need to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. I still wanted to do it, but luckily (in retrospect) my parents refused to co-sign the loans. Because of this, I ended up going to a Brooklyn College that was more affordable. I always knew I liked using computers, so I figured I would try to major in something that would let me learn more about them. This led to my major in Computer Science and it was great! For most of my early classes in the major, I got A’s and loved it.

With my success in the technology industry, I can’t help but think that there may be some linkage between tech and my first major interest and success, football. After a bit of thinking, I came up with 3 solid commonalities between the two. With the benefit of hindsight, I truly do believe the following tenets of football made me successful when getting into the tech industry.

Communication

“82 is the mike, 82 is the mike”. “Omaha Omaha”. You might hear phrases like this when watching your favorite football team play. To the untrained ear it may sound like nonsense, but these phrases are actually forms of communication within a football team. In team sports, there are so many moving pieces. This makes it difficult for any one individual to know everything. The middle linebacker could be positioned in a different place than normal or the offense may have extra receivers on one side of the field. Whatever the situation, teams with great communication tend to play well.

Similarly, within an engineering team, communication is absolutely pivotal. In 2020, I was working at Etsy as an API focused software engineer smack in the middle of the pandemic. I had the opportunity to lead the list recommendations project where we would show a tab with a list of item recommendations whenever users tapped into one of their saved lists on the mobile app. In order to complete this project, I had to do the following:

• Communicate with my product manager to understand all the requirements of this project.
• Communicate with my engineering manager to make him aware of the various pieces of work needed to accomplish this project.
• Communicate with an iOS and android engineer so we could create a contract of the data I would provide to build the new feature.
• Communicate with some data scientists to understand the limitations of existing models and see whether we may need a new algorithm to provide recommendations.
• Communicate with my fellow API engineers so they understood the new code being added to the code base to avoid information silos.

Now if you played football and was an excellent communicator, covet that skill. It’s transferable and it will allow you to excel as an engineer in the tech industry.

Problem Solving

The skill of problem solving separates the good from the great…both in football and in technology. As a defensive end, I was tasked with preventing the person with the ball from getting outside of me and tackling them if possible. The problems came because I didn’t know what the person with the ball or what the linemen were going to do. In order to be successful at solving these problems, I needed to first collect as much information as possible. This started with watching film and understanding the opposing team. In addition, I could pick up cues based on scenarios during the game like “3rd and long” or “goal line defense.” From there I would decide what tool in my tool-belt to bring out. For example, if I wanted to pass rush a 300lb offensive lineman, I might do a swim move if I think I’m quicker as opposed to a bull rush if I think I’m stronger.

Solving problems in the tech space works in a similar fashion. Let’s say you are tasked with building the story feature for Instagram. You wouldn’t jump right into it. Like a football player, you would start by collecting as much information as possible. What are the minimum requirements for this feature? Has anyone else solved this problem before? What type of data will be needed to accomplish this? Once you figure that out, you’ll think about the tools in your tool-belt… like a football player. If you need to store data, should you use sql or nosql? What about handling traffic? Do you need to scale vertically or horizontally? It all depends on the situation, just like a defensive end trying to tackle the person with the ball.

Practice Makes Perfect

Probably the most underrated of all, practice! If you never played football, let me introduce you to just how brutal practice can be. Hell week happens during the preseason for football players. It’s where you fine tune and show off your skills. Hell week is basically an amalgamation of some of the toughest practices we do all year. It has tons of conditioning, position specific drills, and big hits with pads. During these practices, constant repetition is the name of the game. It’s how we hone our skills so they becomes muscle memory. Then during game time, you can see who was really putting in work and who was on cruise control.

Now for any of you techies reading this, y’all know how important practice can be for getting an opportunity that lets you work with some of the best. With a quick scroll on blind.com you can see how often people are complaining about failed interviews and Leetcode problems. Before you can secure that coveted opportunity, you must first get through a given company’s interview stages. You can check out my article on the technical interview if you would like more details on it. But in order to be successful at these interviews, you must practice solving problems whether on some online platform like Leetcode or in interview-like settings. If you played football, you already know the perseverance and grit necessary for you to be successful with perfecting your skills.

Getting your foot into the technology industry as a Software Engineer can be very difficult. But for people who have already dedicated themselves to a tough team sport like football in the past, it’s possible to make that transition easier for yourself. Tapping into some of the skills that you honed when playing football like communication, problem solving, and perfect practice will allow you to stand out from the bunch. Do you disagree with my thesis? Am I spot on? Let me know why in the comments section below!

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