I was recently let go from my role. This wasn’t my first experience with an unexpected termination. In fact, this time last year I found myself in a similar situation albeit under different circumstances and with far more surprise. Yet this one felt like an especially low point in my career; unexpected in a similar way, but predictable given the circumstances.
I was technically on an unofficial PIP prior to receiving the news, which was somewhat reasonable given that I wasn’t shipping and showing progress fast enough. I had taken on the substantial task of reconfiguring our infra from the ground up, all while maintaining the current one single handedly. I’d written about this in a previous blogpost, but this job stretched my skills well past my comfort zone and I was firing on all cylinders. With little to no onboarding (as is often common in every early-stage startup) I had to learn fast, make decisions confidently, and move at breakneck pace. In previous roles, I frequently had the support of a team or a more senior coworker when I pushed significantly past a growth edge. This time, however, I was on my own, operating in a completely asynchronous remote environment, building greenfield infra I had no prior experience with. I thought I could manage (I am no stranger to working through uncertainty) but this work was arduous and there was barely enough room or time for a beginner’s mindset.
I’d experienced failure before, but this was the first time I’d failed so spectacularly and publicly (at least within the company). What made things harder was the unexpected death of my friend earlier this summer which took more of a toll on me than I’d anticipated. I struggled to navigate my grief alongside the demands of my role and I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it openly at work—after all there were Kubernetes clusters to ship and Nomad jobs to keep alive.
In hindsight, it was a mistake to assume I could figure hard things out and muscle my way through my grief at the same time, even though I’d seemingly done so without issue in the past. This time was different. The stakes were higher and there was no time for rest.
In spite of the disappointment I feel around this outcome, I know for certain that I tried hard even if I wasn’t at my best. I can confidently say that seven months ago when I first stepped into this role, I could never have foreseen the kind of growth I’d make. I’ve gained hands-on experience with IaC tools like Pulumi, orchestrated a whole observability stack with Grafana, Loki and Prometheus, crafted Helm charts, and wrangled the nitty gritty bits of repeatedly standing up and tearing down EKS/ECS clusters on AWS. I achieved a lot, but I know I can do better. That’s not to say the environment didn’t play a role in this as well.
At some point, we all deal with failure and the shame that comes with it. What matters most is what we do with it. There is after all an “A” in failure. As is often the case, you do your best work after your biggest disasters—if you choose to keep at it—because failure is painful enough to prevent you from making the same mistakes twice. This experience has without a doubt been painful, but it’s left me feeling like I have nothing left to lose, besides perhaps a steady salary and health insurance.
I can’t wait to dive into the next chapter (whatever that may look like), hopefully building, learning fast, shipping, failing, iterating, and doing it all again, this time with a little more grace and experience under my belt.
If you’re working on an ambitious product and are looking for a platform engineer with a breadth of experience across the stack, someone who thrives on learning constantly, and is excited about building delightful developer experiences collaboratively, let’s chat.