Career

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’ve been pretty quiet about my work life lately. But spoiler alert, I have a job (and have been at it for the last 3 months)! If you spoke to me earlier this year or read a previous post about my job search, you’d have heard that the journey to a job post layoff for me was an emotional rollercoaster. Interviewing was not a strength of mine. I spent months getting wooed by companies impressed by my resume only to get rejected after yet another failed technical. It was horrifyingly depressing. But just as I was starting to lose steam, I got my break and landed a dream role, in the most unexpected (but unsurprising) of ways—in person, at a conference. ...

I got laid off for the first time back in September (surprise!) and it took a giant toll on me emotionally. For the last 10 or so years I’d managed to muscle my way through engineering jobs despite not having a formal degree in CS. I’ve had the immense privilege of working at some really cool companies, working my way from the front of the frontend through the bowels of the stack and (for a brief moment) into the cold heart of bare metal. I’ve worked on product, systems, support tooling, growth/sales pipelines, billing, and miscellaneous developer workflows. In that time, I’ve written code in Ruby, JavaScript, TypeScript, Golang, Elixir and (some) Rust and worked with some crazy intelligent people. I’ve given talks internationally and written blog posts about various deeply technical pursuits. While I’m by no means an expert at all or many of things, I share this to say that I have a chunk of experience under my belt. ...