Man, once a year is a great blog cadence. It’s very fun to see who I was a year ago and reflect on all the things that were just out of sight for that guy. 2025’s entry has me firmly settled into a comfortable routine of minimal investment in the DevOps job, web site work in full swing, and the usual miasma of householder obligations. I had no idea that lightning was about to strike.
Shortly after publishing that post, I was struck by a bolt of lightning in the form of a personal referral to a white hot job opportunity at a fancy startup. The kind of place that has a luxurious SaaS homepage, and flies everyone out to quarterly meetups, and pays a reasonable rate for the Bay Area, a princely sum for a yokel like me. It was very gratifying to see that my client work gave me an edge over other candidates; I may not be the most sophisticated code slinger, but I know how to ship, I had owned the process end to end on a dozen or so projects, and I had thought about and experimented heavily with the correct set of tradeoffs for a flexible and performant frontend over a period of years. I had also been building a well of energy for something new, and the raw enthusiasm leaking from my skin, along with the company’s lead engineer being familiar with my podcast, got me the gig. After years of working in a giant bureaucracy that was totally void of purpose, I was thrilled to put my back into a Serious Job and pull my weight on a team of killers.
Of course, things don’t turn out the way that you expect. Immediately I was reminded that I’ve been on the edge of burnout since kid was born slash covid, and acutely felt the absence of the unlimited time theft that I was privy to at my last job. I found myself unable to get to the desk, to read the code, to wrap my head around my new responsibilities. This ended up being the impetus for me to finally take my ADHD seriously and get medicated, which has immeasurably improved my wellbeing. As a side effect, I am also now officially diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. So now I have that too. In the meantime I was able to use our lovely ever-present AI models to do a facsimile of my work, which was immediately clocked by my attentive coworkers. Late last year I had a 1:1 with my manager that I’ll never forget. They asked me about my relationship with AI tools, I copped to using them far too much to ship work that I was insecure about taking too long to complete, and expected some sort of admonition to do the job correctly. Instead, I was told that I should actually be using AI more. Turns out I was an early adopter of the Future of Software!
The vibes curdled after that. Our lead engineer, who had been holding back the madness, finally quit, and the AI use became encouraged, then mandatory, then someone was fired for mysterious reasons. My job became to basically press the enter key over and over again. We were also made aware of the stakes facing every early-stage startup: the party is over, find product-market fit in the next year or the company is finished. We had just enrolled kid in a fancy private kindergarten, and a supply-constraining war had just broken out, and the AI bubble began to look a little shaky, and I imagined being ejected into an even more hostile job market during a recession. What does one do?
I have led an extremely charmed career since I made the jump to computer job: my boot camp attendance was timed perfectly, covid opened the doors to a national remote job market, and I have friends in high places that have hooked me up to what turns out to have always been the next step of my rise to power. There’s been an extraordinary amount of luck involved at every turn, but there have been factors that have definitely tilted the odds. I have endeavored to follow my curiosity, to acquire an unintuitively compatible set of skills, to put skill points in charisma, to learn the arts of Dark Corporate and advance my career through the un-meritocratic means that actually work. It seemed to me that a good way to invest my remaining time at this job would be to
- not worry about the actual job too much, and see to what extent I can not do it
- Continue to find my people, and make things that will bring me into fellowship with powerful allies
- Acquire more skills that do not make any sense from a short term career perspective
To that end, I took a friend up on her services to do career coaching, and ended up taking the most unlikely track: statistics. I am, in my limited spare time, doing high school math again, and building what I hope will be an intuitive understanding of probability and proportion and prediction that will factor into something in the future. A pivot to data engineering? Maybe! But maybe something cool and weird instead. I have eyes on my site and podcast and have resolved to continue to build a hidden network of unimaginable power.
Of course, this indirect focus on the fundamentals paid off immediately, The Secret style. The day I began my stats tutorage, a data visualization company posted a job that I was perfect for. I was ultimately edged out by another candidate late in the process, but I took the signal seriously and opened to the idea of just getting a better job. If I played my cards right, I will accomplish this goal in the next week. If not, I have seen the process play out enough to know that it’s not far off. I hope to have ended the Startup Saga by turning a promising job into a stepping stone for more financial security, a place to hunker down if a recession hits, and a slightly sleepier shop that will not notice if I am solving algebra problems on the side.
Full-time kindergarten is going to be a big change for our family dynamics, with wife being the biggest beneficiary. I cannot wait until the house does not have a child in it for most of the workweek, and we can get a handle on it. I also picked up the banjo again, and am making sporadic progress at sounding ok at it. I continue to idly fantasize about competing on Survivor, and find ways to hustle around the tech space for considerable money. Maybe the next big thing is about to hit me like a truck.