Changes

This is the long awaited post.  In this post, I discuss a few major life changes I’ve recently made, the stimulus for the change, and my plans for the immediate future.

I haven’t worked on any computer projects in a few weeks. I haven’t written a new essay in a few months. I haven’t written a new original song or worked on my short stories in a few years. One morning I woke up realizing all of these things at once and I decided that something wasn’t right.  Was it a lack of creativity?  Motivation perhaps?  Well, it turns out that it was a combination of both. But what could be causing such a drain?

It turns out that it was my job.

A few months ago, I quit my job and moved to the Bay Area for a brand new one.  Some people found this change to be a bit drastic, but as I’ll explain later in this essay, it was a decision in progress for several months. I came to realize that my job left me little time or energy to work on my own projects, and that coupled with general career path dissatisfaction made me decide that it was time to move on.  I’d like to provide a basic summary of what I did, and why.

So what is it that you do here?

I graduated engineering school with a degree involving a healthy blend of business and nerdery.  Most people know that I’m in the software industry, yet don’t realize that I did not graduate with a degree in Computer Science. I made that move specifically so that I got a lot more exposure to the business side of engineering, and it was definitely the right move. So naturally after I graduated I decided to pursue the best of both worlds.

Consulting was a great fit, and so I managed to land myself a pretty hip gig traveling to the west coast working on, you guessed it, business software.  I went to clients, talked about their business needs, put on headphones, and crafted solutions out of thin air.

I got a lot of exposure to the whole “real world” thing, but I also learned a lot about the niche I was in.  I busted ass, and I’d say I was pretty decent at what I did.  I made senior in a year, which was pretty cool, since that doesn’t happen too much at my former company.

When I told my manager I was leaving, it was pretty evident that he didn’t see it coming.  He explained to me that I was on the “fast track” at my company and in my career, and that I should be absolutely sure of what I’m doing before making such a drastic career change.

So why’d I jump ship?

Didn’t you get the memo?

I’m going to let you in on a few secrets.  Most common folks don’t know anything about ERP, CRM, PLM, B2B, B2C, or any other fancy acronyms you throw at them.  All they know is that they get paid to go to work, and sometimes they spend that money on things.  The business world has a very ornate ecosystem that, for some reason, works like an echo chamber.  Everyone in it can hear each other to some degree, but anyone outside of it is blissfully unaware of how it affects them.

When you go to the store to buy something, you’re buying directly from a business.  We call that “Business to Consumer” or B2C for short.  However, that business can’t do everything on its own to sell you that product (no, not even Apple.  Looooove yooou!) and so it has to depend on other businesses to help it along the way.  The interaction between businesses (business-to-business, or B2B) is the space I’m in, and it’s a different monster from the B2C interactions that we are all used to.

That thing you bought at the store?  Well it wasn’t always there.  It got shipped there, and so that involved some sort of shipping logistics.  Someone had to purchase that thing from some vendor, or perhaps put in an order at some overseas manufacturing facility, so now we’re talking about procurement or perhaps production.  Clearly there was money involved, so that means financials.  Obviously a bunch of human beings were involved in this and so now we’re talking about human resources.  Maybe there were some sales guys involved in cutting a deal to get that product to the stores and in your hands, so that means some sort of customer relationship management.

If all of this sounds complex, it’s because it is.  Being the enginerd I am, I’m attracted to complex systems.  The unfortunate part about these complex systems is that they are also usually complicated.  But, that doesn’t mean they have to be.

It’s not that I’m lazy.  It’s that I don’t care.

Business software doesn’t evolve as rapidly as consumer software. However, in the past few years, a handful of really bright people decided to take unique approaches to some common complexities.  They decided “Hey, we’re going to do this differently” and of course their well-established counterparts scoffed.  They found a way to deliver business software without the typical overhead and up-front costs to the customer, and Software-as-a-Service was born.

My former company is, by design, affiliated with one of those well-established counterparts.  So, when I was sent out to help folks with their businesses, they had to play by our rules, which were the rules passed down by our king company.  We used a specific platform, did things a specific way, and used the same playbooks over and over for completely different businesses.  Also, the tools and technology we used were designed for very specific purposes.

I think most good technologists don’t like being tied down like this, especially early on in their careers.  I suppose if I stuck around, I would’ve become a total guru at doing what I was doing.  But that would’ve just turned me into a magician with one good magic trick, and that’s not the career path I wanted to head down.

I don’t want to be such a specialist.  I want to experience a wide variety of technologies, tools, and tricks of the trade.  I want to expand my horizons and work with the absolute best.  That handful of really bright people who take unique approaches have created astounding companies that have developed revolutionary technology- and I want to be a part of that wave.  Knowing about it and not being a part of it caused me to become a bit stagnant.

Of course, there were other reasons besides wanting to hang out with the cool kids that made me make the switch.

Deeper and deeper.  Way down.

Few people would argue against the statement that the San Francisco Bay Area (which includes Silicon Valley) is filled with some of the country’s brightest minds.  I always try to be around smart people, and while the folks I previously worked with were quite smart (and thanks to the hours I worked, I was definitely around them quite a bit), there was something about the Bay Area vibe that caught my attention.  Moving to the Bay Area was an obvious choice.

I managed to get lucky in that my last project, before I quit, was in the Bay Area, and I stayed at a place in San Francisco while on it.  However, just because I resided in San Francisco didn’t mean I “lived” in San Francisco.  My job’s long hours and travel schedule were hardly conducive to any sort of social lifestyle out here, and that was a problem.

My former company was also having issues of its own.  Retention was poor, possibly because of “the economy” or the shifts in the company direction.  Nobody really knows even today, but the point is that the situation was looking a bit grim.  While my particular position was secure (at least, I assumed as much), all the nervous energy made it apparent that I needed a backup plan.

I found a position at my new company (I still need to talk to our PR department to see if it’s okay for me to disclose the name, will post an update later if possible) that lets me build things that help other people by making their work lives easier, and allows me to work in a stimulating environment with intelligent people.  So the question that remains is, what’s next?

I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it, Bob

Some of you may be wondering if I miss the perks that came with my consulting job. Don’t I miss the basically-free travel, hotel and airline points, and nomad lifestyle? Meh, not really.  I’m not going to lie and say that the next five years of my life are planned out.  Sure, there’s a possibility of me getting back into the consulting gig some day.  There’s even the possibility of me not being in the software realm in the future.  It’s pretty hard to tell where I’ll be, but that’s not to say I don’t have a vision for the future.

It’s no secret that I’m aligning myself to either create or be a part of a start-up some day.  Until that happens, I can only absorb as much knowledge as possible and develop skills along the way to prepare me for those days.  I’m pretty sure that my recent career move is only going to help in that respect.  I almost make it sound like I’ve got some sort of career commitment phobia, but rest assured, as long as I’m being intellectually stimulated, working on a kickass product, and working with brilliant people, I’ll be quite happy.

Now, what these decisions are going to do for my comatose creative life is still a toss-up…but I suppose I’ve already taken the first step.

Special thanks to Mike Stashwick for reading drafts of this essay.

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